Easter 1916

Easter 1916 is the great, troubling poem about uprisings by William Butler Yeats.  He wrote if after an uprising by Irish nationalists against British rule failed--on Easter Monday April 24, 1916---and all but the one woman of the group who failed were executed.  Great poems re-arise.  This Easter poem comes again to mind this Easter 2011, when questions of nationalism and power are being sorted out in arenas of great human tragedy and violence, as ever, terribly, but newly, especially in the Middle East.


How poignant to think of the woman, here in stanza two as a young woman, before turmoil, destruction.  I share Yeats's ambivalence to this kind of Easter.  A terrible beauty is born.  Here is a link to the entire poem.  http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/soundings/easter.htm   I will print here the final stanza:


Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was is needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Spring drizzle

Early morning, drizzle, April

Do you use the word drizzle?  This kind of light rain--drizzle--allows light to come through.  Early in the morning when light is starting, the drizzle casts a kind of grey-green veil.

To get depth, I layered the color, but I did not want to quash the light.

Easter afterwards

Edge of Spring

Trees and bushes are ready to bloom any moment.  There is so much palpitation all around.  Still, even with catkins, bright, at the outer edges of the trees' twigs, winter-bare branches show and much sky shows through the treelines.  Soon, very soon, color will fill the branches and will fill the sky.  This day after Easter, we are poised for much life around us resurging.

Spring, almost

Catkins and light in the treeline

The sky was so very blue around noon yesterday, and the sunlight was mixing amid some of the high tree branches.  The treelines have not budded out into leafs or flowers yet.  Still, the dusty red catkins on some of the trees are fuzzy and full.  So the treelines are showing quite a lot of action.

I did a quick pencil sketch and then back in my studio I worked up layers of color into this small painting.  The painting wasn't lively enough last night at 5:30, when I had to stop and get ready for calligraphy class.  So this morning I worked on it some more.  Though the painting is dense with color and abstracted, it recalls--it echoes--for me the sense and sight of an almost fully emergent Spring treeline.  By the way, you can see some ruff and rib of the wonderful cotton rag paper which holds the color here.

tsunami dog

Tsunami dog

Tsunami dog will forever move in our imagery.  She is still, watching us here in this photo:  go to  Tsunami Dog  and click on PLAY and you will see our dog alive, moving, survived three weeks after the tsunami of Japan.  Our dog is a wonderful story during a terrible time.

Our dog of Pompeii did not survive.  So many and so much were destroyed by the burning lava of erupting Mt. Vesuvius so many years ago.  Pompeii dog remains to us still, unmoving--a replica-cast in a viewing case, a photo, a preserved life, a terrible testament of a terrible time.

Pompeii dog

Though AI-JANE titles itself as "still words and images in a moving world," I consider the image, moving, of Tsunami dog extraordinary enough to be an exception.  You too?

bird of spring

robin

In our family, each year at the end of winter whenever we see a robin reappear, we report to each other.  Some of our family now live outside the zone where a robin, returned, can signal spring; still, those outsiders get the report about our sightings nonetheless.  You too?  Do you watch for a certain bird?

This small painting has various layers of pigment, charcoal and graphite, and fixatives.  I tried for a solid bird (our robins are big birds) with some bit of movement.

Do you know the pastel paintings of R.B. Kitaj.  They are wonderful, masterful, with much movement.  And though his subjects are mostly people in places, his people have avian tendencies, it seems to me.

shadow and sunrise

March shadow, sunrise, thaw

Tetsuo, Takako, and Kentaro are OK.  We got this news in an email from Tetsuo, from Tokyo, yesterday.

Dream over withered fields

The last poem of the great Japanese poet Basho goes something like this:  (the translation is in Robert Hass's book, "Twentieth Century Pleasures")

Sick on a journey,

my dream hovers

over the withered fields.

Tabi ni yamite yume wa kare-no wo kakeme guru

Or, the translation could go:

as for Dream:  it hovers over the withered fields

We think of the Japanese and their distress and their withered fields, and our hearts go out to them.

In calligraphy Tuesday night, we brushed three characters for "dream hovering."

mandorla

winter to spring, finch

Goldfinches have returned en masse.  The finches' indeterminate color has a delicate sheen, almost a glow.  Soon enough the males will molt into bright gold plumage.    M has suggested "mandorla" when I asked him about the word "penumbrous" for the kind of glow that they show.  Mandorla is Italian for "almond," and it means an almond-shaped area of light in paintings (as in, especially, depictions of the resurrected Christ or Mary in the Assumption).  What a wonderful word.

You can see most of the pencil sketch in the finch above, and most of the first gouache layer of evergreens in the surround.  The finch here is on a branch; the one I saw was on a tube feeder.  This painting is a little roughly translated and unfinished-looking I suppose.   Still, I see the finch again in the painting.  And that is enough.  

winter still, long

late winter, late afternoon, evergreens

Three evergreens were catching light and snow and casting long shadows, the foreground inter-changing with the background.  Never mind that it is still winter!  These three figures and their drama compelled me to sketch.

Alyce has asked for this painting to appear in a magazine and in her gallery.  Much of my work has been sitting during the winter.  Soon this one, and then the others will start going out, will start to appear (aper, ap parere) out.

Cranes again

Sandhill cranes in Florida, remembered

We all await cranes and geese flying north again.

I've done this small sketch with pastel and glue-water.  Distemper (or distempre in French) is painting with pigments suspended in glue, so my sketch here has some look of a distemper. Vuillard has done incredibly beautiful paintings with distemper, incredible because distemper is difficult to work with over an extended surface and build-up.

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.