Spring Rhythm

Margaret Mair, Dancer in Green, Original Art

My dancer makes me think of the world in spring. She radiates restless energy, attention turned inward, dancing to a rhythm only she can hear. And she’s clothed in green, like the new-grown leaves that promise deeper greens to come.

Spring has been a long time coming this year – cold winds, falling snowflakes, icy hail have all conspired to keep it at bay. As March turned into April those winter friends did not linger long when they came – but they refused to stay away, bracketing each promise of warmer days with their cold storminess. We might declare that is was time for Spring to be here, but they did not agree.

But now they have retreated. Spring is actually here. There’s green grass and the promise of leaves on the trees. There are buds and birds and warming temperatures that bring the hardy (or foolhardy) out in shorts and shirts. The sun shines differently though my window as it comes closer to our northern climes, lingering longer each day and angling its beams towards where my plants sit, waiting. Like me, they are hungry for its light.

And then there’s the feel of things, a kind of restless excitement that tingles the body and wakes the imagination. There’s a sense of good things coming. As day follows night and happiness follows sorrow so spring follows winter, and after the dark days we are glad again. It’s the rhythm of being, the dance of life.

As my dancer in green reminds me.

Stormy Times

Francisco Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), Winter

February has been a very stormy month, here and elsewhere. The storms have rolled through, coming up from south of us or in off the sea. I’m glad I can watch them pass from the safety of our apartment, while our boat sits – safe too, but rocked by the waves and wind – at a dock not too far away.

And I think about the fact that the same storm can feel completely different to different people. So much depends on where you are and what resources you have. I’ve experienced bad storms tucked safely away inside a sturdy building. I’ve also experienced them out at sea in our sailboat, surrounded by the noise and turmoil of waves and wind.

Goya, too, knew how different the same storm could feel to different people. And he wanted other people to know. That’s why his picture of Winter is not of some beautiful, snow-filled landscape but of people struggling through a winter storm.

You can tell how cold it is. Three of the men huddle together as they walk, blankets or shawls wrapped tightly around their heads and their thin coats. Their heads are down, their arms wrapped around themselves, their faces grim. You can see snow on their clothes, on their leggings; you can almost see them shiver. The poor dog beside them, tail between his legs, looks as if it would rather be somewhere else, somewhere warm and out of the wind.

These three men are empty-handed, returning home with nothing to show for all their work.  No wonder they look so grim and tired.

The other two walk independently. They are dressed more warmly: one has his head covered with a hood of the same material as his coat; the other has tied his hat on so that it shelters his face from the wind-driven snow. They have been hunting, and their hunt has been successful – one has a gun, the other leads a pack animal, a horse or a mule, with the carcass of a pig tied across it’s back. Wherever they are going these men will be well fed, and probably warm.

The painting is a sketch painted by Goya, the design for a tapestry to hang in the dining-room of the Pardo palace near Madrid in Spain. It’s one of a series of four depicting the seasons. So there is a third layer here – those who gazed at the stormy cold of the tapestry would be warm and comfortable themselves.

And people would gaze at it; Goya has made it beautiful. No doubt he hoped at least some would see beyond its beauty, beyond the richness of the colors and the skillful use of technique, to the differences between these two groups caught out in the storm. Maybe they would compare what they saw with their own lives.

Because Goya himself saw these things.  In many ways he was unusual, a tempestuous man who lived in stormy times, though his life started conventionally enough. Born in Spain in 1746, he spent his early years in Fuendetodos before his family moved to Zaragoza, where he began to study art at fourteen. From there he moved to Madrid to study more, then spent time in Rome before returning to Spain and to Zaragoza.

Despite his talent and growing skill, he found it hard to find work as an artist when he came back. Then he became part of the Bayeu family when he married Josefa, sister to the artists Francisco and Ramon. Her brothers were working at the Spanish court, and through them Goya was offered work painting designs for tapestries for two newly-built royal palaces. He went on to be a court painter and to paint for the nobility – though he broke from the courtly tradition by painting portraits of people as they were, not as they wished to be seen.

His later work was touched by an illness that left him deaf, less communicative and more introspective, and his fortunes fluctuated with changes at the court and the effects of wars and revolution, particularly the war between France and Spain. In his later work there’s anger, a sense of pain and despair, and a recognition of the ironies in life.

