Another Cart

Farm Cart, Williamstown, MA.  9x12 inches, charcoal pencil and pastel on paper.  A drawing, done on site yesterday, of another cart, abandoned in place after being filled with debris.  

Snug Fit

This is a 12x16 pastel on colourfix board: a complicated Gloucester boatyard view that I've tried to simplify. I snugly fitted the boat at the bottom to hold up the rest of the harbor.   I want to tackle a larger oil version of this view.

Unrandom Marks

At the end of Rocky Neck Avenue in Gloucester, MA is a site called the Gloucester Marine Railways, which calls itself the oldest working shipyard in the United States.  This 9x12 pastel is a view of the shipyard.  It's also a collection of mostly unrandom marks, touches, scrapes, and rubbings of hard and soft pastel.

Change and Tradition

Another Gloucester pastel, this on an 11x14 on pastelbord.  I can understand why seaports and boatyards have always attracted painters.  Where else can you find colorful and shapely man-made objects surrounded by sky and water?  And there's always the patina of age, and other aspects of change and tradition.  I went to Gloucester to see an exhibition of paintings by Charles Movalli, a great painter who died last year.

Gloucester Boat

I'm still near the water, but this time it's in Gloucester, MA, an ancient and venerable site for painters.  This is a 12x16 pastel.

Two Sides

Here's an 11x14 pastel on pastel multimedia artboard of another view of the Ogunquit sea coast.  What is interesting about this view is how the rock separates the two sides of the same differently lit sea.

Ogunquit 46

A 9x12 pastel on pastel multimedia artboard.  It depicts a winter view of rocks before the sea at Ogunquit, Maine.  It's my 46th image of Ogunquit.

Ogunquit Rocks

Yet another 11x14 pastel on pastelbord of the snowy rocks on the Ogunquit shoreline from the Marginal Way.

Ogunquit in Winter

An 11x14 pastel on pastelbord of Ogunquit in winter with snow on the rocks.

Winter Pastel

Another Ogunquit winter pastel, an 11x14 on pastelbord.

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.

Ogunquit in Winter

This is an 11x14 pastel on pastelbord depicting the shoreline of Ogunquit in winter.  The snow on the shore rocks makes it seem as if the ocean is reaching in.

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.

Revision and Hay

I revised the pastel I posted the other day since I wanted to reduce some of its coarseness.  What I was trying to do initially was to use some of the dust to an advantage.  Also to stay with the imprecision because that's just the way we see.  Tough to do well.

This afternoon I found myself walking through a high cornfield/pasture.  These rolled up hay bales were tucked under some trees.  I did a quick crayon sketch.  I post these two together since they are close in style.

Oh, and Merry Christmas!

Glimpse

This is a glimpse from the top of Sheep Hill looking north through trees screening the mountains of Vermont.  It's a 9x12 pastel.  It seems to work better from a slight distance.  Close up it's a mess of markings, scrapes and drags.

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.

Changing Pine Tree

This pine tree is located at the bottom of Sheep Hill, in a place where the light and weather seem to change as often as the view from the top of the hill.  This is an 8x10 pastel.

Footpath View

After passing that steep section of Sheep Hill on the footpath, if you look back, facing north into Vermont, on a sunny day, you will see this view.  After all the recent rain, the snow is now gone but its remnants added a nice touch.  This is a 9x12 pastel.

Shocking

When walking the path at the top of Sheep Hill, at this particular spot, you can't help but be shocked by the steepness, especially if there's a bit of snow for emphasis, and the sky is churning in a different direction.  A 9x12 pastel.