SunnyMarlene

The spring of 2020 has been — to borrow a phrase from the Fantastic Mr. Fox — a cluster-cuss. What should an artist do in the studio when all of our lives are being turned upside down? In a world where suddenly there seemed to be no right side up, I pulled out a happy technique. How about some watercolors that you can hang in any direction?

These pieces are 18 x 23 inches and have no right-way-up. I turn the paper as I work on them, adding more layers. The long, thin lines are made by letting drops of colour flow down the paper by the pull of gravity. It all seems like fun and games, but watercolour is not for sissies. There is no going back with this medium. Much soup-making and yogic breathing has to occur in preparation for the paint strokes.

I first experimented with spinnable watercolour during a residency in Santa Monica a few years ago. It was my way of capturing the beauty and unsettled energy of California. A client on a studio visit recently fell in love with one of those images and took it home with her. Which got me thinking of them again.

Finally, a word about the flowers. They are the first element put down in these paintings. When it comes to flowers I often take inspiration from a book called A Victorian Flower Album, by Henry Terry. Terry was a gentle Victorian father who wandered the fields of Oxfordshire collecting flowers with his three small children. The book was his gift to them, a record of their discoveries.

The events of this spring have given many families the gift of time to wander fields together. I hope these images lighten your heart in these topsy-turvy days.

The year began with me staring at the hydrangea that grew in my garden last summer. The blossom that was once a creamy pale yellow has dried in a vase to a beautiful sienna colour.

I have always gone back to painting flowers through my career. This season is no exception. I play with technique and composition. My palette ranges from warm, earthy hues to neon colours. A bouquet of painted flowers somehow brings me a sense of stability and peace. It reminds me how bright colours spring from the earth, which is magical when you think about it. With the new year there is always the promise of new colour.

This isn’t about me having fun driving off-road in a big truck. But the 4×4 grids you see are a bit of a departure from my usual roads. For starters, they involve some tools I’m normally a bit suspicious of — arithmetic, the English system of measurement,  long rulers and straight lines.

The paintings started out with the organic layer that is really just about playing with colour, celebrating my palette, and trying not to think too much beyond that. That step is mostly abstract, but if objects drift in — hearts or trees — I let them. If you are meditating and a thought drifts in, you don’t let it bother you. You give it a little space and go back to breathing.

I chose the grid size afterward so what you can see through the windows is a matter of random chance. My man Cloudy doesn’t believe me entirely. He thinks I could probably eyeball where the windows would line up, and so this influenced the outcome, consciously or not. Nevermind, that’s just how Cloudy thinks.

As you may know from following this blog, I have this tug-of-war between abstraction and representation. When I try to do one, the other creeps in. In this round of paintings, the two seem to get along just fine. I think it is time to declare the war over. Why now? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because I chanced to hear Ram Dass today, or because I didn’t fall down in pigeon pose at yoga this morning.

There is joy in randomness and also in trying to hold a pose.

In Greece, like California, everything grows well and ends up on a plate or in a cup in the city. Flavours abound, sharp and fresh. Honey or olives are taken very seriously. Even in the heart of Athena’s ancient city, there are savoury things growing wild.

The top photo is some rosemary I was given by a flirtatious groundskeeper in the amazing Stavros Niarchos gardens in Kallithea. Niarchos was a Piraeus shipping tycoon who built a gorgeous formal public garden, library and concert hall next to the harbour. It is designed with native Mediterranean plants in a setting that photos cannot capture. We went there often, Cloudy to write under the canopy of olive trees and free wifi, I to sketch and daydream.

Camomille grows all over the green hills in the centre of Athens where Socrates strolled in his toga. It is available in every restaurant as tea, no question. I loved it. I drank it everyday usually more than once. Its smell is so flowery. I tucked fresh flowers into my button holes to sniff all day.

At some point I was offered mountain tea, or Sideritis. Very next-level stuff. People pick it wild and bring it to cafes to sell. It is a detox tea. Cloudy objects to the word “detox” but he loves the tea. The little flowers taste a slightly bitter. We just finished our stash. So sad.

Finally there is sage. It smells like clean earth to me. I put a dash of it into everything. I make a lot of soup. Vegetables, a wee bit of chicken, some stock, a few twigs of sage and bravo!

Besides eating them, I’ve been thinking how to incorporate these green things into artwork. The shapes and lines and textures of the plants please me, like the cross-hatching I’ve discovered. At least I have found a way to photograph them. Not sure where this is heading….. but now I must depart for another city named for a wise woman: Sofia, Bulgaria!