Because through it all he continued to work, to share his thoughts about difficult things and tragic events in stark and beautiful paintings and dark prints. Beauty has its limitations, though. Some of his paintings and drawings I find very difficult to look at. The horror overpowers the beauty.

But not the compassion. He understood that the storms of life can blow most cruelly when we are least equipped to deal with them.

A compassion we all should share.

Winter Tales with Monet

It’s the middle of January, and the middle of one of those blasts of winter that make you remember why you love summer so much.  There doesn’t seem much to say about this – after all snow and blasts of cold air will come in their season.

I suppose that I could spend my time longing for summer, dreaming about warmth and long sunny days.

Or I could find my comfort somewhere else.  Perhaps in Monet’s paintings, which are so beautiful they could make a person love winter. At least for a while.

Thank you, Feishtica.

Sunrise, Sunset – Playing in the Digital World

Margaret Mair, Sunrise/Sunset, Digital Image

The holidays are just past. They’re a time for playing, so I spent some time playing with one of my toys – a digital drawing program on my phone. Creating shapes and playing with color are a pleasure, and when even the act of creating is pure play then creating can only be pure pleasure – and the process more important than the results.

And then I played with words:

Sunrise, sunset,

rolling over

night to day to night.

beginnings, endings,

renewings -

smile hello, wave goodbye,

cry hello again…

 

It’s all endings and beginnings, and life flows on in between.

Last year ended with storms of wind and snow and icy rain. This year is starting with winds that toss the waters and sing in the window cracks, making cold into bitter cold. Old year, new year, the days come and go in much the same way, and weather doesn’t care much for our attempts to corral and predict it with dates and times and seasons. It has its own cycles.

And so do we – wake and sleep, give and receive, work and play, birth and death. Each part of the cycle has its place.

So let us not neglect play, an activity ripe with possibilities and full of joy and discovery. For life, like weather, doesn’t care much for our attempts to corral and predict. As John  Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans…”

Wonder what life will bring this New Year?

Notes: On Color in Spring

Margaret Mair, Flowers in the Sunset, Original Art

Seasons are not the same everywhere.

I grew up in a place without Spring – or winter. The closest thing to spring was the coming of the May rainy season, when grass grew greener and the poui trees lost their leaves and burst into flower for a short while; when, if all went well, the reservoirs filled; when the sweet sop was ripening and we looked forward to buying bunches of guineps from roadside stalls.

So when I moved to this northern place both spring and winter were a revelation, strange and cold and beautiful.

My first real winter was an adventure in learning about cold and snow and the shortness of days and the slipperiness of ice underfoot. Unaccustomed to months of short days and much time spent indoors, to rising to dark mornings, and nights that fell before the day’s activities were done, I welcomed my first Spring with joy and appreciation. There was a sense that life was expanding again, and we would enjoy the return of green and sun and warmth.

I remember sitting outside on damp, green grass with my books, “studying”, enjoying being in the barely-warm sun with my friends. It was time to breathe deeply and stretch out again, to shed coats and boots and dream of summer clothes and sandals. We were re-emerging from the clutch of winter and the depths of indoor life to the freshness, openness and changing colors of outdoors.

It took me a while to be aware of the many different colors of spring. The yellow-greens and deep reds of buds, the browns and greens of new branches, the deeper brown of mud, the gritty grey and lacey black of disappearing, smutty roadside snow. The coy blues of the periwinkles, the fragrant purple of the lilacs, the sunny yellows of the forsythia and the dandelions. The evergreens seemed a softer green. When the spring rains came they washed the air clean and made the new leaves shine.

And when the sun went down it added its sunset colors to the colors of the day.

The Joys of Spring…

René Lelong, Joys of Spring

What are the joys of spring? For most of us, the promise of the approaching summer’s warmth and sun and fruitfulness. Trees blossom again, flowers bloom. We shed our winter clothes and spend time outside, enjoying the sunlight and the fresh air. It is a beautiful time; it is a changeable time.

Sun encourages, rain waters, wind tosses, cold pinches. We hope that the new buds will grow, become leaves, that blossoms will become fruit, that courting birds and animals will find safe shelter to raise their young. But the buds and flowers are still fragile, and a change of weather, a change of temper, can destroy the promise that spring brings.

