A Quick Trip To England - A few impressions

Yesterday, I returned from ten day holiday in England and brought home too little to declare to customs but so much to unpack in impressions.

Here in no particular order, are some of those thoughts.

• England has so much history. A Christmas Carol, The Favourite, The Crown, Robinhood, Downton Abbey, anything on BBC fuels our sense of it. But I didn’t really get it until I saw foot-wide window seats that meant foot-wide walls, buildings in rows like teeth with new ones ghastly shiny among worn ones that represent bombed homes versus the saved, and foot paths through fields, and hedges like barbed wire, and, Downton Abbey like or bigger or burnt down homes, let alone so many buildings with art. 

• There was hardly a road or town there that we haven’t copied here. 

• The Brits are way ahead of our actions and concerns for the climate crisis. They know their next electric tea kettle won’t be as fast in heating water for tea because it wont pull as much electricity. And, they are thinking about how every citizen should be growing their own food to reduce transport, so have more gardens. They think our cars are too big and that lorrys (trucks) need to get off the road. What’s more is that they are getting their stiff upper lip ready to endure it.

• Cats are out on the street and dogs are everywhere most are on leash.

• Food is good. Take out is the exception. People eat at home more. 

• Wine and beer seem more a part of meals. It seems like better quality but it doesn’t seem to be as expensive for good bottles of wine. 

• Parking is difficult. Everybody walks. I was thinking of driving a mile to pick up some eggs, maybe I would reconsider.

• Brexit is worrisome and causing businesses to make decisions that are making the economy shaky and worrisome for all. 

• The people are warm. Class is still a big thing and I think I witnessed a duel of Queen’s English upsmanship at one point. Not sure though. I had trouble understanding idioms and began to question my hearing as I was asking people to repeat themselves so frequently. 

• At a dinner party, I was told that we were crazy to elect Trump. One man who sat down next to me while I painted the sailboat scene, asked me about Trump. I wasn’t complementary and he told me to be respectful, he is your president. He’s right, but it’s hard.  

The Sketches – My literal impressions…

Though I wasn’t traveling with an artist, I was with someone who supported my desire to paint what I saw. I packed watercolors and white gouache, brushes, a sketchbook and several small pieces of 5x7” or 4x10# watercolor board. Thinking I wouldn’t have a lot of time to paint and knowing that my luggage needed to be minimal, I decided my paintings would be sketches, perhaps to be used for reference later, and left home my typical oils, plein air easel, tripod, wet canvas carriers, umbrella and other gear I typically take for plein air painting. 

Over the eight days of touring, I had time to complete five sketches. There was so much more I wanted to paint, but my photos and memories must suffice. Actually, I painted two inside, one, while waiting for my friend to pack for our excursion, of an exquisite flower arrangement on a highboy dresser in a soft window light.  Another, I painted in the airport hotel after my last night, from a photo I took earlier in the day as we drove through farmland. The cadmium lemon yellow rapeseed fields were in full bloom throughout our days on the road, it’s a perfect reminder of our touring.   

 

Very early our last day, I painted a scene from a couch inside our Thomas Kinkade-perfect Air B&B cottage, of a clothesline of billowing family laundry across the garden. It stood outside the back door of another couple cottage that was equally a couple hundred years old in the village of Stretton. The freshness of the clean clothes juxtaposed against the history of the architecture and gardens caught my eye.  It will help me remember the glorious bird song outside our windows and baaing of lambs loud enough to hear from a nearby field. The day before, I took a few minutes to capture the front of our cottage with its sign that reads “Daphne’s Cottage”; just one of the many who’d lived there before.

I had time to paint two in my friend’s village of Deal on the English Channel. One with sailboats darting up and down and the other of fishing boats tucked in the sand, near the town pier and where I stayed. If you saw the movie, Mr. Turner, you’ve got a sense of the area where I was. He spent a great deal of time in a town called Margate where today there is an art museum, the Turner Contemporary named for him, about a twenty five minute drive from Deal. (BTW, in prowling around, we found an art supply store on the main drag of Margate, called Lovely’s. It wasn’t large but painters and sketchers can find what they needed.)

Ten days is so short. I probably could’ve spent half that time just in the art galleries, and the whole time seeing villages, and half the time finding more pubs, and another half the time just riding bus lines. There are so many more impressions to gain. 

