Ferry Street

A 9x12 oil on mdf panel looking down Ferry Street in Lambertville, NJ.

Lambertville Street

An 11x14 charcoal and pastel drawing of a street in Lambertville, NJ.  I am also working on a painting of this one.  I like its combination of flatness and depth.

Lambertville Drawing

A 9x12 charcoal and pastel drawing of South Union Street in Lambertville, NJ.

Every now and then I have to remind myself why I am doing all this.  Sometimes I forget.  I will elaborate later.

Threefer

9x12 oil of Washington Avenue in Brooklyn, a 9x12 drawing of Lambertville, NJ, and an 8x10 pastel of the swamp at Field Farm.  I move quickly.

I have been re-reading the essays of Christian Wiman in Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.  I think there are a lot of parallels between poets and painters.  He writes,  "I once heard a painter say that he wanted in his paintings a feeling for nature but without the nature.  What he meant by that, I think, was that he wanted the natural world but colored with his own consciousness, wanted his art to be at once of the world and his own mind, but not merely a mirrored image of either one.  It's the difference between illustration and the creation of original forms. between representing or refining reality and enlarging it.  It's the difference between sight and vision."

A Digression

These two are 11x14 charcoal and pastel drawings of streets in Lambertville, NJ.

City Market and Cezanne

A 16x20 oil of the City Market in Lambertville.

In the book Cezanne: Visions of a Great Painter Henri Lallemand writes, "...his landscapes have no seasonal variance, the people of his portraits little individual character, and the everyday objects in his still-lifes no trivial function.  The artist projected his isolation and loneliness onto a natural world which is void of human subjugation, and the composition of his works are as tight and complex as his own personality.  His goal was to take the contemporary aspects out of his subjects, to make them appear permanent, eternal.  His life in Aix, with its immutable rhythms, determined the iconography of his paintings."

I imagine that it would be possible to extrapolate similar psychological conclusions about the mature, consistent work of any artist.  Cezanne, first through the influence of Pissarro and then his own persistence, managed to transcend his weaknesses, and turn them into strengths.

Two Houses in Lambertville

Two houses in Lambertville. 9x12 charcoal and pastel drawing.

Exploration of the Next Room

The above drawing is from Lambertville, NJ.  11x14 charcoal and pastel.

This 16x20 oil is the final version of this particular image of houses on Route 2 in North Adams, MA.

Macfarlane writes: "We don't come fresh to even the most inaccessible of landscapes.  'History,' as the American writer Susan Solnit has observed, 'which is itself an act of imagination, is carried in the mind to the remotest places to determine what one's acts mean even there.'  So traversing even the most uncharted landscape, we are also traversing the terrain of the known.  We carry expectations within us and to an extent we make what we meet conform to those expectations...  A raft of largely undetectable assumptions and preconceptions affects the way we perceive and behave in a place.  Our cultural baggage--our memory-- is weightless, but impossible to leave behind."

But all is not lost.  On the very next page Macfarlane writes:  "Yet we are still capable of being surprised by strangeness, of being shocked by the new.  In the right frame of mind, to walk from one room in a house to another cab be exploration of the highest order."

House Face

Did I tell you that I love to draw?  This is a 9x12 charcoal and pastel drawing of the face of a house in Lambertville, NJ.   I couldn't wait until tomorrow to post it.

Lambertville

 A couple weeks ago I started to explore Lambertville, a small city on the Delaware with many beautiful nineteenth century houses.  The above is an 11x14 charcoal and pastel drawing.  I used pastel to get a different kind of gray on the right wall.