More Like Me Than I Am

 The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney said, upon seeing a portrait of himself, "It's more like me than I am."  This might be the case of most of my self-portraits, which nevertheless continue as a useful exercise in the time of the plague.  Painting the same landscape under different circumstances, like Monet's grain stacks, can a be beneficial for the artist.  The same goes for a head or a face.  For this portrait, I took my inspiration from Bonnard's self-portraits where he seems to be looking into a bathroom mirror, though whether he actually painted them in the bathroom, is unknown.  He tended to paint from imagination most of the time.  This one I painted in front of the bathroom mirror.  12x9 inches, oil on linen.

Gloucester Boat in the Air

When you see something like this boat in the air, you have to stop and look.  I recently saw this boat at the Gloucester Marine Railways at the end of Rocky Neck Avenue in Gloucester, MA.  There's something magical about a boat in the air, like the boat that Seamus Heaney writes about in poem viii from "The Lightenings."

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air...


The painting is a 12x16 oil on panel.

Drawing in the Sand

One of the reasons that I've always been attracted to the poetry of Seamus Heaney is that he created poetry at a time when his country was so deeply divided, with sectarian murders occurring, that any kind of peace or resolution to the conflict seemed impossible.  He wrote in his essay, "The Government of the Tongue," "Here is the great paradox of poetry and the imaginative arts in general.  Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught, they are practically useless.  Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individual life.  In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil--no lyric has ever stopped a tank.  In another sense, it is unlimited.  It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed."

Heaney, in "the writing in the sand," refers to the story of the woman caught in adultery from chapter 8 in John's Gospel.  When the woman is presented to Jesus, he bends down and writes in the sand.  When pushed again to respond, Jesus says, "Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her."  Then Jesus bends down and continues to write in the sand until everybody has disappeared.

The poet goes on to write, "The drawing of those characters is like poetry, a break with the usual life but not as an absconding from it."  Of course, we don't know what Jesus was doing in the sand.  The gospel story says he was "writing" but he could have been doodling or drawing.

Heaney continues, "Poetry, like writing, is arbitrary and marks time in every possible sense of that phrase... [I]n the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we would wish to happen, poetry holds attention for a space, functions not as distraction but as pure concentration, a focus where our power to concentrate is concentrated back on ourselves."  So poetry and the imaginative arts can make us "a bit better...for the moment," as Heaney says elsewhere in "Stepping Stones."  But we can reject that opportunity provided by art.  If the accusers of the woman had no shame or integrity, they could have started to throw stones.  So the success of art is fragile and tentative (like writing in the sand), but it is so foundational to our humanity

Interestingly, the story of the accused woman almost didn't make it into John's Gospel.  It is found in some of the early manuscripts but not others.  Some early Church Fathers wanted to exclude the story because they found Jesus too forgiving.

The accompanying image is an 11x14 pastel on pastel multimedia artboard.  It shows a view of a famous rock on the Ogunquit shoreline.

Cold Mountain

This afternoon turned out nice weather-wise, if one doesn't mind temperatures in the low 20s.  I went back to the mountain at Sheep Hill again, and made two 9x12 charcoal drawings.  It was sunny, but the fingers holding the pad became numb.

I've been reading the poems of Han-Shan about Cold Mountain.  I learned about Han-Shan from the first "Squarings" poem in the book "Seeing Things" by Seamus Heany.  Cold Mountain is more a state of mind than a place.  Here's one translated by Gary Snyder:

Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease--
No more tangled, hung-up mind.
I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,
Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat.

A Natural Geometry

Last week when the sun was shining, I walked up a hay meadow, and came across this hay bale (actually there are two of them), an arrangement of shapes, foreground and background, marking a kind of natural geometry.

Seamus Heaney's poem "Markings" has the following lines:

All these things entered you
As if they were both the door and what came through it.
They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

This is an 8x10 pastel.

Distant Mountains

I'm doing a slow reading of Seamus Heaney's book Seeing Things.  That deceptively simple title phrase contains multiple meanings.  Then there's the oft-quoted ending to the poem "Fosterling":

Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels.  Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made.  So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

I read that the tin can clock was made to fool the devil, which would be a marvel indeed.

The accompanying 8x10 pastel is small, slight, and contains distant mountains.

Strange Mountains

There's a poem by Seamus Heaney called "Field of Vision," which ends

                                       ...you could see
Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.

Oftentimes, I think as I look at these mountains from the top of the hill that the great space separates me like a hedge, and the mountains become strange.  This image is an 8x10 pastel.

Providing Time

Mindscape: an 18x24 oil on canvas of the wooden pathway that goes around half of Jordan Pond.  I posted a pastel study last week.  A landscape like this for me is a metaphor for the mind.

I've been reading another book on the poet Seamus Heaney (Seamus Heaney's Regions by Richard Rankin Russell), which quotes Heaney, who wrote that "artworks... can slow and even stop frantic activity that characterizes most of the rest of contemporary existence... [because] they provide time for the evaluation of intention and consequence.  Even more significantly, they provide time for those extensions of memory into the past and imagination into the future by means of which our lives acquire their genuinely intersubjective and moral dimension."  Heaney creates landscapes of the mind using words.  I try using paint, though I may be disadvantaged since paint splotches have fewer levels of meaning.

Vanderbilt and Dean

A couple days ago I wrote that I was working on a 'large landscape,' a 12x24 oil of the corner of Vanderbilt and Dean in Brooklyn.  The long format leads to some interesting compositional details, such as balancing the yellow sign on the left with the building opening on the right, the three cars and the the three buildings, the repetition of the arch, etc. , stuff that's always there, but not visible.

Which leads me to:  I was reading Seamus Heaney again.  In the second of the 'Squarings' poems, he wrote, "Make your study the unregarded floor."  I wondered when I read that, Can I interpret that to mean, paint what we depend upon but do not see.  The ground.  Painters paint foregrounds, backgrounds, middlegrounds, and directly upon 'grounds,' like canvases, and we walk upon the ground, the roadway, and seldom see it.  Tillich called God the 'ground of being'.  I could go on, but I will stop.

Singing on Carroll Street

An 18x24 oil of Carroll Street at the bridge over the Gowanus Canal.

Related to the previous quote from Charles Wright is the following from Helen Vendler's book on Seamus Heany, where she comments on his book Seeing Things:

"The powerful effort of re-imagining everything - not representing it mimetically as it happened; not representing it embalmed by memory; but representing it on an abstract and symbolic plane that presents itself as such - this is the strenuousness that underlies the hieroglyphs of Seeing Things.  The virtue of such writing is that it records what is precious without tethering it to a limited personal place and a brief human lifetime.  The poet sacrifices himself - as autobiographical persona, as narrator of his own era, as a person representing his class or ethnic group - in order to see things in the most basic terms of all..."

Elsewhere, Heany wrote, "The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet they allow us to get at truths about who and what we are and might be."

All I can do is keep all this in mind:  I have no idea if I am succeeding.