We see that sense of eagerness and that fragility in this painting. The two slim young women and the eager girl enjoy and embody the joys of a windy spring day. Skirts and scarf are blowing in the wind; the sea behind them is kissed with the whiteness of wind-driven breaking waves; the grasses bend before the gusts.

Each has their own look, their own character, but they are all moving forward together, against the wind. The red-haired young woman is leaning and moving forward and yet turns, attentive, toward the other two. The dark-haired woman is poised, erect, looking down smilingly at the young girl beside her, one hand raised to her windblown hair. The young girl looks as if she is laughing, leaping (springing?) forward between the two women, her movement supported by their hands. They hold her safe between them; she unites them.

Whites and pale colors light up the painting – the whites in blossoms, dresses, shoes, flowers in the grass, all touched gently with pinks and blues. Spring green touches the land behind them and hides among the darker greens of the patch they are passing through. It is warm enough for them to wear only short sleeved jackets or a scarf over their dresses. The young girl’s legs are bare, she wears a white flower in her hair, her short sleeved red jacket adds a touch of bright color. The dark haired woman’s jacket adds a subtler touch.

Even the sky is touched with white, full of clouds. Sky and sea hint at turbulence, a changeability like the changeable weather of Spring. In contrast, the rock behind the three looks both immovable and worn, dark in the shadow, sunlit where it frames the sea. Its shadows give us a quieter space to rest our eyes on.

At first glance it looks simple, like an illustration. And the artist, René Lelong, was well-known and highly respected for his work as an illustrator and his knowledge of that art. But he was also known for his work as a painter, and was a member of the Salon des Artistes Francais.

So it’s not surprising that a second glance tells us there is more to see. We look again because those figures moving forward are intriguing. They seem to be coming toward us, calling for our attention, inviting us to look around them.

We see in them the joys, the eagerness and the fragility that are a part of spring.

The Fertility of Spring

Jozsef Rippl-Ronai, Spring

Spring is tantalizing. It teases us with its suggestion of all that is to come. Trees are budding, crops being planted, trees and grasses showing their spring greens, early flowers lend a touch of color. But it is only a beginning – a fertile beginning.

In the same way this painting is a suggestion of spring, a sketch really, a promise. The yellow-greens of meadow and tree leaves are spring colors. The lights and darks of freshly turned soil, waiting for planting, are other signs of spring. The red hues of earth in the background suggest fertile, waiting soil.

Nothing looks complete. The trees and houses are blocks of colour – our mind completes them. The roofs in the distance are red, echoing the roughly blocked in colors of the soil. Those hues are picked up again in the glimpse of sky at the top of the painting, in areas of the trees in the background.

The figure in the foreground catches our eye – he is outlined darkly, filled in simply, his shadow lying across the ground behind him. He is working along lines of tilled soil. It looks as if he is hoeing a field, getting it ready for planting.

Behind him trees rise vertically, crossing the horizontal lines of fields and low hills. Only the man and the tree beside him curve away from those lines, each leaning toward the other, and his shadow breaks the ploughed line running across behind him. The trees lend their roundness to the painting, their leaves and branches barely suggested within the shape of each tree.

The painter was Joszef Rippl-Ronai, a Hungarian artist who studied art in Munich and Paris, where he came to know and appreciate other artists working in various styles. His fertile mind was influenced by the naturalistic tradition of Munich, then by the Impressionists in Paris. When he returned to his own country he developed his own style, loose and full of light, very different from that traditionally accepted by his countrymen.

Change is not easy, and new approaches are not always welcomed. At first his work and ideas were not readily accepted.  It took time for them to be appreciated and enjoyed, and then he found himself at the forefront of artistic change in Hungary.

This painting gives you an idea of how he worked. Rather than tell the viewers what to see, it invites them to complete the picture in their own minds. And yet there is a formality to its lines and composition.

Like Spring, it teases and is fertile – fertile ground for the imagination.

Winter’s Light

Karl Bodmer, Confluence of the Fox River and the Wabash, Watercolor, 1832

It’s about this time of year, when winter knocks at the door to be let in and winter light already casts its influence over the landscape.

