Nordic Days

Heat Drove the Englishmen Mad

It was said that early English settlers or visitors to the American South used to suffer hallucinations from the ungodly heat. Their time there was one long acid trip until they returned to their temperate zone.

It's been in the upper 90s since late May here. It was 100 degrees in the last week of May.

My Canadian cousin was glad to hear from me because she said I hadn't posted on this blog for a while. The U. S. northeast and lower Canada are getting the heat blast this week, while it's a little cooler here. So this one's for the cuz.

She said this weather was rough on Nordic peoples. While I thought of myself as deriving from French stock, I never thought of myself as Nordic. Cool! We (our family) originated in Normandy, after all.

It explains to me why, after a lifetime of living in Florida, the summers get harder on me rather than easier. Pi yimini, I'm Nordic!

My studio (the garage) has only a couple of early-morning hours before turning into a kiln. So I've stayed in the cool of the computer room and played with the quick capture-and-retreat imagery from the back yard.

Photoshop tools and magic make me feel (a little) like I'm painting, and they are the images I'd be painting anyway. The difference is there's no toxic stuff to dump when I'm done and storage is so easy. I just burn it to a disc.

The 'painting' above is "Summer Waterfall". It is a view of a little waterfall I fashioned out of rocks and hand-formed concrete. Wife contributed the plants. What's shown here survived the coldest winter in years to bounce back with great vigah, as the Kennedys used to say.

If I can survive the rest of July, all of August, September and October, I too plan to return with great vigah.

Stay cool, dudes.

Lenses and Memory

Out of the Fog

A couple of mornings ago Mattie and I were doing the walk.

It's a repetitive must-do task. My sympathies are all with the dog, but after three years of going up and down the same old blocks ... it gets old.

We have been through a for-Florida very cold winter and spring has been a joy for us. And daylight savings time has given us back those sun rises again. But still, the streets are the same.

Just when I think I've gotten all the paintings I'm going to get out of doing that same walk, a new twist gets thrown in.

That morning came wrapped in a really nice fog. It's thickness increased as we walked and the sun rose. Fogs have a way of redefining the landscape. A line of trees disappears here, a street of houses becomes one mass there, foreground and background merge or separate in new ways.

It made me wish I'd brought my camera. Mattie wished I'd brought some dog biscuits. She always wishes that. She's a one-wish dog.

The road curves around stands of trees, then arcs back in another direction. In the fog the stand of trees became a vague gray-green wall and the road disappeared after the turn. I could hear some crows cawing in the tree tops.

Suddenly one of the crows swooped down out of the trees toward us. I thought it was going to land on the streetlamp just in front of us, but the bird cleared the lamp and swooshed on over us.

That little moment was hardly more than three seconds long but the fog concentrated my attention on that sweet little downward arc the bird made and the expectation I had for its destination. Still no camera. We completed our walk and headed home to breakfast.

I went back the next day with my camera, but there was no fog. I expected that. I've noticed over the years that aspects of the sun, moon or weather rarely give you a second chance. Incremental changes of rotation and orbit move the sunrises and sunsets to a different spot and time from day to day. But I had the camera so I took photos of the approximate areas I'd been the day before.

Then I went home and downloaded the images to my Mac and fired up the photoshop.

After clipping and pasting bits and pieces from several of the exposures and importing a crow from archive, I set about creating a fog. It took some effort and digital painting, but it came out pretty much as I remember the moment.

I can live with that.

We Do Get Weary

Souls Get Tried, Hearts Broken

I heard from a friend recently, for the first time in years.

His story got worse as it unfolded. A list of sorrows and loss.

Over the years he went from one bad job to another. Small-town economy is like that of the big city. Diminishing returns. Leaving the field you worked in just to have a job. To having no job.

Then cancer in the family. Med expenses. Recovery! But the illness took it's toll. Separation.

The death of the family pet was a final blow.

The life-blood of this friend has always been music. His Facebook photos are of band mates all the way back to junior high. He's in a band now. He contacted me to see if I could help with a band logo. And he told me his story.

A part of art's job should be to tell the story of the artist's times. Goya and the horror of invasion; Hopper and the isolation of the city; Picasso and the bombing of a Spanish town.

