My brother Grier. Photograph by Mike Carroll

I brought a very old laptop to the studio so I could use it when the muse struck.  In dog years this computer is 312 years old.  Some screen labeling itself as “Smart” informed me that the hard drive was about to crash and I should swap it out.  I didn’t come down here with a spare hard drive, so this may or may not see the light of day.  Life on the edge…

Today I’m painting the swirling patterns in a creek bed.  The last time I actually looked at those patterns was back in March, so at this point they are no longer observational, but instead an abstraction meant to create a mood in the viewer—the mood you’d find yourself in if you were standing in a voluptuous body of water and it moved around you in small surges and eddies.  And the sun was beaming down on it to add hypnotic patterns all around you.  That’s some pretty vaunted prose for what I actually turn around and see on the canvas.  There is much to be done to make it do what I want it to.  My son, Gordon, is particularly fond of this painting because it explores some of my “weirder” ideas and pretty much walks off and leaves reality behind.  Paintings like this are more fun to paint.  I long ago became bored with the landscape reproduced as it most often is:   technically predictable,  aping reality.  All those paintings look like they’re by the same artist.   They’re missing the weirdness.  They lack the intensity of a real relationship to what one sees.

Background music for painting swirling water patterns:Etta James.  Especially the sulky ones with attitude.  I guess that pretty much means all of them. And Herbie Hancock, triggering the right brain, surging and eddying as he does.

So that is what constitutes this day, along with the newsworthy arrival of the first ripe tomatoes from the farm, and the first of the amazing corn my brother grows and my sister-in-law sells at the Bradford Store.  Tonight there will be the classic summer feast to celebrate this moment in the cycle of things.  I will soon be missing the fresh spinach, cabbage and  lettuces, but they will be replaced by the mid summer tomatoes, corn and cantaloupe, and they in turn by the fall flavors.

Late afternoon I’ll be cleaning out the debris around the foundation of the smokehouse so my brother can clear it up with a loader and a carpenter can look at it for repairs.  The smokehouse is currently supported by the walnut tree it leans against.  We may set it right.  Life on the edge…

I’m just back from a flying camping trip to the Asheville area.  Last night I sat by  a river reading until all the daylight was gone.  This morning I woke up in my dew covered tent the moment the sun appeared.  The day started with a walk around a lake.  The lake was nearly covered with blooming pink waterlilies.  In the small spaces where the lilies didn’t grow Canada Geese swam with their young.  The goslings had such an attitude–like any teenager– I know what I’m doing.  Back off.  I don’t need you.  Or maybe that was just my perception.  I was on a trip to take my youngest to orientation for college.  That was certainly the attitude in my home and in my car over the course of the last few days/weeks/months.  I could just feel it in the body language of the goslings.  Such insouciance.

The day before, I had removed the thorn from my side, dropping him off at college.  Feeling a good deal lighter, I treated myself to a trip back in time.  I embarked on my own little excursion,  to places where I had friends and happy times when I was in college.  It was a lovely, tender experience seeing those places through my older eyes.  Though much had changed there was, about those places, the same important quality of light, of freshness in the air.  The tree canopy is so huge and never-ending there that the air is always fresh. The air and the wildflowers are perhaps the best characteristics of that place.  At a stoplight a dragonfly landed on my windshield that was the biggest one I’d ever seen– probably 6 inch wingspan.  My immediate thought was “helicopter on the windshield”.

Among the highlights of my little journey was the pistachio muffin I enjoyed for breakfast, and a trip through the Blue Spiral Gallery.  I am always inspired by my trips through the Blue Spiral.  It is a destination as rich as any museum.  There I always see some of the best artists North Carolina can claim, and am entranced by the imaginative use of media, the interpretive leaps, the technical mastery.  Today’s mind-bending experience was a book-makers exhibition.  White gloves were provided for the viewer, so one could leaf through the complex volumes.  I was mesmerized by the craftsmanship, the raw edgy imagination in evidence.  I remember best the volume that included linocuts, mixed with rubber stamped images.  The key image was a wolf in a forest, all black white and gray.  Wolf pages were interspersed with other pages bearing flowing rhythmical images in color that appeared to be more like  water.  Had I thought that I would write about it later I would have taken more time to make notes to be more faithful to what I saw.  Instead I  have to write more intuitively and less factually.  I felt fed by what I saw in The Blue Spiral.  It’s a feast—three stories of wonderful art.  I always stop to look at the work by Will Henry Stevens, who  seems like our native John Marin, his eyes as captivated by the North Carolina landscape as my own.

