A Vermont Cabin

 A Vermont cabin: a memento of a thoreauvian retreat.  9x12 inches, oil on linen panel.

The Surface of the Pond

As I worked on this painting, coincidentally I read an essay by David M. Robinson on Thoreau's Walden.  He writes, "...the description recreates the pond surface as a medium of cognition, an ideal analogue for the completely perceptive mind.  The line of demarcation between two different realms, water and sky, the surface is also the place at which these realms meet and merge, recording and thus comprehending each such event.  Perception, as represented by Thoreau through the perfectly impressionable pond surface, is thus a process of merger or unification."

The painting is an 18x24 oil on canvas of the small pond located on Mount Greylock.

Sky Water

Yesterday afternoon I made it back to the larger pond.  In the chapter on "Ponds" in Walden,  Thoreau writes, "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature.  It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."  A few lines later, he uses the phrase, "Sky water."  This painting is a 12x12 oil on panel.

Like An Eye

Yesterday afternoon I visited a local pond to paint.  I wanted to see the sky in the water.  When I first arrived, the water was like a mirror, but a breeze picked up, and the water surface never kept still after that.  Somewhere in Walden Thoreau writes that a pond is like an eye.  The painting is a 12x16 oil on panel.

Butler near 3rd and Wisdom

Samuel Johnson said that the prospect of being hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully.  The same applies to moving.  But I am concentrating on painting again.  The above is a 9x12 oil of the view on Butler Street approaching 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn.

Lately, I have been reading Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness by Alan D. Hodder,  which I acquired at the bookstore at Walden Pond earlier this year.  It is a rich, profound book about Thoreau's religious and artistic vision.  Hodder cites Thoreau from Walden:  "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."

Canal Drawing for Sam

I am trying something different.  I like drawing with a stick of vine charcoal in my sketchbook when I am out walking.  I can rub the charcoal with my fingers if I want to make changes.   The only problem is preserving the drawing until I get home.  This morning I used a piece of glassine to cover the drawing (above), plus a clamp to hold the pages still.  I will have to carry fixative, especially if I want to make several drawings.  Yeah, there is the problem of dirty fingers, but as long as I am near water, I can wash them.

Still reading Thoreau's Walden as part of my daily ritual:

"If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, --that is your success.  All nature is your congratulations, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.  The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated.  We easily come to doubt if they exist.  We soon forget them.  They are the highest reality.  Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.  The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."

Pacific

9x12 oil of Pacific at Classon, Brooklyn.  I prefer sunny days, but this weather fits the setting.

One has to read Thoreau carefully.  He can surprise, such as when he writes, "Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places.  The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses."

A few paragraphs later he writes, "With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense."

When I paint and draw, I am always beside myself.  My next group of pictures will all be pastels.

Pacific at Classon, and Thoreau

Besides cars, there are a lot of walls in Brooklyn; some are falling down like these.  9x12 charcoal drawing.

Lately,  I have been reading Walden.  Here's what Thoreau says at the end of the chapter "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For":

"I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things.  We think that that is which appears to be.  If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality...If he should give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize the place of his description.  Look at a meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them."

Sounds like a proto-cubist vision!

He goes on to write:

"Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the furthest star, before Adam and after the last man.  In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime.  But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.  God himself culminates in the present moment,  and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.  And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us."

The next three lines are more difficult, at least for me:

"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.  Let us spend our lives in conceiving then.  The poet or artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it."

A Paintable Landscape

This is another view of the Hopper from Sloan Road in a 12 x 24 inch oil.

John Berger in a fascinating essay, titled "A Story for Aesop," discusses paintable and unpaintable landscapes. The Spanish landscape is "unpaintable," he writes. "A landscape is never unpaintable for purely descriptive reasons; it is always because its sense, its meaning, is not visible, or else lies elsewhere... Paintable landscapes are those in which what is visible enhances man--in which natural appearances make sense. We see such landscapes around every city in Italian Renaissance painting. In such a context there is no distinction between appearance and essence--such is the classic ideal."

He adds, "The scale of the Spanish interior is of a kind which offers no possibility of any focal centre. This means that it does not lend itself to being looked at. Or, to put it differently, there is no place to look at it from... A landscape that has no focal point is like a silence. It constitutes simply a solitude that has turned its back on you."

The only landscape like this that I have encountered is usually the site of a natural disaster in a forest area. Or the shattering descriptions of nature that Thoreau recounts in his trip to Mt. Katahdin in Maine.

Slain Corn Field

When I see a harvested corn field with its remnants strewn across the ground and stubs still anchored in rows, it reminds me of those huge landscapes by Anselm Kiefer filled with history, blood, and fragments of past struggles. I have a lively imagination when it comes to corn fields. Do you know the passage in Walden where Thoreau describes his battle with the weeds, as if he was a warrior in the Trojan War?

On the Canal after the Snow Storm

The canal is quite different right now, so I took a break from the quarry. The b&w is small, 5+x8. The pastel is 8x10. After his daily walks, Thoreau wrote in his journal. I draw and paint instead, keeping a visual journal.

Last Reflection

This maybe my last visit to the land of upside down for a while. Looking into a body of water, seeing a reflection, reminds me of the passages in Thoreau's Walden. He looks into the pond and sees the sandy bottom, ancient pine trunks, himself, the sky, and eternity. "I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars." But I must stop reflecting and move on.

My pictures have been getting more wintery. I will be visiting the land of cold beauty next. A cold beauty is born, to borrow from Yeats.