Outside the town of New Harmony, where the Wabash River and the Fox River meet, dying trees trailing vines rise from swampy land and cattle come to the rivers to drink.  The light is soft, the sun’s rays long.  They make even the dying trees seem to glow with life.  The water looks soft and misty. Tree branches bare of leaves make lacy patterns among the cypresses.  The trees in the distance are softly silhouetted against a glowing sky.

Karl Bodmer painted this ‘Confluence of the Fox River and the Wabash’ in early December, in 1832.  He was a visitor to the continent and the region, a Swiss artist contracted to accompany the famous naturalist Prince Maximilian of Weid-Neuwied from Germany to America and record what he saw there.

He traveled with and without Prince Maximilian.  With him he traveled from Boston through Pittsburgh and down the Ohio River to Mount Vernon, Indiana before arriving at New Harmony.  There he left the prince, and traveled on his own to New Orleans.

Along the way he painted the scenery he saw, the artefacts he found, the Native Americans he met.  After he returned to Europe he had many of the scenes he had recorded reproduced as aquatints, and many of these were incorporated into the book Prince Maximilian wrote about his travels.  Bodmer had done his work well – even now it is recognized for its great accuracy.

And in this case, it’s beauty.

I wonder, is it so beautiful there still?

A Note for the End of November

Alfred Sisley, Early Snow at Louvecinnes

November is coming to an end.  We are sliding into December, into winter, into the busy-ness of holidays.

It’s a good time to pause, take a deep breath, and look at the world around us.

Because this time of the year has it’s own beauties, here towards the north where winter visits.  Trees’ bare lacy branches make delicate patterns against the green of their evergreen cousins, against the changing colors of rocks, against moving clouds and changing sky.

Denys van Alsloot, Winter Landscape

Morning light is soft and kind, making bare branches glow and creating pools of light and shadow across the landscape.  Long morning and evening rays cast long, elegant shadows across the ground.  Snow, when it comes, reflects its own wintery light.

The sun is more precious, now.  We look for it, enjoy its rising and regret its going more, because the time it spends with us is shorter.

On these mornings when we wake to the glitter of frost (and the sound of scrapers on car windshields) we know that it is just winter visiting briefly, flirting with us.

Soon it will come to stay a while.

Sophus Jacobsen, Sunset in the Forest

The World as One

Frederic Edwin Church, Rainy Season in the Tropics

Frederick Edwin Church saw the world as one physical entity, and he wanted to show it to us that way.

We are looking down; the view is dizzying.  We see rocky mountainsides and water lying on and tumbling over rocky surfaces and a rushing, spray-surrounded fall of water, all through a veil of rain.  And yet the scene is full of light. It glows off the waterfall, off the crags around it, off the water behind it.  The slanting rays of the sun behind the clouds and rain fill them with color.  A beautiful double rainbow circles the waterfall and links the mountains to the palms, trees and bushes that make an island of green where two tiny figures stand.  The abundant vegetation lies against the mountains, as if superimposed.  There are patches of blue sky above, patches of sunlight on the mountains and greenery below.

You can tell that Frederic Edwin Church was one of those painters who was fascinated by light.  You can also see that he took pains to compose his pictures well, bringing the different elements together in a way that pleases the eye and arouses the emotions.  What is less obvious is that here he used elements that did not go together naturally.

The mountains you see on the left are from sketches made in the Ecuadorian Andes; the lush vegetation on the right is from sketches made in Jamaica.  Here he unites them in one picture, linked by the beauty of the double rainbow.  They look as if they go together; the detail in the picture makes the scene seem real.

Church was responding to the ideas expressed by the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt.  Humboldt challenged others to travel and observe, as he had. Church took up the challenge, and traveled widely outside his native North America, sketching scenes that would later become the bases for large, carefully presented works.  Many other artists traveled around North America and to Europe and the Near East; he also traveled south to places like Ecuador, Colombia and Jamaica and north to the Arctic.

Humboldt believed that the physical world existed in harmony, that all it’s separate parts were related and worked together.  He brought careful detailed observations together in his writings to show how and why this was so.  Church brought the same ideas to his work as an artist,  bringing different parts of the world he observed in detail together in the same image, to create a picture in which the harmony could be seen.

He was bringing the world together in a different way.

A pity that we cannot so easily bring our own world together!

More of Church’s paintings, courtesy of brendaofohio: