First Walk

This past Saturday I walked along Route 43 from Hancock to Williamstown, MA, a journey of several miles.  I've done this before on this road and elsewhere at different times of the year.  My wife will drop me off, and pick me up when I am ready to stop.  Macfarlane concedes later in his book The Wild Places that all the wild places aren't found in remote, never-travelled sites, but often, very often, right where we all live.  I think many wild places are at edges, such as edges of fields, rivers, and roads.

Route 43 doesn't have too many cars on it to be overly bothersome, but it does have incredible views, which one can't appreciate fully from a car.  Route 43 runs through a valley with mountains on either side.  I started at my favorite barn with the barber pole (above 9x12 oil).  I take pictures and notes, and always find something I had not seen before.  This time an overgrown 19th century cemetery which no one in a car would ever see.  In fact, I missed it the last time I walked by a year ago.  There are plenty of fallen down structures, and non-traditional views to be seen when walking along a roadway.  I did see some deer, plenty of cows, and lotsa crows.  More images to come.

Second Walk, Trees and Macfarlane

This past weekend I went on two long walks.  First, the second walk:  I walked up the road and put on my boots when I entered the farmer's field, since my sneakers would have drowned.  I crossed several more fields, went through some woods, and visited the abandoned barn and house.  No sign of activity beyond some more slow decline, especially the house.  Though sunny, it was quite breezy and cold.  I found a spot on the edge of a field that was dry, in the sun, and out of the wind.  Seated I drew what I saw in front of me, a stand of trees with mountains in the background, and then turned 90 degrees, and drew the large tree.  I mention all this because I was thinking of the Robert Macfarlane book The Wild Places.

He writes: "Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more extraordinary still... Time is kept and curated in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them.  The discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting.  It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile.  It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die.  Such knowledge, seriously considered, changes the grain of the mind."

Then he continues, and this part is more difficult: "Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human mind.  When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost.  When woods and trees are destroyed--incidentally, deliberately--imagination and memory go with them.  W. H. Auden knew this. 'A culture,' he wrote warningly in 1953, 'is no better than its woods.'"

Later in the book he writes: "We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world--its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits--as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.  A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination.  The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird's sharp foot on one's outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt.  There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun-warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one's upturned palm."

Certainly I am not tempted by his constant desire to sleep in 'wild places' but I can appreciate the deep relationship between natural things in the world and the imagination that he describes so well.   The first walk will be my next topic.

Top of Luce

An 8x10 pastel of the top of Luce Road looking into a farmer's field.

From the Robert Macfarlane book The Wild Places, a quote for which he has lost the source: "Landscape was here long before we were even dreamed.  It watched us arrive."

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."

Landscape Interlude, Pigment, and Hard Rock

This is an 11x14 landscape from Stratton Road I did a couple weeks ago, followed by a more recent 8x10 pastel looking up Luce Road.

Macfarlane writes that "Geology...is intimate with the history of painting; in oil paintings of landscapes, the earth has been pressed into service to express itself."  He is referring to pigments.

Here's another, possibly more profound thought: "Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage.  And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.

Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time.  True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe.  But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist--as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist."

House Sketch and a Mountain of Disjunction

Just a sketch.  No need to worry.

I am reading another book by Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind.  "What we call a mountain is...a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans--a mountain of the mind... Mountains--like deserts, polar tundra, deep oceans, jungles and all the other wild landscapes that we have romanticized into being--are simply there, and there they remain, their physical structures rearranged gradually over time by the forces of geology and weather, but continuing to exist over and beyond human perception;  they have been imagined into existence down the centuries... A disjunction between the imagined and the real is a characteristic of all human activities."

True painting is about that disjunction between the imagined and the real.

Washington Avenue and Barefoot Eyes

An 8x10 pastel.  One has to remain simple at 8x10.  Fortunately the original looks better than the photo image.

Macfarlane writes, "It is true that I remember the terrains over which I have walked barefoot differently, if not necessarily better, than those I have walked shod.  I recall them chiefly as textures, sensations, resistances, planes and slopes: the tactile details of a landscape that often pass unnoticed."

I am working with my barefoot eyes.

1st and 6th

This is what I have been working on the last couple days: a view of the corner at 1st Street and 6th Avenue in Brooklyn, 18x24 in oil.

Here's Macfarlane on reading surfaces:  "For [Mark] Twain the river was a capricious text, which punished literalists and allegorists alike for the fixities of their interpretations.  Horace Bixby, the veteran steamboat captain who apprenticed Twain, taught him the need to read surface for depth: how small perturbations might infer large submerged truths: the 'long slanting line' that suggested a reef which would 'knock the boat's brains out'."

Of course, I interpret this like reading the surface of vision and the working surface of paper or canvas. Both contain depth with hidden truths.

From Luce Road

A 9x12 oil of a view above Williamstown.

Macfarlane writes, "Small islands have often inspired dreams of total knowledge in those who love them.  I have read the work of several islomaniacs over the years -- Tim Robinson's deep topographies of the Irish Aran islands, Nicolson on the Shiants and Lawrence Durrell on Corfu, as well as Nan Shepherd's study of her inland-island of the Cairngorm massif, and Gilbert White's record of his Hampshire parish of Selborne.  All these people had been animated at first by the delusion of a comprehensive totality, the belief that they might come to know their chosen place utterly because of its boundedness.  And all had, after long acquaintance, at last understood that familiarity with a place will lead not to absolute knowledge but only ever to further enquiry."

I'm an islomaniac, except worse, since I have several islands.

Two Pines and Two Questions

I'm reading The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlene.   He writes, "Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.  The language of hunting has a luminous word for such mark-making: 'foil'.  A creature's 'foil' is its track.  We easily forget that we are track-makers, though, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete -- and these are substances not easily impressed."

I would like to leave good and characteristic marks on paper and canvas, though sometimes they are not easily impressed.

Macfarlene also writes, "For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that i can know nowhere else?  And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?"