barn detail, a work in progress

The newest piece on the easel is a large painting I started a month ago.  It’s been a slow and delicious process bringing this piece together.  It’s slow, because I’m using tiny brushes on a large surface to create the kind of texture I want.  It’s delicious because it’s about very early spring and the colors involved have the aura of magic about them– delicious because it reminds me of earlier times.  Its edge is its subject matter.  It’s a painting about a barn.  I tend to shy away from barn painting because that subject is so hackneyed and sentimental that it offends.  It did occur to me that those sentimental barn paintings’ emotional source is the same source I’m tapping into– a sense of loss.

The barn I’m painting isn’t anonymous.  It’s Fred Washam’s barn.  Fred and Sarah were my dear neighbors for 30 years or so.  When I was a young mom I had a studio and office on the second floor of the front of my house and I could look down on Fred as he drove up the highway on his tractor to his brother Joe’s farm, and then watch Joe do the same going the opposite direction.  The brothers farmed until they couldn’t farm anymore.  Fred, always wearing a smile, was the kindest person.  A photograph of him hangs in the Bradford Store– Fred as a young man beside a team of mules.  He died of Parkinson’s Disease and grieved us all.  Joe lived into his nineties, in the house  where he grew up, just leaving us this past year.

Sarah, Fred’s wife,  was the consummate farm wife.  Her flowerbeds were spectacular and the subject of many of my paintings in the 80’s.  When it was Halloween she would invite my children to come for treats and there would be homemade cupcakes and candies.  She even made, from scratch, the host we used for communion in our  church.  I know it’s a strange comment, but it was a lovely and evocative host, with character.  There was something of  the Mystery baked into it. Not at all like the cardboard chips in my current church that seem to bear the mark of  shame.

To paint this barn is not to say “look at this sad remnant”.  In my heart it says their legacy lingers.  The love and kindness these neighbors invested in me, my children, and in all the neighbors and their children is not lost or forgotten.  The barn still stands solid and generous  upon the land, and Sarah’s cherry tree blooms  in glory in front of it.  The big oaks that sheltered their family, their lives and laughter are still there.  As long as I’m here to paint about it, in some way they are  still with us.

An unusually deep snow fell here over the weekend.  It greeted the beginning of the weekend–starting just a few moments after I left school, and quickly and magically covered my whole world.  I stopped for provisions, filled the woodbox before dark fell, and planned to be forced to relax, eat well, and paint for a few days, without interruption.

All that happened.  The days that were gray made the woods look soft and mysterious.  I’ve been challenged, in my paintings, to figure out how to represent the dove grays of the woods– so thick that no light shows through–tiny limbs interlaced and overlapping.  The texture of limb on limb is subtle, and varies in different lights.  The snow showed the lay of the land more clearly than I usually see it.  At night the moon was nearly full and I got to see the shadows cast on the snow from its light.  The air was so clean and the sky so clear that I was enchanted by the movement of a plane overhead at night– its warm light gliding over the landscape like some slow motion comet.

In daylight I got to observe crazed bird and squirrel behaviors.  Birds came from everywhere, and hung like wild earrings from the tree limbs.  The cardinals accent the winter world like holly berries, the bluebirds like pieces of clear sky.  A leopard spotted bird appeared, with some red markings and turned out to be a Red-naped Sapsucker.

I kept the woodstove loaded and the house grew cozy.  One night I cooked venison for dinner , and brussells sprouts from my brother’s farm.  Another night my dinner came from the boat of a Gullah shrimper, the former husband of a dear friend.  I went out into my own winter garden and cut icicle covered broccoli heads to go with it.  Cat got the leftovers and amused me by tackling the remains of a sweet potato.  He has learned to love my cooking, I tell myself.

I washed all the bed linens and dried them in the arid heat of the woodstove.  For three days I worked on a seemingly insoluble painting problem.  It remains to be seen if I suceeded.  But I do know this much– three days of quiet, all imperfections hidden under a white sparkling glaze, long soaks in a claw foot tub, home cooking and art can be very restorative.

