FINALLY, enough snow to cast shadows in the moonlight.
Enough to light the way to drive familiar country roads in the dark.
Tonight I had mango sorbet in Sully's... the cozy restaurant right next door to the gallery. It's bone-chillingly frigid outside.
Why am I eating an icy dessert in the full dark of winter in Vermont?
Because I am so darned lucky..
In the first place, we are now starving for color, for the vivid warmth of that tangy leathery, mango peel.
Secondly: the sorbet is there.
Thirdly:
One tiny nibble of delicate sorbet and I am transported to the scents and sounds of my mother's kitchen in the shade of an immense mango grove in Asuncion, Paraguay. Dark tile, and soapstone; chopped garlic and onions and raisins in simmering chutney. My mother accumulated mango and avocado recipes. Her own creativity and inventiveness, sprung loose by the abundance of the crop. Outside the kitchen window, just beyond the jury-rigged wringer washer that my father kept cobbled together for years, raucous kiskadees would congregate and call: bold bright yellow birds. Audible chaos: wind in the leaves; the neighbor's chickens, the neighbor's radio; the neighbor's children playing; the #7 bus careening down the road in front of the house. Everything echoed within those walls, and the sorbet brought it all back.
Rich and vivid imagery, trapped in my mind, sprung free by a spoonful of tropical flavor.
We played mango polo in the pool, under the shade of the trees, tossing lethally dense fruit at each other. The native Macah peoples loaded the oxcarts with mangos when Mom was finally overwhelmed by the annual harvest. Swarms of yellow jackets hovered over the rotting fruit on the red sand soil.
Tomorrow is my youngest brother's birthday. There was a small black and white tv in the kitchen where he & I would occasionally watch Kung Fu dubbed in Spanish. Now he designs propulsion systems that send satellites into space, and manages/directs a sizeable, aerospace company.
These sensate moments are intense. Their emotion, sound, color and texture and detail are the palette of my imagery. Although I chose specific components for the composition, they are all part of the fabric of my life. Emerging when I least expect them to tell me something... perhaps about who I am, and what I should do next. Connecting the hemispheres of my brain, and of the continents.
I am acutely aware of how fortunate I have been to have had this opportunity, this vivid experience, then and now. I WORRY so much about the WORLD. How can I be writing about sorbet and my young adulthood, when thousands are dying senselessly in Iraq, and Darfur. It seems incredibly indulgent to make art. And yet, I do. It is the most constant thing in my life since childhood.
Back to Sorbet...
The particular reason they have mango sorbet at Sully's tonight was for their culinary participation in Art in the Snow, a town wide arts celebration, organized to bring a little pizzazz to the dead of winter. The fabulous cooks at Sully's created a "Starry Night Special" of duck with mango sorbet sauce with blueberry swirls. Terrific. Additionally 16 artist's studios were open, merchants about town had fun specials. There was music in the bookstore and at the tavern. All good energy in our little town, on the last days of January. Check out www.artinthesnow.com
January... the new year.
Hope and promise and the full moon rising in the misty east.
Misty?
In January?
In Vermont?
The northlands are reeling with warmth.
Where is the snow?
I was given new telemark skis for christmas, but there is no backwoods snow. My skis are white with bright flowers on the front, like a japanese print. quite lovely. But they are sitting sadly in the mudroom, awaiting the opportunity to glide through the woods, across moose tracks and under heavy hanging hemlocks, weighted with ponderous snow. All the snow is in New Mexico and Colorado. Today began with freezing rain. and then thawed.
Many of my friends are interested in snow shoeing. They trudge up to the signpost on the Long Trail (Vermont's left hand turn to Canada from the Appalachian Trail) and then trudge back down. I've gone with them a few times, but it seems silly to do all that work in both directions. On skis you trudge up, but then laugh and glide all the way back down instead of sloshing along with wide, webbed feet. The long glide is the reward and another challenge
It ever so difficult at anytime of year to focus as an artist.
Even as driven as I normally am, the holiday season is particularly challenging. Family beckons.
Deadlines loom.
Energy wanes.
Here's a small painting that I just finished. The surface of the eggs is golden with an antique crackle pattern... a diversion from my norm of quasi-scientific accuracy. While I was working on it, my great-aunt Sis, Lillian Shipley, was continually in my mind. Among her many careers was a stint as a milliner in West Virginia. It was nice to spend time with her in the process of creating the painting. In another phase of her life she had a chicken farm in Westminister, Maryland, and she spent the last years of her life as director of the Carroll County Historical Society in the same town. She was born in 1890 and lived until 1989. Rumor has it that she was quite the wild young woman in West Virginia. I remember her warm, slightly raspy voice with a southern drawl, while she served us mint chocolate chip ice cream on the back porch, with the scent of summer box bushes rising up in the July heat.
Hard to imagine how the world changed during that time span...
Just finished a commission: a portrait of a branch with a small, exquisite nest that is probably from an American Redstart: entwined twigs lined with pine needles. Quite elegant and unusual. Tiny bits of birch bark are woven into the exterior. Attached to the branch on the right side are two leaves: one actually still attached to the stem & twig; the other is oddly impaled on the end of another twig. It was found in the yard of the people who requested the portrait, blown down in a storm. It took me quite a while to get the painted branch to have the sheen of living bark, but I'm finally pleased with it.
Painting is the most magical of mediums. The
transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I
see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat
surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a
life experience.
- Chuck Close
