'Tis a Gift to come down where we ought to be . . . .
If Winter Solstice is mid-winter, as it surely is, then mid-November means winter has already begun. It's a time to get comfortable and reflect on the accomplishments of the past year, and to finish projects so that winter days will be freed up for reading all those books we have piled on every surface. It's time to give thanks.
Fall was a glorious gift this year, and as the song "Simple Gifts" goes on to say, we found ourselves in a place of delight. The vivid colors are a memory now, and that's one of the reasons I paint. I believe that the ability to take the raw material of the real world, and transmute it through imagination into paint, or a musical score, or theater or dance, is a gift. I'm grateful to artists in every discipline.
In my case, the source of my paintings is the natural world. Paraphrasing Lewis Hyde, whose book The Gift I've highlighted below, I paint as a way to give back, to return the gift of nature to the living earth. What I may not do, is question the gift. Examined too closely, it will evaporate. "Whoever has identified with the spirit will seek to keep the gift in motion."
In a spiritual sense, this means that every painting I make seeks to understand its subject - the rain garden, the red maple, the late-blooming zinnia. Every painting is an homage to the marshlands, the peonies, or the live oaks. In a more worldly sense, I can also give back by restoring habitat in my small wood-and-wetland, earmarking a percentage of sales for the large-scale projects, like wrenching out multiflora rose, that I can't do by myself, or by sending a year-end gift to organizations whose reach is broader than mine.
The painting above, of late-blooming zinnias, chamomile and calendula, is a thank you for the extended growing season we enjoyed this year. Now as we're entering the holiday season, I think about the gifts I prized most when I was a kid. Which ones? The ones that were book-shaped of course. I turned them over and over, trying to peer through the wrapping paper to see if it REALLY WAS A BOOK. And if it was, which one of the ones I'd asked for? I haven't changed at all. Books are still my favorite things, and so in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I'd like to share with you eight books I've recently finished or am in the midst of. I'll group them in pairs.
Spying on the South and These Truths are history inflected in response to the current mood of the country. They're reminders of the cyclical nature of human events. As fraught as the political situation is right now, the country's been through it all before. And will again. The wheel always turns. There's not much here to serve as inspiration in the studio, but since I don't watch TV, these are books that keep me in touch with the world outside.
The main source of inspiration for my paintings comes from my being outside growing things, or watching things grow. That gets harder to do this time of year, and as a motivator, I'm reading Becoming Animal and Underland. In the same way that I want to dance when I see good dancers perform, reading these books makes me want to pull on my coat and walk down by the creek to hear what the water's saying. There's a language we share with all sentient beings, one that we experience, as they do, through our entire bodies.
Time travel and magic realism are powerful ways of getting out and around the world. I always loved Dr. Doolittle, who himself loved talking animals and travel to far places. Whether it's the song of a running creek or hearing a language I don't understand, a different idiom exerts a magnetic pull on my imagination. I just finished reading a German novel, Heimsuchung (Visitation), a time-travel story staged from the 1920's to today in the area of the Mark Brandenburg. Jenny Erpenbeck is a new author to me, and I plan to read more. In Spanish, Ojos de Perro Azul (Eyes of a Blue Dog) is a collection of short stories from the 40's and 50's, starting with one about the boy who died three times. I've read nearly everything García Marquéz has written, and this is by far the oddest. Never try to sing like an alcaraván (that's the Eurasian stone-curlew).
My reading and this account wouldn't be complete without Mary Poppins, because it was her journey with Bert into a sidewalk painting that opened me up to the possibilities of painting as space travel. I'm re-reading it now because I just saw a terrific production of the play at Camden Hills Regional High School. A WOW gift, and one that makes me realize again how important community is as the place in which gifts circulate.
Many thanks to Lewis Hyde for writing The Gift. It's provided me with the inspiration for this newsletter and given me a better understanding of what it means to be a painter. I'll just let Margaret Atwood sum it up: The Gift is the best book I know of for the aspiring young, for talented but unacknowledged creators, or even for those who have achieved success and are worried that this means they've sold out. It gets at the core of their dilemma: how to maintain yourself alive in the world of money, when the essential part of what you do cannot be bought or sold.