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The grandfather oak

Driving by my house on the way from school to an appointment I was shocked to see that the oldest tree in my yard had come down in Wednesday’s hard winds.  The trunk still stands, but the yard is filled with the top,  limbs larger than most mature trees. 

This oak had been struck by lightning 40 years ago, and hit squarely by a truck in the late 70’s, in a brutal accident that killed the driver.   It had survived Hurricane Hugo eighteen years ago, losing a giant limb, but it stood otherwise intact.  Its six ancient  companion oaks had all toppled over the years, unexpectedly, striking blows  like earthquakes . 

Under this tree we had built snowmen.  My sons remember shooting their bows at a target balanced against its trunk.  We had thrown a big party beneath it to celebrate my brother’s marriage.  I had stood in its shade in my own wedding gown, as had my aunt before me.  

I had come to watch its canopy obsessively, looking for signs of sickness, and dreaded the day I knew would come.  Its canopy had been lush this past year, and it cast so many acorns on the lawn it’s impossible to walk there.  It had even taken to sending limbs down toward the ground– as if to attempt communication with its human family. 

Its trunk still stands  25 feet tall or so, with the lowest limbs  intact, but its sheltering limbs are gone.  I found myself feeling exposed,  my shelter  gone.  It reminded me of the emotions I experienced when my father died in my 20’s.  I no longer felt protected.     The man I imagined to be the strongest person on earth was gone.  The tree that would take four men’s arms to encircle is gone.  The sky is empty where there was  complex tracery.  Empty. 

My brother reminded me of my good fortune to make me feel better.  He’s right, of course.  “If this is the worst thing that happened to you today, you are okay”.  But on the phone later, calling each member of the family to announce the death, I realized we all grieve the loss of beauty.  Born before the American Revolution, witness to the life of my family for six generations, and to another family before that, this tree will have no replacement .

Beth is one of my friends from college days.  She’s been there with me through a lot of interesting experiences.  She was a bridesmaid in my wedding.  She is godmother to my middle son.  She and I have stood before thousands of paintings and talked about what we saw.  We have looked at the ocean together for hours with or without conversation.  Not since Chapel Hill days have we lived near one another, but that hasn’t kept us from staying connected.  Some of my favorite Beth memories are from the times she lived in Maryland near DC.  We would sometimes stay at her house, and sometimes in the city, abandoning our children to other people’s care so we could go to museums all day, seek out adventure-dining and funky thrift shops.  I’ve forgotten more days than most people have lived, but it seems like I remember all the times I ever spent with Beth.

This entry is in tribute to Beth’s influence on me.  One of my earliest memories with Beth is one afternoon in our early twenties when we took a blanket and some snacks out to the reservoir in Chapel Hill.    We found a remote spot beside the water and sat there enjoying the fall day, the lake and  sky.  Beth produced a notebook in which she started writing.  In my memory it was a book about ideas, goals and inspiration.   I was so moved by her purposefulness.  She was the first young person I’d ever known who even at twenty-something was living an examined life.  That’s probably where my adult notebook-keeping habit came from.  Now many years later I have several well-worn volumes I use to give myself organization and direction.  

Beth and I have just returned from a weekend at the beach.  It was a perfect beginning of November experience.  It was sunny and warm enough that we sat beside the ocean for two days– almost all day long.  The cooler weather had inspired the wildlife and so our entertainment was schools of porpoises cutting through the water.  At times hundreds of birds converged on shallow areas in the surf . There was a dead octapus on the beach we could examine at our leisure.   We were small and the vista was large.  We were quiet and it was loud. We kept the doors open so we could hear the surf all night.   I picked up blue crabs at the fish market because I will pay to watch Beth eat a blue crab.  After years of living in Maryland she is semi-professional.  If I think about it for more than a minute, I can be back there with Beth, examining our lives under the big blue dome of the sky.