I have been spending time in this graffiti-covered city. Spray paint is a form of wild expression for the young but draws all kinds of artists. I found myself loving the colour black, which is used so much, and the whole painting-by-night thing is intriguing. I’ve also been enjoying all the black cross-hatching in comic books we bought in the student/anarchist neighbourhood called Exarcheia. The city has many abandoned and crumbling neoclassical buildings with shuttered windows behind which I can’t help thinking Vampires are sleeping the day away. And of course there are the Greek goddesses who are portrayed in black on the ancient pottery that was produced here. Maybe all this explains why this piece is called She Liked to Work Into the Night.

Karen Thompson Pask and I have been painting companions for many years. We both continue to mix abstraction with realism. The piece above is by me, “Woman knitting.” On December 9th, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., we will show our work together for a one-day exhibit. It will be at The Store Front, 325 -21 street West. Come on down and see the art and say hello.

Over the years I’ve kept mostly away from figure painting. Not sure why. I’ve done images of people in light-hearted work, such as cartoon-style water-colours to record travels. But lately I’ve wanted to summon the human figure onto canvas, and these ones have come out to play.

I’m still figuring out (yes, Cloudy, that’s a pun) who these people are. I’ve heard fiction writers say they don’t control what their characters do. They put them on the page and wait to see what happens. This feels a bit like that. These figures seemed to arrive of their own accord. The images all started with the figures as sketches, and the rooms they occupy emerged from there.

Are all characters facets of the author? Maybe. These figures are all women, so that’s a clue perhaps. Another is that they inhabit the kinds of spaces I’ve been painting for years. They seem to possess the bowls and vases and flowers of a hundred still life compositions I’ve done in my life.

The figures all wanted to be busy. It’s true the seated woman — who is to me particularly mysterious — isn’t doing anything. But she has a look of calm readiness about her, as though her work is all recently done, and that something interesting is about to happen in this energetic space she occupies. It’s like she has arranged a still life for me to paint and then sat in the middle of it, as if to say, “Here I am.”

For years now I have been hiding tiny sculptures, paintings and messages around town for people to find. I think of them as love notes. It began at a time when I was working with a friend who has Alzheimer’s, a celebrated Canadian artist whose memory of her career has been erased by the disease. At that time she could still travel around the city, and we would go for walks or coffee, and I helped her buy groceries. I would have a pocket full of love notes. We would decide together where to hide them in the store. Behind the pickles? Among the tomatoes?

I’ve tried handing them out directly now and then, but that can be unpredictable. Once when I was staying in Los Angeles for a few months, I went up to a woman in a community garden in Santa Monica offering a mini artwork, and she got scared. People are never afraid of me, I don’t think, but I guess my delivery was off that day.

Mostly I just leave these pieces to be found anonymously. I get the same pleasure out of it as having a piece up on a gallery wall, when it comes right down to it.

Here’s another installment of figurative work I mentioned in the previous post — and also the next chapter in the Family Travelogue, Summer, 2018. When our daughter returned to Toronto for the fall semester, Cloudy and I hit the highway to catch up with our son Lewis. He has recently taken up residence in the lovely and historic Osborne Village neighborhood of Winnipeg. He lives in a slightly crumbling but still elegant Victorian-era walk-up near the bank of the Assiniboine River. I found the city’s downtown architecture to be well-preserved with so many striking lines, mixed with modern developments too! I watched Lewis slink around them like a cat who knows his new domain.

The painting is from a photograph I took of Lewis, not in Osborne but near the marshes in the Assiniboine Forest. We used to hike together often as a family, so following him through the aspen trails took me back. We spent most of the time under the shade of the leaves, but Lewis is under the full blast of the September sun as you glimpse him here.

This summer my daughter Esther was home from Toronto for fifty-six sweet days, on leave from her nursing program. Her arrival coincided with a renewed interest I’ve had in doing figurative work. I watched her bustle around my apartment and I really wanted to capture her. She’s always been a fast-moving target. She and a friend sat for one experimental figure study. Then we went to the smoky mountains.

Esther, her dad Cloudy, and I drove west to Jasper through the smoke of BC forest fires. The national park was full of tourists from all over the world, scratching their jet-lagged heads and wondering where the famous Rockies went. The peaks were all in pastel blues that got paler with the distance. We had one clear day when we climbed the Opal Hills trail to one of those high mountain valleys full of cheeky marmots. Cloudy was ecstatic to have our company at altitude. We all thought of Lewis — fourth member of the family — in his new city out on the prairies.

I studied trees, rivers, rocks, and the world became blocks of colour. In the image, Esther is in our secret campsite by the creek that lulls us to sleep and chills our hard-boiled eggs. The colour planes I think of as blocks of energy, and Esther is making a gesture that says, “Ok, you got me.”