Camaraderie – The Joy of Painting Together

When the Plein Air Painters Chicago Steering Committee created its mission statement, camaraderie as one element listed after painting, improving, and selling paintings. It wasn’t at an afterthought, but all aspects of painting ranked higher on the priority list. As it turns out, members usually rank the interaction to other artists as the second most important reason they belong to the PAPC. They came for the painting and stay for the people who care about painting, and are willing to console and kavetch about painting. They want to commune with someone who knows what its like to feel discouraged, be driven to paint, or need a nudge to submit a painting for a contest or enter a competition. Camaraderie doesn’t mean family, but it can be the ease of old school friend, the excitement of learning new things from a date or the shared intimacy of disappointment and success. 

So, I’ve been thinking about how the members of the PAPC experience camaraderie. I admit, I didn’t love the word when we first placed it in consideration for our mission. I suggested instead, the word fun, but it took little convincing that we should expect more. Words like  welcoming, inclusive, and supportive shaped the concept. It was quickly decided that we welcome everyone to paint with us, paid membership or not. If lunch after a paint-out is in the works, everyone is invited. If someone’s discouraged about matching a color, getting the shape of a car, or struggling to give a figure more dimension, they only have to ask.  PAPC comrades in art will come to the rescue. 

Here are other ways for any of us to show camaraderie.

Social media –

• When a painting is posted on Facebook and Instagram, like it, better yet, make a comment. 
• If a fellow artist shares a promotion for a personal or group show, share it, attend it and take friends who like art or like you. Consider sharing promotions from the Palette and Chisel, what helps them helps the PAPC.  That goes too for any of your instructors.
• If someone posts a newsletter, share that on the same social channel, and, copy and paste it to another. Whether the newsletter is written for artists or collectors, it may benefit someone. 
• If you’re also a figurative or portrait painter, invite models to bring family and friends to a show to see their likeness.  
• Grow your network. Keep track of people who buy or are interested in your work. Let them know not only about your own show, but group shows as well.  
• We all need support and camaraderie at one time or another. Use your social networks  to ask for what you need… be the receiver and expect that your comrades in art will respond.

Critiques 

• Critiques onsite - Plein air painting reminds me of my son’s high school track team. Everyone worked toward personal bests and there were MVPs, but the team stayed till the last competitor jumped. You may choose not to be critiqued or enter a competition, but you sticking around till the end, offers support and encouragement. 
• If someone asks you for a critique of their work.  Start with a question, How will my critique help you? Focus on that. 
• Begin with a positive, ask if they want more. Be precise and don’t offer an opinion if you don’t know how to fix something that’s not working.  Err on the side of encouragement. 

  

Go with a fellow artist to museums and galleries. 

• There’s nothing like looking at a painting with someone who shares the language and understands what it may have taken to create the image you’re seeing. It doesn’t have to be an art expert, I’ve learned. In fact, for me, some of them have a tendency in explaining to forget the feeling. 
• Once immediately after a paint out in Grant Park, Ray Vlcek and I toured plein air paintings at the Art Institute. Maybe it was our fresh encounter with landscapes, but those few minutes we took to notice and discuss the capture of light, composition, shapes and patterns was especially useful. Check out the light in this 1909 plein air landscape on display at the Art Institute of Chicago by George Gardner Symons.   
• Discussing online work with a fellow painter can be valuable too. After staring at raucus waves in changing light for a couple hours I was no closer to capturing them. Studying Anders Zorn’s paintings Sommamoje, Caique Oarsman and Pier paintings with an artist, helped me see them better and stop obsessing. BTW, while I still don’t paint water well, but it helps to know that Zorn spent more than two years on some of his paintings.  

Camaraderie for me is still about fun and sharing the joy of painting plein air.  How can I encourage you? How can we encourage each other?

How to Edit a Landscape with Help from Twyla Tharp

How do you decide what elements to include in a landscape? I am regularly challenged by this. I typically want to paint it all... every damn leaf.  I watch other plein air painters include three people, not twenty, move a tree, change a tree shape, omit a building, or add clouds to a clear sky, without a hesitation. Exclusion for me is an inaccuracy, maybe a lie. I think plein air paintings are creating a moment of history. Cave walls tell us about the animals present, and sometimes the dress of the day… Not that I expect my paintings to last millennia.  Yet, I do see merit in editing for the composition especially.

Over the last couple weeks I began savoring a Christmas gift, reading, not too fast, Twyla Tharp’s 2003, The Creative Habit. Her stories of musicians, writers, and artists of all kinds are entertaining in themselves, but the exercises she suggests have inspired me. They are different from many other creativity books I've read. The one I want to wax on about, is led into with a story about Neil Simon, which you'll have to read for yourself.

