photography by Mike Carroll

July is brand new but it’s hard for me to let go of June in Carolina.  It’s the month I wait for all year… roses, lightning bugs, tomatoes, yellow sun, swimming, painting all day.

The other night I woke up and opened the window.  The night sounds that burst into the room  made me stop mid-motion, holding onto the window frame, my mouth open in sleepy enchantment.  There was, surrounding my house, a web of sound,  an intricate woven form with nubs and holes, rhythms, punctuations, riffs, and mysteries.

To capture the best of the Carolina June day I’ve been getting up at six and going straight to the garden where I’m learning, for the first time, to grow things.  The garden is around what we call “the ruin”.  The ruin is a couple of standing walls from a mostly destroyed building my grandmother called the Jar Room.  I presume that she stored her preserves in it. Perhaps the day’s milking was also kept there, since it had a concrete floor.  When I was little it was a handsome building, made of creek sand, mortar, and local rocks combined into a kind of peach-colored stucco.  It had a hip roof of standing seam tin, and handmade doors.

I am creating a kind of patio area, enclosed by the remaining walls.  It’s been a lot of fun, learning a little masonry in order to patch the crumbling places. From my grandmother’s old cast iron washpot we made a pool, and water splashes into it from an old discarded spout removed from the general store’s  kerosene pump. The ruin is becoming a space that is quirky and imaginative.

In the cool morning I water the rose bushes my son David planted for me, and work on building a low rock wall to surround my kitchen garden.  Perhaps the best part about this experiment is the chance it creates for me to enjoy my mother’s gardening wisdom.  She is, I’m finding, an encyclopedia of knowledge about plants and gardens.  We have a new subject to discuss.  And, for once, I’m taking all her advice.

In the studio I’m working on a lavishly composed and wildly colorful painting of flowers that grow in Kim’s breathtaking flower bed.  My sister-in-law grows about a quarter acre of flowers in deep beds of great soil.  I’m painting a lily that is 5 feet tall with many blossoms on it, each larger than a man’s hand.  I reverted from oil back to acrylic paint for this piece because I wanted its sharp edges and the variety of colors I have access to.  I knew this painting called for the quinacridone reds, magentas and burnt oranges that are in my acrylic palette.  There were a few awkward moments as I began the painting when I tried to remember the difference in media and shift my mode of handling. But the years of acrylic practice came back to me quickly.

In the early hours of the day I can work in the studio with just the ceiling fan on and the door and windows open.  To conserve energy I’m trying to use air conditioning as little as possible.  I’ve even taken to hanging my wash on the line.  All this was inspired by a program I saw on PBS about energy.  They showed a huge pile of coal sitting on a house lawn and said that was how much coal had to be burned to generate enough electricity to run a light bulb   for a couple of hours.  I was shocked to think of energy in those terms, and the polluting outcome of even a little bit of wastefulness.   I recommitted to turning things off, to being responsible for less wasted energy and more protective of my earthly home.  And to my June sense memories I get to add the clean tree smell of my line-dried clothes.

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…

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.