Geese, Herons, Beavers, and the Baby Steps of a Lapsed Blogger

For those who have been faithful followers of my blog, who have worried, and asked, “Is everything all right?” My reply is a hearty, “Yes!”.  It’s simply been a busy spring. So much has happened that I don’t know where to begin. Thus, baby steps.

Scultpure. LH

I watch the geese. We have, I think, eight families, but they often mix together and it is hard to tell who belongs to whom. They are eating machines and when I listen closely I hear their beaks snap as they grab grass, insects, and whatever else they are snacking on. They are also poop machines and walking around the farm requires attention to the ground before you step.

The geese love being here because of the pond. They need a body of water for protection. The hissing and tongue-sticking-out behavior of the defensive adults seems bravado distraction to give the goslings time to scurry into the pond.

The young herons are also a treat to watch.

Two Herons, Watercolor, LH

One caught a frog in the mixed fruit orchard by the house. Another has been fascinated by something in the chicken coop. Then she or he walked across the street into the orchard and meandered down a row of apple trees. It is most unusual behavior for a heron. These young birds haven’t learned to fear humans or their domains; innate curiosity lures them close. This morning one came walking up the driveway;  I half expected a knock at the front door. Older herons have their reserved spots around the pond — one stands near the willows, another across the pond, and a third on the far side of the dam. This heron pays no attention to the medley of black, Northern water snakes that congregate on the warm rocks. I look down when I walk around the pond; sometimes the snakes prefer to hide in the long grass.

When I look up, I see my studio. There is no siding on the outside walls, only plastic Tyvek wrap like a Christo art installation. Inside, however, I am working and enjoying the new light-filled space immensely. We don’t have a CSA at the farm this year, and we don’t have any full time workers – which means I try to make time each week for art.

New Studio (difficult to photograph)

So far it has been working and I’ve installed new work in four outdoor exhibits this spring.

Just Sitting, Installation at the Fuller Museum, Brockton, MA

I also try to spend a little time at the end of the day sitting in a chair with the windows wide open looking over the pond. One evening I saw something swimming, making what looked like figure eight circles on the far side. This went on for quite a while until I decided I would go up to the house to get some binoculars, risking of course, the creature’s disappearance.

When I returned to the studio and held the binoculars up to my eyes, I saw that there were two beavers, not one, swimming together.  One swam ahead while the other approached, then slid up over them, then swam off, and circled round. In silence the beavers came together again, then separated; joined and parted. Beavers making love in the pond!  A few more times and they disappeared. Now I keep binoculars by my window seat. I will not use these to make another scutlpure!

Mama's Coupons — Good Forever

•  Bike Ride You and Me.

•  Day with You.

•  Only the perforated edge remains of the third coupon.

•  Read a Book Together.

• Kiacking or Canoeing Together.

• Clean My Room.

The old newsprint paper is dry, the glue on the binding is coming apart, and a water stain covers the last page. My daughter, Ariel, then 10 years old, gave me these coupons. She must have been missing me. Unhappy, and thinking only about myself, I was not giving my daughter the attention and support she needed. I saved this faded booklet of coupons, a reminder of the regret I can still feel.   

Fast forward to January 2016. Ariel is in transition from leaving the high level dressage horse world to finding another path. She is depressed, lost, and needs to have a serious shoulder operation that will require extensive rehab — like sitting up in a chair for six weeks —  even to sleep. She returned home. She got through the operation and the pain-filled recovery. I even watched my first sitcom, the Gilmore Girls, but we never finished the series, because it was then time for her to move out.

Ariel found a tiny attic room in a dilapidated house on Windsor street in Cambridge. Housing is hard to find, but she lucked out, the rent was only $500, but I worried about how she would escape if there a fire. To help with this transition, I offered her two days of work; she came out Tuesdays and Thursdays and she helped me in the studio, she took photographs, she worked on my much in–need-of-help art database, or we focused on the ever-pressing farm jobs. We especially enjoyed picking berries. Opposite each other, moving down a row, picking berries into one gallon jugs, we were quite efficient from years of experience.

A well-meaning friend told me, “She should get a job at Starbuck’s – just something. She shouldn't be working for you.”  I disagreed. I think we need time to discover ourselves. Ariel didn’t have that opportunity in high school or college. She got through high school while taking a lot of time off for horse shows. She took college courses wherever she was training. The horses always came first. Barn management and riding.

But it was in late fall, after the farm closed, that our relationship changed again. I needed to work on the sculptures for the opening of After Apple Pruning, an exhibit I scheduled to open mid-January. I had promised to fill the gallery with art made from the pruned branches of our apple trees and invited Ariel to be part of the exhibit. We worked on a large wall installation, Grafting a Life. She also made her own spiral of apple branches.