Now I’m back in the Piedmont with a bit of the cool mountain breeze still blowing through my soul.  I hope tomorrow I will carry some of the energy of the last two days into the studio.

low fire porcelain-- work in progress

The pattern of summer days is finally falling into place. Once the school year is over it takes me a few fretful days to find my place in such freedom. I’ve closed my classroom and come home to clean out my studio, readying it for long summer days of work. Next comes a difficult day or two of wheel-spinning. I’ve done this through enough seasonal cycles that I’ve learned the ways to trick myself into the change. Get up early. Get some exercise to lift the spirits and focus the mind. If starved for inspiration, a walk in nature helps. Then head to the studio. I wind my way through the morning doing whatever painter’s chore needs doing. Yesterday that was creating dark green areas of negative space between plants I was painting. Today it was building the rough form, in clay, of a magnolia blossom I took from a neighbor’s tree. The one I took two weeks ago is thoroughly and commitedly dead, in its own lovely, peculiar way.

Lunch time means tomatoes on crusty bread with mayonnaise that true North Carolina natives love—Duke’s. You can tell you’re in the home of a transplant if they produce mayo of any other brand. I have a few friends who love to cook as much as I do, and we all feel compelled to tweek the southern tomato sandwich. We add arugula. We plop on the goat cheese. But you will still find Duke’s as the mortar that holds that experience together. I’ve been using the tomato sandwich ritual for so many years to announce the presence of summer and life as a full-time artist that on these first days of summer I get out the ingredients even though the local tomatoes are not yet ripe. I eat the communion food of summer even though it’s not quite the real thing yet. At least it still has Duke’s at its core.

Today after lunch I started a small painting of the dead magnolia blossom. Its petals litter the floor and are as brown as tanned leather. Its leaves have become a lovely nut brown, and pollen peppers them.

A couple of months ago I moved an easel into my kitchen. It seemed like I would get more work done in the evenings if my easel was in a cozy comfortable place. Sometimes, like a child, I don’t want to walk out across the dark yard to go to my studio. I want to stay in the warm light of the kitchen. This kitchen was first the domain of my great-grandmother and then my grandmother. I remember sitting in its warm light as a child, on top of a phone book, so I could reach the table. I also remember occupying the family high chair, made long ago by a man we know was named Milas Potts. He was an African American craftsman, his skill the best explanation for why children still sit in that chair. It is oak, and its seat is oak, hand split and woven. And the places where little feet go are worn into the curve of Cupid’s bow. I remember falling backwards while seated in that chair. I must have pushed myself stubbornly away from the table. Back then there was an old clock that sat on a shelf above the kitchen table with a handy kerosene lamp beside it. The clock made a calming background sound that was the meter of the evenings. All this makes me realize my kitchen is dense with association. Now it is also dense with spilled paint on the floor, and carelessly disposed pots and pans. I skip the clean up sometimes to get to the painting, with so little time before bed. The painting this week is vertical. It’s a group of River Birch tree trunks, peeling, pastel, complicated, against the green of the woods behind them. It’s a vignette from a subdivision landscape so it seems like cheating. The plants aren’t native. The scene is not venerable. It’s just wildly textured and patterned, and thus it drew me in.

These days I’m working with unaccustomed materials—for the first time in my adult life, oil paint. It’s very different from the acrylics I’ve used for the last 15 years. I miss the wild chemically derived colors in my acrylic palette. There are certain subtle undertones of hue, nearly invisible, that I’m sure can’t be duplicated with my oil paints. But I love the sensuality of the oils, thick, slow to move, grooved by the hairs of the brush. I can almost feel the intersection of two areas of color like a field of conflict.

So in the kitchen, as the night falls, I’m trying to keep the cobalt and cadmium out of my ice cream, so close at hand, and trying to keep the floor from looking even crazier than 150 years of foot traffic has already made it. Then I notice the tread from my shoe reproduced on heart pine in titanium white. Maybe I can find some way to use that…

This photograph was taken by a wonderful photographer, Mike Carroll, last summer.  He spent a day at the farm capturing the light, color and texture of life here.  Thus the ultra-clean kitchen!

One day it hit me.  I’d been playing with the idea of writing another book.  Friends who had listened to my stories urged me to continue spinning tales.  I couldn’t make peace, though, with the amount of time and energy and luck it would take to have another book come to light.  Instead of painting and living a life worth writing about, I imagined myself assembling and posting countless manuscripts to the offices of disinterested publishers where they’d languish in a pile until someone had the time to send the rejection.  Precious days of introspection and paint-pushing, quiet hours in nature, would be lost to futile stamp-licking and  failure.

Then, my light bulb moment arrived.  I could write the unending book.   No stamps or rejection notices required.   By adding a blogging  element to my website I could launch an experiment that would chronicle my experiences and observations as an artist, a naturalist, and a woman.  I imagined it beginning as a monologue, but hoped for the good fortune of future dialogue, people responding with their own wisdom, as they have to the writing I’ve done in the past.  So, at this liminal moment in time, when our technology has exponentially outstripped our imaginative uses for it, I see this as the New Book.  All it lacks is a brutal editor and a foreseeable ending.

As with  all the best experiences in life, when one leaps out into the unknown, I wonder what this will bring and how it will evolve.  Perhaps it will be a novel, perhaps a memoir.  I’m sure, like my paintings, it will show me what it needs to be.