Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Love Canada

Fuseli knew William Blake. And Blake was so weird. And both, weird, we love them. Intense, the world beyond the world, the nightmare. Fuseli was the only man that didn't make Blake "spew". And why was that? And then there's Samuel Palmer, and the dreamy landscape. Another Blake pal. Boyo, i love them.

I am English, and Welsh, and that's about it. So I get to say these fella's stir me up at the roots. Well, Fuseli is Swiss, but still, its that Romantic nightmare stuff. Love it.

And ...another topic, I feel all over the place, I have to say, who can beat the Canadians!? The Canadian 7, and all that followed! Love them!

And Tom Thompson, such a great painter, such a passionate asexual (apparently) being, out in the deep woods at the end of train line, young, and painting the root of all Canadian/European painting, and then... falling out of a canoe, while peeing, his fly unzipped, and drowning, damn. Was there a paint box in that canoe?

And that tree, windy, winding, silhouetted, a white capped lake, and a score of painters after painting the same damned thing. Heroic. Remembered. Was he happy?A life fulfilled?

And poor Emily Carr and her monkey. Both such immigrants. You'd have to be Bella Coolla and live here 10,000 years before you figured out what the woods were all about. She tried, and Mark Tobey claims the credit, and the poor monkey, without monkey friends, but chained to a camp stool. Where the hell did she get a monkey?

I spent my early  20's in the woods, painting in Olympia, and i knew about Emily, and saw and painted the same spartan Doug Fir in a clear cut , and the spirit of the woods. Its all through a filter, I did what i could, but really knew nothing- and know nothing, really, now. Its not hard to admit.

I continue, through a filter, darkly. I hope to some sort of transcendent painting. Something beyond what i see in my dentist's office. Something I can trade my dentist for a root canal, which i think is about two grand. It would have to be a pretty nice painting.

Drawing show in Everett. Taking it down this week.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Wobbly on the Trail

I took my old bike down to the river this evening, with paint box and easel, and two bottles of beer, and about 8 layers of clothes, and tried to re-establish some sort of relationship with the place I used to paint. It had changed, but it was a bit like an old friend, pushing my bike across the thorns and tall winter grass, flattened to the ground by winter. I saw no one, I set up by the river, close to the edge, with the sun a half hour from setting and glowing through clouds.

Its the place I have painted one hundred times, and looking anywhere, I could pretty much see a painting I'd done. But due to circumstances beyond my control, I hadn't been back there in two years, almost, and here I was again, to see if there were new lessons here, and to be back with an old friend, in this case, just a landscape.

There is so much beauty in a field, and a river, and clouds, and a vista or two, and in the damp brown grass. And a beer into it, beauty generally increases, and it's intense and like this other world one visits for a time, like some sort of dream. Its not really meditation for me, it's its own thing. I don't know what the chord is that gets struck, some of it has to do with being at root a loner kid in the woods, who spent a lot of time there working out childhood and adolescence by talking to trees and streams, and some has to do with nature in general, and its ability to transport us to higher planes, and not worry as much about the smaller circles of troubles.

Its not what i generally need or look for in finding a place to paint, but this time, it was important. There's a lot going on right now, and lots of tensions and unsurety.

I painted the water, the land, a tree, the shape of a far hill, the sky. Half assed, I wasn't feeling it like i should, And I scraped it out. And worked it again. And again. But it lay dead. So i scraped it out and looked up river to the penitentiary, and its the best view of all, and i think i made something OK, though its still strapped to my bike and I don't know if it is OK or not.

I rode back clanging with gear, wobbly on the trail (due to the gear, not the beer). Ive painted since I was 16, or 17, and that's a long time to be doing something that you are still not sure about.  But I paint pretty much the same thing as I did when i was that age- shapes in a landscape. Its like a theme, its not a choice, its your motif. You will paint it again and again and find it hard to escape.