20 Oct Fall 2008
I took students of mine to the Smith College Art Museum. One of the paintings I talked about the longest time is Monet’s ‘Poppy Fields,’ forgetting even that the students were there. As I studied the painting, I made discoveries in this same painting I have looked at for decades that I had never before seen, as I talked my way through them. When I turned and saw my students’ faces, not only were they ‘there,’ but they looked enraptured, which stunned me, realizing that had come right along the journey with me.
I ‘critiqued’ the left side of the Picasso figure painting as being ‘flat,’ and unresolved, so I think he rose up from his grave and punched me in the nose at 4am.
I told a jazz pianist how I paint many long hours but only at the last does the painting begin pull togther with acoutrements, and he jumped up, as a fellow-improvisationalist, and exclaimed, “Yes! That is how it happens!” My carver/sculptor friend in northern Vermont feels the wood in the dark in her basement, just touching the shapes that beget ideas from beginning to end. She counts on the touching, seeing through her hands as process. We all come into the world lucky or not to have found our way ‘in.’
Starting painting, (now that I have paint, as I was too long without funds), was the hardest part. I was a coward. But when I painted on the canvas in my sleep, I knew I was getting involved with a new painting, so the fear was gone. My dream held my hands in the paint, and I awakened feeling like I was able to breathe again.
Late Autumn landscape drawing , 2008 I am loving the long dark shadows that take place at only this time of year. The blue in the sky is unusually brilliant at mid-day; then, all of a sudden, the orange-yellow late- day sunlight falls on the fields as night comes down fast, and all that sky blue becomes a whitish yellow-orange.
The tiniest bit of oranges and yellows came through the branches of the apple trees in early October, but each day there was more yellow- -green, cadmium yellow, and yellow-green orange variations. Then all this symphony of sounds became more brilliant, and then the deep orange reds showed up two days later, between my bouts of teaching, and then there was more of it, (don’t I sound like I am telling a story)? and now the mountain is ruby red, glowing even in the dark. I ran out to the mountain to do a 10-minute quick sketck today, as it was raining. Tomorrow will be perfect, if the rain does not diminish the rubiness. Each set of colors lasts a mere day. Now all the leaves are down except on the mountain; thus, that deep dark red forming the sensuous curves of the mountains!!! I shall need tiny pieces of blue sky to counter it, coupled with those big physical heavy clouds I so love to draw.&
“Mt. Norwottuck and Apple Tree” 10 X 13″ cray-pas crayon