spring, forced

daffodils

The daffodils were blooming because a grower had "forced" the bloom early, inside.  Sandi forced a branch of redbud from her yard last week, and she brought the successfully blooming branch to class on Tuesday for us to see.  I like the meaning of the word "force" here.  You too?

My studio is in a building owned by a floral company.  Deb, who is in charge of all the potted plants, had some daffodils out on the back racks this week.  The daffodils looked good, but they were on their way out of bloom (probably they were brought in to sell for Valentines Day, the 14th).  I borrowed a pot of daffodils and did some small color sketches.  Here is one of them.

spring, hopes

Hopes in new growth--of plants, seeds, yard and garden areas, travels--arise with spring.  Look at this wonderful poem about hope or, if you will, about language, about life, about art!  Last week M met Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, the poet.  She said to him about this poem that, at one point in a busy day with much and much with the children happening, she wondered to herself  WHAT WAS SHE DOING? WRITING POETRY IN THIS LANGUAGE THAT PEOPLE DIDN'T READ ANYMORE?  CRAZY!  And then she began writing the poem.  She writes in old Irish, Gaelic, and I have copied the Irish title here but not the Irish words of the poem, alas.  (You can find them, yes.)  The translation here is by Paul Muldoon.

Ceist na Teangan
(The Language Issue)

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant


in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,


then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river


only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh's daughter.


  -Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill    c.

early spring

    
     With white plum blossoms
these nights to the faint light of dawn
     are turning.


(Shiraume ni akuru yo bakari to nari ni keri.)


The poem is by Buson, an eighteenth century Japanese poet and painter.  (The translation is by Edith Shiffert, in a book by Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures.)

We have more snow, and more snow will come tonight.  Still, any moment, we will see a bloom outside.  And seeing the bloom will fix a moment amid the turning from winter to spring.  The poem above is Buson's last poem.  He dictated it to his friend Gekkei, then fell asleep and died before morning.  "That one," he is said to have murmured, "should have a title, "Early Spring.'"

Dawn, thaw

Dawn, thaw

"Rosey-fingered dawn" is Homer's famous description.  My sketch (see below) says "orange creme" to describe the color of dawn that I woke up to yesterday.  How wonderful the dawn:  can I paint that color, that wonderful dawn?

At the foreground of the pencil-sketched field (below) is "tan dust," or thawed snow, which is not a great color but, still, a wonderful sight after months of earth-covering snow.  In the small painting, I have suggested the thaw with some of the paper showing under the shadowy blue.  I have suggested the dawn light with strong color.  The night-darkened treeline has only some detail; it is still waking up.

As I worked on this painting, I wondered if it would be the last winter view on my drawing table for awhile.

Dawn, thaw preliminary sketch

out of winter for a week

sandhill cranes

Three Sandhill Cranes walked into the back yard while Mother and I were having lunch last Tuesday at her house in Florida.  Last Thursday also, after lunch, I saw two Sandhill Cranes meandering in the back yard of Mother's neighbor Pattie. 

This sketch of Sandhills I did two weeks ago, up here in my northern Midwest studio, after leafing through a wonderful book, On Ancient Wings: The Sandhill Cranes of North America by Michael Forsberg.  How wonderful then for me to see these cranes in Florida when I was there, so soon again, and, you know, real!

I was in Florida for a week, the week when the Midwest and much of the rest of the country got blasted by snow and ice and winds and cold.   I suppose it is fitting then that my previous blog entry, the small painting of a blizzard, stayed as the current image on view here at Ai-jane during that week of icy storms.  Still, I like seeing cranes at any time, and this sketch of cranes, though simple, has a bit of the softness and stalk-iness of cranes coming through the charcoal strokes.  The simple view of cranes, in the midst of still-immense winter, pleases me.  You too?

winter, thick

blizzard

We are in the thick of winter.  A lot of winter is past, but winter will only slowly crawl toward spring, through many weeks.  We almost forget the shapes of trees or where the long yard meets the fields.  Some days we cannot see much of any detail, winter so thick around us.