Back to the challenge of editing a painting. Twyla talks about the power of seeing, you know, like Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by watching.” She recommends watching a couple and making a list of their actions and gestures until you have twenty. He puts his arm around her, she picks a piece of lint from his coat, she crosses her legs, he man splays, she pulls a Kleenex from her pocket, she blows her nose. It’s not hard, to list twenty items in a brief time, Twyla
comments. The second phase of the exercise is to watch another couple and list the actions that please you aesthetically or emotionally. A sign of tenderness in a touch on the arm, the slide of sunglasses onto the head, to see something more clearly, an elbow jab with a laugh, a slight step back at some news. Now judgement is added to powers of observation, and being selective becomes essential. 

Twyla’s point is that what catches your fancy is not as important as the difference between the two lists. What one includes or edits speaks to how you see the world. My thought is that what catches my fancy in a scene are the items I’m going to paint with more intention, might even be my focal point. And, if not my focal point, I will create a relationship to it… place it where it best tells the story I am painting. 

Once again, Twyla danced me into a new way of thinking.

As I wrap up this post, it reminds me of another one, I wrote a while back on making word lists to create a more accurate and interesting piece of writing. That process, coupled with asking yourself, what pleases you emotionally or aesthetically, offers another way to consider what to edit. This link will get you to it Lexicons and Writing. And, "That reminds me of..." is as always another powerful creativity prompt.

Photo: From Twyla Tharp Pinterest Page
Painting: Waiting for the Magic, Mary Longe, 2019, 16x20" Oil on Canvas

The Cat in the Hat and the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

“What would you do if your mother asked you?”

This is the last sentence of the Cat in the Hat. It’s asked after, as you likely recall, Cat through acts of entertainment, causes exponential messes in the children’s house that get cleaned up in the nick of time. Mother walks in and asks Conrad and Sally, “What did you do while I was out?” 

I’ve had a Cat in the Hat morning. When stowing plates and bowls in cupboards, followed by a spatula and peeler in a utensil drawer, I found I could barely pull the drawer wide enough to get out a knife, let alone get at whatever was blocking its opening. Piece-by-piece I remove enough to dislodge the offending item… my nemesis, the sharp, pointy and painful meat thermometer that stabs regularly, no matter how deep I place it in the drawer. 

Having had way too many discussions lately about the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and rather than jam the damn thermometer in the back corner, I emptied the contents on two countertops and the kitchen table, and attempted to ask myself if any of the items bring me joy.  (It occurred to me at that moment that seeing all the stuff spewed everywhere is a stupid time to ask the question.)

I removed the five dividers and liner, washed them and reimagined the space. I moved one of the dividers containing openers and closers (rubber discs, can opener, cork screws, wine stops, etc.) to another drawer which had to be rearranged first, and before that, wiped clean. Skewers moved to a shelf high in a cupboard, risking oblivion, but better than discarding, I reasoned. The shelf below them held my mom’s box of recipes, which surfaced in a recent conversation about hot chicken salad with potato chips… a dish she served at a Coke-tail party before prom in 1969. Of course, I had to find the recipe. That led to photos, a text to my friend and eventually putting away the step stool in the laundry room.  

Damn, I’d been using the top of the dryer as an emergency holding area since the doorbell rung on Christmas Eve. It was piled with wrapping paper, a wood wine rack, a package to be shipped, dirty cloth napkins – the only items that should be there, an empty cat-toy box, a huge Tupperware full of bags of nuts and seeds, and bags, lots of bags… brown paper grocery bags, bags with nice handles and pretty sides, plastic bags thick enough for cat litter disposal, and bags to be recycled at the grocery store. Of course, it didn’t look as organized as I just described it; it looked more like the kitty’s litter box. 

“And this mess is so big 
And so deep and so tall, 
We cannot pick it up. 
There is no way at all!” 

I started a wash and cleared the top of the machines, which led me upstairs to the closet where my wrapping supplies are stored. I flipped. I jammed the tissue into the bag of rolls of happy paper, inside that disaster pit. I’d had enough. 

Returning to the kitchen, I easily reopened the now tidy kitchen drawer to grab the wine bottle-opener and discovered, in the last of the debris, an item offering true joy - a meat-thermometer sheath, free from Sur la Table, that forever renders my nemesis impotent. 

Conrad and Sally never answered mother.  Maybe neither would I. I didn’t accomplish one thing I had planned.

Grandma

Today, the wind and the windows hummed the deepest baseist chord

A guttural tone that mimicked my grandmother’s fret. 

“Lydia took a turn,” she’d say, never saying in what direction. 

“You’ll catch your death,” she’d scold, never explaining how. 

She baked the tiniest of muffins from the tiniest box and tell me not to eat them. 

I’d swat her hand when she’d help me with my dress for church.

“No man will ever have you,” she’d warn, without a trace of doubt. 

“Your independence will be the death,” she’d say, without any clarification. 

A gust, the rain, more leaves on the ground than on the trees.