Slant of Light

This 12x24 oil on canvas painting is a studio piece that I completed a few days ago.  It depicts the entrance to Haley Farm and the end of Hopper Road with the Hopper in the background.  The light is often unusual accenting the Hopper's distinctive slopes.  I'm easily reminded of Emily Dickinson's poem, "There's a certain slant of light"  even though it's not a winter afternoon.

The Hopper and a Slant of Light

A 9x12 pastel of the Hopper, this time from Field Farm, on a winter afternoon, located a considerable distance from Haley Farm, which is directly on the other side of the ridge on which that v-shaped clearing is visible.

Since I've been reading the essays of Robert Hass, I want to focus on one, "Notes on Poetry and Spirituality," in which Hass discusses the Emily Dickinson poem that starts, "There's a certain Slant of light / Winter Afternoons--".  He writes, "So a young woman in Emily Dickinson's world had seen that moment... that astonishing moment when a person becomes a body; it's an unmistakable experience.  She's talking about, very accurately about, a thing she's seen more than once.  When this feeling of despair, this hurt, comes on her, the landscape is alive, and when it goes, when the hurt goes, it's like the soul leaving the body.  And deadening it just that way."

He goes on, "So, in this poem... she's talking only about only being alive with this painful sense of absence, but a divine sense of it, or at least it seems to me a sense of absence, or at least a sense of an intuition whose namelessness is its quality, so much its quality that it hurts...  the choice is between a kind of pain and a kind of deadness, and she would choose the pain any day."

Dickinson's poem is about light in a winter landscape, in which the landscape is like a person on the edge of life, and the beauty of the lighted landscape suggests to her a wonderful supernatural presence that she feels is missing, absent, gone, unresponsive, a painful image that she would rather experience than give in to any comforting explanation.

No Horses Today

Another 14x18 oil of a scene at Sweet Brook Farm.

Denis Donoghue in his short biography of Emily Dickinson quotes the following:  '"All her life," R. P. Blackmur wrote of her, "she was looking for a subject, and the looking was her subject, in life as in poetry."'

Bug

One can't stay in Shangri-la for long. Back to the bugs. I revisited the airplanes today to see if they are still there. They are. I am creating a group of drawings and paintings of the planes for possible inclusion in an exhibition later this summer.

Richard Sewall, in his The Life of Emily Dickinson, summarized the poet as follows: "...she is the poet of the passing insight, the moment of vision, the unitary experience." Wouldn't it be nice to be a painter of the passing insight, the moment of vision, the unitary experience.

Affinities and Parallels

Steadily I have been reading The Life of Emily Dickinson by Richard Sewall. I find many affinities and parallels between her poetry, her need to write poetry, her religious outlook, her love of nature, and my own frequent drawing and painting. Below is a quote from a footnote, no less, from an article by Roland Hagenbuchle, quoted by Sewall. Painting nature with its changing light, the involvement in the present moment, the inability to capture this fleeting moment, the need to react expressively and creatively in a visual way to one's surroundings, painting quick, small, suggestive pictures, and the perilous contingency of this constant endeavor are some of the affinities and parallels that, to my mind, link her poetry to the painting I do. The quote:

The...concentration of the "critical" moment [the "Now"] is a crucial element in Emily Dickinson's poetry...It finds expression, first iconically, in the epigrammatic shortness of her poems, second thematically, in the numerous descriptions of unstable phenomena in nature such as the rising and setting of the sun or its precarious poise at the meridian hour of noon, the changing of the seasons at the solstices and certain fleeting effects of light in general. It can further be observed in the elliptical and often ambiguous syntax (including the hyphen), and finally in the use of polysemantic and often precariously unstable words and expressions. The world's drama is enacted before her eyes as a process or, to use her own words, as "God's Experiment"... The reversal from being into nothingness (and vice-versa) takes place anew at every moment, as "a gun...that touched 'goes off'". This eminently dialectic principle foredooms every attempt to pursue the romantic quest by means of analogy or metaphor. The poet experiences each instant of life and, even more so, that of death as a "critical" turning point or crisis:

Crisis is a Hair

Toward which forces creep

Past which forces retrograde

The nature of a turning point is such that it simply eludes all our attempts to grasp it...

If indeed existence proves to be a continuous crisis, we begin to understand why the poet preferably portrays moments of precarious poise between "advance" and "retrograde."

Bright and Sanctified Mud

About walking outdoors, Emily Dickinson wrote,

It is a lonesome Glee -
Yet sanctifies the Mind -
With fair association -
Afar upon the Wind

A Bird to overhear
Delight without a Cause -
Arrestless as invisible -
A matter of the Skies.

Blair Road Morning with Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "I think you would like the chestnut tree I met in my walk. It hit my notice suddenly, and I thought the skies were in blossom."

Blair Road hit my notice suddenly.

In another note to Higginson, Emily wrote, "I was thinking to-day, as I noticed, that the 'Supernatural' was only the Natural disclosed.

Not "Revelation" 't is that waits,

But our unfurnished eyes."

The above is a 9x12 pastel over acrylic washes on Colourfix suede paper.

Canal with Early Sun and Emily Dickinson

Yesterday I finished reading the biography of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books. Emily Dickinson was a remarkable person. In a way, she designed her life within its constraints to become a great poet. If she had lived a different life, she might not have written her poems. In one feverish, astonishing year, 1862, by one count, she wrote 356 poems! After she died her sister burned her letters, at Emily's request, and almost burned her poems. In 2000, another photograph of her emerged. You can see it on Wikipedia. The now two existing photographs of her do not reveal that her hair was red.

I am fascinated how she managed to create an independent life, and overcome what seems like an oppressive religious environment. Writing poetry was a means of salvation, maybe her only means.

Muddy Field

A muddy entrance to a muddy field. Apropos of nothing: de Kooning turned paint into flesh. God made Adam from clay. Jesus cured the blind man from saliva mixed with dirt. Emily Dickinson wrote, "I was always attached to mud."

Near Five Corners

This one's actually all corners, corners of fields, mountains, house and road. 9x12 on colourfix suede.

I have been immersed in Emily Dickinson lately, reading through Helen Vendler's new book of commentaries. Emily must have been quite a character. When she said something, men responded, "What?"

She wrote:

The Inner - paints the Outer

The Brush without the Hand -

Its Picture publishes - precise -

As is the inner Brand -

I want to give this stanza my own meaning - in terms of painting on a surface other than the face and eyes.

Canal Path in November

To get to and from the woods, I have to walk along the canal. Such luck. The sun was spectacular this morning. This is another 8x10 on Wallis paper prepared with acrylic wash before applying pastel.

I was reading a review of the Helen Vendler book on Emily Dickinson yesterday. Emily wrote short poems frequently for a period of many years. If the Internet had been around then, she could have done a Poem a Day. Anyway, I was thinking that little paintings, just like little poems, can still have a major impact.