My small pastel painting here only seemed OK (OK, it's done) when it became almost detail-less.  It did not breathe or shake or otherwise move for quite awhile, for many layers until then.  I did not set out to paint such an abstract view.  Still, this is the place where the painting has stopped, where the evergreen on the right emerges or dissolves in the midst of winter all around.

I wonder where the word "blizzard" comes from.

shou and kotobuki

shou

Shou is Chinese for "long life."  In Japanese, "long life" is kotobuki.  The same written character is used for shou  and for kotobuki.  My calligraphy, above, shows the character for "long life" with bamboo-like strokes and a bit of a lilt at the bottom.  The dot at the bottom is almost double-lobed.  It is OK calligraphy, and so I have added two red seals.  When I did "long life," some family and friends were having health trouble.  I see shou now and I think of them.

Kotobuki, below, is a work of calligraphy done late in his life by Hakuin, one of the most notable Zen Masters of all times.  You may know of him because of the wonderful koan that he came up with:  "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"  You can tell--yes?-- that I looked at Hakuin's kotobuki, that I have, in my simple calligraphy, paid homage to his great calligraphy.  His strokes are both bonelike/strong and round/alive.  He shows much force in this one character.

kotobuki

winter, color

hawthorns, evergreens, winter

The red-berried trees are notable around town.  Maybe they are Washington Hawthorn trees, maybe they are Cockspur Thorn trees, which were planted once by many municipal crews as a tree of choice.  These trees I saw alongside one of our four-lane roads.  Gretchen says that in the spring, Cedar Waxwings come through in flocks and feast upon the berries.  Imagine those beautiful birds among the berries!

Here is the sketch that I did of the view.  I was stopped at a traffic light, so I had to work fast.  You can click on the sketch to see it more clearly.  (You can click on most of the images at Ai-jane to enlarge them.)

winter deep

winter deep in January

Tree trunks and branches mostly provide colors now.  Much else is covered with snow.  Trees in the far distance lose their color and become sky or snow; it is hard to tell which sometimes.  This kind of deep-January scene can be interesting drama:  the ins and outs of distance and middle distances, the snow white lines that are either field or branch, the movable horizon (where is the horizon?).  Is that a telephone pole, or is it a fence post?    Why does the color shift there?  Any conclusions that I settle upon:  these conclusions seem to shift the next moment.  And the shifts cause more movement out there, then more responses from me.  Such activity!

When I painted this small landscape, the image became abstract early and kept veering quite abstract quite often.  Still, I tried to show some distance and some details, and I consulted my sketch several times to do so.  I like the sense of activity in the finished work, a sense of actor--liness maybe, from a scene that at first seemed quite quiet.

How is your winter going?

winter, quiet

January 2011

We look and look and look around in the winter as we do in any season.  Snow quiets everything.  Slows things down too.  My looking is mostly padded these days, so that variations in a scene seem not so often abrupt as they seem nuanced, attached to the tonal dance.  Still, the scenes are quite lively.

Have you read Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening recently?  Is there impatience with stillness at the end of his poem?

Whose woods these are I think I know,

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

old year/ new year

winter field

Rain today has dissolved most of our snow.  Yesterday, at this nearby field, snow was not thick but still it dissolved most of the recognizable forms.  The grasses, the young trees, and the far treeline came in and out of definition, depending upon whether I fixed my view upon them or upon the snow or upon the winter-grey sky.

The year changes tonight.  2011 will become distinct at times from other years.  A vast field:   I'll move in and out of it, forward and backward, around and around.  You, too:  best wishes, Happy New Year!

sparrows and snow

sparrow and snow

Our house sparrows are of course brown.  Still, when they are flitting on and off the snow, they can seem to be carrying the snow with them.  The "glittering" back and forth of snow and feather markings adds extra activity to the view.  With a busy flock of sparrows on the snow beneath the feeders, ohmygosh what a lot of this glittering clatter!

As with the bluejay in a previous post, with this small sparrow, I wanted to paint the detailed markings without detailing them.  Accordingly, maybe the markings flutter a bit, yes?