Call me corny and predictable, but I’m a huge devotee of Monet.  I know, there are a thousand bathrooms in a five mile radius where a Monet poster hangs.  I know.  But I fell in love at 13, and I never recovered.

My parents took me to NYC that summer.  We went to the Met.  The way I remember it, and the way I describe it to my 14, 15 and 16  year old students is:  coming around a corner in the museum, my eyes glazed over from Masterpieces,  I saw my first live Monet.  All my synapses fired.  I went into shock.  The way I remember it, it was a small painting, with color like a bucket of jewels.  I’d never seen color act as a participant in a painting like that before.  That was what it was ABOUT.

I know– color is the easiest way into  a work of art.  Everyone, except for possibly the color blind, can be touched by color, regardless of their insensitivity to the other aspects of a work.  But, in my soul, I am a colorist, and that little painting was screaming in my language.

On my last trip to France, five years ago, I had some pilgrimage duties planned.  I went way out of my way to visit Giverny.  And I planned to end the trip at L’Orangerie.  I was devastated to discover that the restoration of L’Orangerie was still ongoing and it was closed.  So, on this trip to France, I set aside one afternoon to make up for that missed opportunity.  I had seen isolated pieces of Les Nymphaes at various museums all over the world, and I’d seen studies for them.  But I had never seen them as Monet intended them to be seen,  all together.

I felt a real rush of empathy when I saw the sign at the mouth of the gallery  ”Silence”.  Indeed.  I wanted to allow my soul to drop down into wordlessness and to float into this work.  Nobody else seemed to have that impulse, however.  I kept wishing I had a special pass to come after hours and stand in that space alone, and allow it to subsume my field of vision and sweep me up.  It had to do that in spite of elbows and voices and cameras and other folks with a more relaxed interest.

Over the years I’ve read a lot about this particular work– the work of Monet that I’m most interested in.  I’ve read that it moves toward abstraction possibly because he was quite elderly and his vision was failing.  But seeing  the ensemble live I was shocked at  the explosiveness of the abstraction.   In my journal I wrote that they were “more wildly and vigorously abstract than I’d expected– as violently flung down as a Pollock or a de Kooning .”  They had a topography that surprised me as well.  Encrusted and multi-layered.  Thought and rethought.  I took photographs of abstract details.  But at a distance the work locked together like the dials on a safe.  They were definitely not the work of an artist whose vision had failed.  They were infintely sure-footed and wise.

I sat down and found myself settling deeply into the trunk of  a reflected willow tree.  It held me for an inexplicably long time– not billiantly colored, simply a dark textured vertical.  It was sinewy, rope-like, male and archetypal.  There was more in this shrine to nature and art than I had expected .

How nice to still find surprises in one of my oldest relationships.

Before I settle down to a summer’s work it’s good to do a little gypsy roaming.  I just had a great break from my routine, exploring Provence.  At first I enjoyed the companionship of wonderful friends at Le Beaucet in a delightful country home. We saw the sights, enjoyed the regional foods and wines, and were expertly guided, tended and fed by Mary James and Xavier (www.maryjames.net) .

In my journal I made a list of sounds and sights and smells that were especially vivid.  And of course, tastes.  There were many.  It was a sensual feast from morning until night.  Lavendar and garlic in the markets, wild thyme disturbed by my feet on a hike up the hill,  patinas that were rich and complex, cicadas in the heat, a tomato reduction dressing an eggplant that I will not soon forget.

The second week of my journey I took off by myself with my tent and sleeping bag to explore more unknown territory.  Mary James equipped me with a giant map that I’d stop and consult about 40 times a day.  Thank goodness France’s signage is very logical and finding one’s way is made simple.  The un-simple thing is navigating a 10th century road in a car if anyone else decides to come from the opposite direction.

I circumnavigated Mont Ventoux and walked the streets of more hilltowns than I can recount.  I also took some afternoons to sit beside swimming pools in the intense heat.  I chose campgrounds with pools that had splendid views so I could swim and paint and rest all at the same time. I’d paint a while, then fall asleep in the heat, water  sounds lulling me.  Then I’d wake up and paint some more.  Camping allows for a lot of intimacy with the nature of a place.  I loved going to sleep to the sounds of the cicadas, and waking to the dawn birdsong.  Or seeing the moon through my tent’s little window.  In the hotel  at the airport all sound was muffled in thick carpet, and all moonlight masked by drapery.