Branch Spiral, Barrel Stay, Apple Prunings, Copper Wire, Ariel Matisse

I admired her work ethic – all the discipline gained from riding and training horses was there, as was a sophisticated aesthetic. The keenness of her eye shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, she was spoon fed art from her two artist parents. Art covered every wall of our house. Her father reminded me when Ariel went to overnight summer camp, we received a call to please come and see what she had created. Asked to make a simple mask, instead Ariel had single-mindedly worked for days on a giant elephant head with floppy ears and tusks. 

Now we are two artists collaborating on our first outdoor permanent commission. How does this kind of transition take place? Lots of us have older children who are trying to find their place in the world — wanting to find something they are passionate about and will provide a livelihood. I think there is nothing like good old complete love and acceptance — holding the belief they will find it. When we are struggling with self-doubt, someone else’s belief in us is so crucial. I don’t mean unskillful enabling, but truly seeing them as whole and thriving. 

Today, Ariel has her own studio at the Artists Asylum in Somerville. She is making trees from wire and using tree branches rounds for the bases. At her first Open Studios, she sold out and she now has several interesting collaborative projects she's working on.

For our commission, she is designing the sapling tree growing from the trunk and the intertwining roots, while I work on the trunk and the figures that will populate the branches.

I can’t tell you where this sculpture will be permanently installed, it’s a surprise tribute. Meanwhile, we are working on the details of our second commission, The Boddhi Tree, for a couple in New York.

I feel so fortunate. I still have more coupons to use: Make Breakfast, Take a Walk Together, and Cut Flowers.  But the real gold is Make Sculpture with You!

January Ice

Ice and cold describe my January 2018. Our dog snores in his bed near the wood stove. The wood pile lowers as we pull from it to feed the flames. I think of Galway Kinnell’s poem, Another Night in the Ruins. The flames in his poem might be our creative spirits, our deeply felt lives. The narrator of the poem remembers his brother’s warning — the day offers nothing; it is the night when the bonfire lights the entire sky.  But to light the flames, we must be the flame. We must, like the rooster in the poem, let go of all of our ‘ink-spattered feathers', our failures, our half-hearted efforts, our old and accustomed habits; we must hurl ourselves into the unknown, and with single-minded effort search for the single grain, the true grain that will nourish, that will deeply warm our souls.

Another Night in the Ruins

1

In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.

2

Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.

3

He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in ...”

4

Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

 5

I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.

 6

Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.

7

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

             —Galway Kinnell

The Muse

Welcome to the New Year of Apples, Art, and Spirit!

After two years of weekly posting, I am going to change it up a bit. Posts will still arrive on Sunday morning, but I might miss a few. When I am not writing the blog, I will be finishing a memoir about moving to Old Frog Pond Farm — how apples came to take over so much of my life, finding a spiritual path — and lots of art.

Meanwhile, the renovation of my studio has taken longer than anticipated. With no shop space, I’ve gone back to watercolor — a medium I find challenging and delicious. And what do I find I am drawn to paint? Apples, of course! I’ve been taking a class with Sandy Wilensky in Maynard. Sandy has us make a blind contour drawing before we start painting. Contour means following the outline of the object; blind means looking only at the object we are drawing, not at the paper. The drawings tend to be refreshingly off, the lines don’t necessarily connect, but the intense concentration of really seeing makes for a drawing with lines that are alive. It’s not about drawing our idea of what an object looks like, but drawing what the eye really sees. It’s fun and you have to trust the process. I highly recommend it, especially if, like me, you don’t feel confident about drawing.

Here I’m experimenting with color, shape, and transparency. 

I’m also testing the medium and using the watercolor paint as if it was acrylic.

Sandy’s classes are super supportive. She creates an environment where her students feel at ease. She slides in some technical information, but the focus is on finding your own expression and trusting it.

I'm also taking a workshop with Martha Wakefield, one of my favorite painters from Wild Apples days, the journal I published and edited with friends Susan Edwards Richmond, Sophie Wadsworth, and Kathryn Liebowitz. This series of Martha’s classes are all about color  —  we explore its technical properties — hues, tints, shades, saturation, for example.  Martha gave us homework after the first session to use only one color with black and white, and paint a simple still life. I’m so undisciplined when I paint it is helpful to have these restrictions.

Here’s my apple using only three colors: M. Graham’s Green Gold, Chinese White, and Mars Black. 

Soon I will be back in my studio. It’s been lovely to explore color before I return to wood and metal. If you desire to move in a new direction with your art, or open the faucet to new creative energy in the New Year, I recommend trying a class or workshop in a new medium. Be a complete beginner, it’s humbling and freeing. And give yourself lots of space. A Zen master, Suzuki Roshi, taught: "To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” Give yourself lots of space, don’t limit the possibilities; there is no right or wrong, no watcher judging, only your own mind putting up fences.

Here's to freeing your muse in the New Year!