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 archs 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 conciousness.  There was a kind of oneness that occured 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.

Early June is about as paradisical as North Carolina gets.  There are thousands of flowers around me– probably a hundred roses that I can see from my kitchen window.  The first tomatoes have just appeared in the garden.   There are glossy eggplants and cool cucumbers.  It’s steamy and overwhelming at midday, but gentle and ravishing at 7a.m.  I often end up planning a trip to somewhere else in June, and missing a portion of this time.  What bad planning I always end up telling myself.

The Ruin has reached a lovely state of maturity.  The rock walls I built last summer now mark the borders of a couple of painterly and colorful beds– one filled with organic and heirloom vegetables, and one with flowering plants.  I’m puttering with some antique sections of iron fencing, trying to give the Ruin  a sense of enclosure.  More and more my entertainments end up in the Ruin.  It has an irresistable pull.  A couple of weeks ago friends from Greensboro came for supper and we started there, evolving into the dining room, and finishing out the evening on the front porch.  I read an article about the guy who came up with the idea for The Moth, on public radio.  He had great memories of story telling on a screened porch in the south on summer evenings, and transplanted it to NYC and public radio.

I share those great memories, adults rocking in a half dozen big old oak rockers, while the children played leapfrog on the lawn and caught lightnin’ bugs (not “fireflies”– lightnin’ bugs ).  I decided to rededicate my front porch to story telling.  So I told my dinner guests to bring a story.  I’m finding we’re a bit rusty in the story telling department, but I intend to work on that.  You think up a great story and so will I.  And next time we’re sitting somewhere in the semi-darkness of a summer evening, let’s bring it out and try it on our friends.  Let’s keep all the good stories, and more importantly, the tradition of telling the stories, alive, whether we’re sitting in a roof garden in the city,  beside a campfire in the forest, or in a rocker on an old front porch.

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.

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.

A couple of weeks ago, I took an evening off and went to Greensboro to a workshop at the Weatherspoon.  There was a short component for teachers, followed by a kind of community-wide invitation to make a sculpture– or three, to be exact.  My one word description of the evening was “fun”.

The current exhibition of the installations and sculptures of Leonardo Drew were the jumping off place for the workshop.  The work is very dense and rich.  The palette is restrained– the white of paper, the red of rust, the brown of wood.   Much of the work is compartmentalized– assemblages of found objects.  Even more wonderful are the cast paper objects that appear in the work.  Like toys and tools constructed from eggshell they fascinate with their fragility and exactness.  Some of the work evokes  Pollock, with skeins of cast paper or other materials, put together in relief.  Real space instead of implied space.  The scale is monumental, in many cases.  Particularly arresting were, however, the small framed paper reliefs, influenced by the artist’s travels in Japan.

The workshop exercise involved retired doctors, engineers, moms, artists, students, professors and who knows what else rubbing elbows.  We were given three mason jars to serve as compartments, and told to bring found objects to work with in creating three pieces.  I was so irritated by the mason jars with their little embossed apples and pears on the surface that I worked hard to lose the jar, dignify the jar, deny the jar.

Teaching a sculpture class has sensitized me to the use of color in sculpture, so I worked with a stack of white paper lunch bags and transparent beads to make an  piece that was a kind of polite explosion.

A second piece became an illuminated cloud when I put a light source inside the jar and enclosed the jar in a blown up  bag.  Over the cloud flew a found goose.

The third piece I covered with masking tape, stacking component parts of the jar and lid to make as tall a totem as I could.  She bore a half of a face I’d found on the ground in my school’s parking lot.  She had breasts that were a milagro, slightly rusted.  I had golden paper wings in my stash– just in case I might ever need them.  The were attached to the totem’s back.  Twigs made arms and legs,  she looked perfectly ethereal.

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.

.

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.