What did I bring back?  Recognition of how I love to sit by water.  Recognition that French food is wonderful, but in the same way that North Carolina food, or any food grown and prepared with love is wonderful.  I brought back a fascination with the textures of ancient surfaces– the way a thousand year old piece of cypress used as a supporting beam gets eaten away, but stays strong;  the surface of stucco when it chips and peels and changes color;  the immense shade cast by trees when they’re allowed to grow as tall as they want without being cut down for “progress”;  the elegance of women who listen to their own inner voices instead of enslaving themselves to some kind of commercial standard of beauty and rightness; the energy,  imagination and wildness of Cezanne’s landscapes, which made me feel timid by comparison;  the brilliant engineering of the Romans, seen up close and still functional;  the logic of good national road planning;  the kindness of strangers;  a few new words added to the vocabulary;  a newfound love for the afternoon glass of French rose– if you’d told me I’d love it six months ago I wouldn’t have believed you.

But waking up this morning, thinking I was still in France, I realized I took away something else.  Because I traveled alone, in the absence of conversation–in silence– I took into my body a group of  kinesthetic impressions from the hundreds of miles speeding by under my car, the arcs of the many roundabouts, the textures under my feet, the buzz and  hum of the life around me, the cyclical movement of the sun and moon.

Because I stopped each day to paint the place where I was, to examine it with care and attempt to represent the feeling of it, I brought it deeply into my consciousness.  There was a kind of oneness that occurred between me and that lovely place  that went deeper than tourism.  This all came to me in a rush, before I’d really opened my eyes to the day, believing I was still in France .  Swinging my feet out of bed  I  felt the smooth texture of my bedroom’s heart pine floor and that texture told  my body I was not in France.  Returning from a camping trip when he was 3 years old , my youngest son Stewart announced “I miss my tent”.  I know exactly what he meant.

yum

Tonight my brother called and invited me to pick my own strawberries.  His patch has reached the point where it’s scantily filled and not worth hiring labor to pick it.  So, at dusk I went to take a look.  He told me that the end of season berries are the best.  He was telling the truth.  I ate the first strawberry I picked and it was the best  I had ever tasted.  His fruit has the added benefit of being organic, making the flavor even more intense.

I picked until it grew so dark I couldn’t tell which ones were spoiled.  Kim handed me a gallon of their wonderful milk, and told me where to find the fresh squash.  On the walk home I found a few squash that still had their blossoms clinging.  A friend told me one afternoon, after a particularly tough teaching day, to “go home and make yourself a squash casserole and pour yourself a glass of wine”.  Sounded like a good southern girl’s prescription for a return to sanity.

The walk home was  in the quickly deepening darkness.  Looking up I noticed the lopsided waxing moon, crisp and white against the sky.  At that moment the sky was light blue, but dusky, in that indescribable passage that is so hard to capture in a painting.  By the time I crossed the road darkness had taken over.  Strawberries and milk before bedtime.  Windows open with their screens in place– healthy bug and frog sounds to attend my sleep.

Last night John Borden Evans opened at the Christa Faut Gallery. It was great to see his newest work in the company of his many friends and fans here in the area. His work always has a strong resonance for me, because we have both chosen rural lifestyles and our environments have much in common.

John often creates diptychs. I recall one from a show several years ago that was immense, and divided in two parts so it could be transported. In this exhibition he had one diptych that was a small work on paper, and another that was midsized. It amused me that it hung next to a painting that was on a single canvas, but split in half by the black line of a tree trunk, so it read like a diptych as well.

This work had John’s usual wonderful quirkiness and intense sense of texture. There were paintings with his own iconography I’ve come to expect– the stars and their auras, abstracted in this show to look like jewels. There were animals arranged in pastures. But there was also a new thing going on– a quieter, more serene and restrained approach to the land in several of the paintings. They were empty of animal life, and focused on balance: of verticals and horizontals, of  smooth with rough, of darkness and light. A favorite was a snow day painting, as usual, abstracted with abandon, but all the same, reading with the truth I recognize as a student of the landscape. It conveyed the way the snow peaks out and exposes the contours of the forest floor normally hidden in the grayness of a thousand bare tree limbs. The texture he created to describe the trees in the foreground was perversely horizontal, when the obvious direction for them to have been painted would be vertical or diagonal. It married serenity and intensity,  smooth and rough, white snow sky and darkened forest,truth and the myth.  All were suspended in  quiet equilibrium.

I would never have predicted that the Party of the Season would be tonight–with my family– in “the deep midwinter”.  But it was.

My brother and sister in law, Grier and Kim, threw a party tonight on their farm, while my family was all gathered for the funeral of my dear aunt,Betty.  It was a party full of good will, humor,and reminiscence.  I don’t expect to see its match for a long time– until we are all gathered again.  Tonight would have been the 50th birthday of my cousin Homer Harris Ragan– Hobey.  He died at 48 of lung cancer.  I remember the wonderful party when he turned 30.  Tonight we celebrated him again.  What a commingling of sadness and gratitude for good fortune.  With a lot of laughter, over a variety of carefully prepared  southern food and drink , we toasted to our memories of both my aunt and my cousin.  As the evening passed  many stories of grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins were pulled out for sharing–especially the funny ones.

There was lovely delicate she-crab soup, and catfish stew, as well as barbecue.  Tracey, Hobey’s true love, brought wonderful green beans.  When we asked for the recipe she said you “just cook the fool out of them”.  There were  babies, and little boys lost in wonder at the stars hanging over the bonfire.   We wrapped up, two or three to the blanket, for the hayride, bundled against the fierce cold, seeing the farm all blue, black and gray under that clear sky. 

There was shared wisdom about the next generation of cousins we are raising.  There was a lot of humor over the bar, set up in the workshop out back, alongside the woodstove and hundreds of tools.  My precious young first cousins–once removed– Hobey’s beautiful daughters– shared their  wit and humor.  I got to see their enthusiasms and their talents.  Their father and grandmother would be so proud– with good reason.  What miracles of grace and warmth they are.

It occured to me, in our serious mutual enthusiasm for tonight’s gathering, how lucky we are.  We are about the business of setting in motion the future trajectory of our family.  We are establishing the bedrock of comfort and strength, love and respect.  We will  see one another into the new times to come with the same love, loyalty, and connectedness that was given to us by our flawed but open-hearted parents.  I hope our open hearts trump our flaws as well, and that we are no less human and  no less funny than our predecessors.

One of many full moon paintings inspired by this place. This one: "Full Moon with Cedars" 2005

It’s a new day in a new year, beginning a new decade.  I’m grateful for that.  We talked today, at Kim and Grier’s table, over blackeyed peas and collard greens, about how we all, in our own ways, managed to miss the clock turning over.  But I think we all felt keenly this invitation to newness and change.

I marked the close of last year by writing out my intentions for the coming year.  This is much more productive than making resolutions.  I’m bad at resolution-keeping.  But if I name an intention it rides around in  my unconscious all the time, and often  has a way of making itself reality.  Looking at last year’s intentions, they seemed a bit vague, though I did notice that most of them had happened.    This year’s are very concrete.  I celebrated them with a brandy and dark chocolates that Carla had brought me.    Then I called Rodney– my friend since college days, and we tripped over one another’s sentences, talking for an hour about past, present and future.

This morning, to celebrate the newness, I could only think of taking a walk back into the woods.  Lacking tractors and chainsaws I often resort to third world techniques for getting a job done.  With my machete, bought in Central America for $1.50, and sharpened by my sons, I cut the briars out of my path, finding my way to the back of my little farm.  It was warm and the woods were a hundred soft grays.  All the recent rain had made the  mosses brilliant and lush.  I found a little spring-fed creek I’d never seen before.   After lunch I could only think to go back to the woods.  This time I brought back a sapling that had fallen and developed beautiful lichens.  Tonight, on this first night of the new year I noticed it took darkness a little longer to arrive, and when it did the white disk of the moon rose slowly up behind the bare branched trees as it has hundreds of times in my life here.  It was so beautiful it brought  tears along with thoughts of dear friends scattered and far away, and my never-ending deep gratitude for this earthly home.

Last night I had an opportunity to listen to Alice Ballard  (www.aliceballard.com)speak about her life and work at Hodges Taylor Gallery.  She has long been a favorite  artist of mine.  Over and over I have come around a corner in a gallery to see a piece of hers and been stopped in my tracks.  The desire to touch her work is always overwhelming for me.  The pieces are always based on natural objects that happen to appear in her life– perhaps stumbled upon on a walk outdoors, or sometimes arriving in the mail– gifts from a sympathetic friend.                    

It seems to me they are often generative forms– pods, seeds or bulbs– carriers of the next generation of life.  Not always, but often, they are cool and sensuous white forms, coated in silky terra sigillata, and burnished to  a soft glow.   It was interesting to hear of her journey as an artist from two dimensional painting to sculpture, and of her love for handbuilding.   Her formal education centered on painting, and her sculptural studies were all self-taught.  

Many of her most intriguing forms were sleek pinchpots. She explained how the act of pinching the clay compresses it and adds to its strength.  She also gave insights into her process, including the occasional working of the piece upside down which allows gravity to act as a partner in the construction.  

Alice Ballard posited the theory that the most important events in an artist’s life often happen before the age of six.  She talked about her own memories of being at her grandmother’s farm and being given beans and corn to plant wherever she liked.  The magical thing was being there long enough to  see them sprout.  It is easy to see how those childhood experiences were seed for this contemporary work.

tree trunk in the maritime forest

It’s Monday back in the real world.  I’m attempting to pretend I’m all here, but I still have one foot on an island.  Yesterday’s sunrise, which seems a continent away and a month behind me, was a battle between blackened hovering clouds and peach colored light thrown at the edges of billowing cloud formations.  It came and went, shifting back and forth.  I sat in the sand and tried to paint a seized moment here and an arrested cloud there.  Sand blew low and hard, needle-pricking me.  It completely filled my paintbox and scattered itself on my page.  My brush, new and sharp-pointed- became frayed and full of sand particles.  My hair blew so hard across my face I couldn’t see.  The waves tossed spray high above the horizon line.  A heron flew overhead.  Then a peregrin falcon.  It was altogether a spectacular and peculiar sunrise.

The night before, at dusk, we had traveled to a roosting site, hidden away from the public, to watch perhaps one hundred or more egrets and ibises rocking up and down on tree limbs suspended over a perfect mirror of a pond.  The mosquitoes lit on our faces and arms and drew blood in spite of toxic doses of bug spray we’d bathed in.

Part of that day had been spent in the maritime forest, learning about plant species.  The woods were scattered with deadwood more extreme than any sculpture.  We were irresistably drawn to touch it and photograph it from every angle.  Yesterday morning we took a walk in the marsh and sat long enough on an ancient dune, now covered with cabbage palms and live oaks  ( called a hammock), to observe the behavior of fiddler crabs.  I had time enough to do a lightning fast sketch of the underbrush on the hammock.  I learned new words for the plants  and creatures that fill the marshes– spartina, sea lavendar, periwinkle snails.  Mike picked up a glass lizard, the only legless lizard I have ever seen.  Empowered by my previous night’s experience of petting the belly of a California King Snake I attempted to do the same to the glass lizard, who struck at me.  No harm done beyond the embarrassment  of my own reaction–  abject bone-rattling fear, which greatly amused my fellow adventurers.

There was butterfly catching, seining, lots of drawing to record what I saw.  I was swimming in a soup of sensation.  It made me delirious and carried me out of myself and back into union with the earth.  It is with reluctance that I bring myself back to electric lights and cars, billboards and cellphones.  I looked back at my journal from last September’s trip to this island.  In it I said that I’d had the revelation while there that the secret to living this second part of my life was to live it like a poem.  “order it and edit it and take time to live it consciously”.  This year I plan to remind myself everyday that I am in the midst of a poem.