As I worked on the band's logo, I kept replaying his pathetic story, like the worst country song I'd ever heard. Couldn't help being touched by it. He summed it up: Living in his brother's empty house, a for-sale sign on the lawn. Time running out.

The times are rough.

I live in a middle-class neighborhood. As I walk the dog I note all the front porches with the rocking chairs and little tables and potted plants. They are set designs from a world that doesn't exist any more. People no longer sit on their porches. They sit inside, behind drawn window shades. Worrying.

The only people on the street are those walking their dogs.

I decided to do a little "report" from my era. I surfed the internet for various images and put them together, artified them, in the electronic collage above -- "When Times Get Rough".

Music is keeping my friend alive and hopeful.

He liked the logo.

Futurists of the Past

Coming Around and Going Around

Visiting with a friend brought to mind a painting I did ten or more years ago.

Marcel Duchamp's painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" has long been an icon defining "modern art". Just as many who don't know much about art know about Vincent Vangogh's ill-fated ear, the nude descending that staircase comes to mind for many who couldn't name another "Modern" painting or sculpture.

I've long thought it funny that art still called modern was being done well over 100 years ago.

We live in a disposable age of everything being so 15 minutes ago, so last wednesday, and yet, work by Monet and his buds were being painted and rejected in the 1880s.

Just to give a little background to that stair-descending nude, Duchamp painted it in 1912 and entered it in that year's established outsider artists' big show. By that time being an outsider was gaining some cachet with those salon-going Parisians who loved being shocked.

The Impressionists had done it in the previous generation and the Cubists were taking up le shock treatment for les Parisiennes.

Duchamp had lettered the title of the painting at the bottom left of the canvas and was asked to change the title or take the painting home. Who knows why? Paris was used to nudes, maybe they weren't used to titles.

It's also said that the Cubists had some objection or other to the painting. Duchamp objected to the request and took his painting home. He then entered the same painting in the big "Armory Show" of 1913, which introduced all this modern stuff to America. The "Nude" raised a bunch of sand there, too.

Duchamp eventually tired of people being shocked by pigment on canvas and retired to playing chess for the rest of his life.

During the period that I painted my descending art (that painting at the top, "Dude Descending a Staircase"), I was showing my work in a sweetly funky gallery called Pelican Place. A bare brick wall beyond the parking lot was regularly used by FSU art students to do graffiti wall art. I liked their work and thought about the fuss graffiti was making in cities around the world.

Graffiti art also makes it more interesting to be stopped at a railroad crossing by a passing train. Each freight car is part of a moving exhibit.

I also had scuffed up elbows and knees during a brief fling with boarding, and related to the spirit of street art.

And beyond all that, I can't resist a good pun. So I brought together the elan of 100-year-old outsider art with the decade-old outside-wall art in that modest little painting I did.

And it sold.

My apologies to Marcel Duchamp. It wasn't outside enough to be rejected, as his was.

But I think Marcel would have liked the joke.

How Many Chances Do We Get?

Blessings or Curses?

This painting was done in 1994. Sixteen years seems like a long time ago.

A much younger man than I am now did this painting. And that younger man was troubled and pressured by circumstance to weigh the truths of life. Feeling the need to resolve unanswerables.

Some in my life had made choices of faith that I couldn't. It put a space between us.

We remain friends thanks to their generosity and I never did make a choice. Couldn't. Can't.

After all this time we still come back to those points of discussion. There is less heat and fire to the discussions now and we agree to disagree. We all know where we stand. What we do now is exchange honesty and sincerity.

After all this time of examining what I do and don't believe about the whole shebang of the universe, I come down to a few simple guideposts, none of which can be traced to any particular doctrine.

Those points involve individuals or groups who are in difficulty like that guy up there is.

The one in "Last Match".

He's lost in the woods, in the dark, and down to his last match.

My guiding points are to try to avoid getting lost in the woods. Avoid getting down to that last match. And I try not to be so alone that these things happen in the first place.

I'm a loner by nature, but I'm not foolish. Good friends will get you through this life.

I've often wanted to drift from those friends over the sixteen years of discussion and argument, but we're still together, most of us. The irony is that I'm still here discussing and arguing with them while some of their group have strayed off, alone, into the woods.

But above the belief in friendship I try to adhere to, is the desire to pay that friendship forward. I don't do that well. I'm a pretty clumsy friend. But I try.

The people in Haiti have just gotten shoved into the deep woods. They long ago ran out of matches. There are a lot of friendly people trying to get to them and we know they won't find all the lost folks. I'm overworking this metaphor, but bear with me.

We all know the parables. We were all taught to be good do-bees, that a friend in need is a friend indeed.

And it gets real old, this helping others. It's a slog. Specially when the same people seem to need help again and again. But, honestly, in spite of all the cynicism, what else is there to do?

Change the channel to American Idol?

All this week an old song by the '60s rock group Rare Bird has been running through my head.

The song's title is "Sympathy" and the punchline is "And sympathy is what we need, my friend, because there's not enough love to go around."

We can scream and yell about whose fault it is that help is needed. Or we can help.

Someone else's curse can be a blessing of sorts. It shows us to be better off than that person. And it gives us a chance to reach out beyond our safety zones.

And in a lifetime we get plenty of chances to be both blessed and cursed.

A Bagette and Some Red Wine

Just a Hint of French

We spent the Christmas holiday on Cedar Key, where homes are built on the second floor. The first floor is left empty to minimize damage if and when tides come rushing in at the front of a hurricane.

There was no storm during our stay. Just a few days of blessed peace and quiet, and some retired snowbirds taking their winter residence far from Ontario, Quebec and other cold, dark places.

Speaking to such neighbors put me in a Frenchie sort of mood when I saw the woman above from "our" second-story porch. "Madame et la Petite" (A Ladie and the Little One).

All that was missing was the panier, the bread basket, on her bike. That would set the stage for a trip to town and the purchase of groceries for the evening meal. Something flavorful.

The dog would poke along, sniffing at all the usual spots and marking as many as time and fluid would allow, then run to catch up with Madame.

In town, Madame would select some choice cuts of meat and eye the butcher's thumb as he weighed them. That bagette, a bottle of wine and some fresh-cut flowers would round out the purchase.

The trip home would involve the usual sharp calls to the dog, who would chase the same cat, bark back at that same big spotted hound, and wander down the same trail she always does.

Madame might even use some of those rougher French phrases that slip out when la petite isn't as charming as she is at home.

Back at home, the evening meal would be prepared. The small house would fill with the aroma of things to come. The dog would curl up in the pool of fading sunlight at the base of the storm door. The wine would be airing out on the table by the new flowers in the vase.

The winter sun would set beyond the bayou across the street.

But, of course, that didn't happen. It was just a neighbor taking an afternoon ride.

Art is the spice that adds flavor to an ordinary meal.

A Little Color

Goes a Long Way

This entry is filed under Mattie Walks.

The girl does get bored with the same left-or-right decision to our walks on our one-street neighborhood. I try other sites to break up the daily grind. She likes the cemetery. I like the lake.

That's a view of the lake above. "Fall, Lake Hall". The lake is part of Maclay Gardens State Park, a former estate of wealthy New York snowbirds who wintered in Tallahassee while most grandees chose to roost on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. The estate was ceded to Florida and attracts many visitors during the camellia and azalea seasons. Locals enjoy the park all year around.

Mattie doesn't care as much for it as I do. The trails creep her out a bit. I think she's a suburban girl at heart. Then again, she may be getting scent of a bear or other threatening critter. What do I know?

Lake hall winds around, creating little coves here and there, and the shore is heavily wooded with the region's collection of pines, oaks, sweetgum and magnolia trees. A nice place to be during every season.

And the truth is that the scene above was one of a pretty hot summer. Everything about it is true to the moment except the color of the leaves indicating temperature and season.

The problem I have in seeing so many enticing moments and events in the nature of my environment is ... that those moments stack up. Getting to a painting in its time is difficult. So many impressions amass on the sketch pile that it's often winter before I finish summer paintings, spring before the fall art gets easel time, and so forth.

A counter-pressure comes from galleries asking for works denoting a current season. It's understandable, of course. Patrons are as susceptible to the seasons as I am.

I hadn't yet gotten to this Lake Hall painting and wanted to do it, so what the heck -- it became a fall painting. And the stripe of wind-whipped ripples on the water (which were there in summer) add a touch of chill to the air.

The original moment indicated a cooling breeze.

I'll catch up with other summer lake views soon because the temperature and the leaves are falling.