Quick Impressions

As opposed to slow impressions, I suppose. Today was warmer than yesterday to wander about in the snow. The drawing is on the approach to the colonnade. I was the first one through the colonnade yesterday. It felt strange leaving footprints. The view of the bridge is from the foot bridge. It probably should be bigger. Maybe an oil. I have a couple slow impressions in the hopper.

Snow and No Snow

The arrival of snow provides the opportunity to do more "graphical" kinds of things, as the above drawing. The painting shows the canal with a little ice on the edge from a few days ago.

River Drive

There's River Road and River Drive and Rivera Avenue. These are views on River Drive, but not today, because it's snowing.

Third River's Edge

Third River's Edge sounds like the name of a bank, not a river bank. I guess one can get away with a lot more in a black and white charcoal drawing. Color is less forgiving.

Two River Edges

Here are two paintings, same scenes as previous drawings. As you might guess, I am not working today, only painting! These are pastel on Wallis paper prepped with acrylic washes.

Pony at River's Edge

There has to be a pony in here somewhere. I may try to tackle all three as paintings. These images are from this afternoon at the river's edge on the New Jersey side.

Searching

The bottom is a 9x12 colonnade oil that I worked on a few days ago. The above is an 8x10 canal charcoal. I usually don't add a figure. Both images pull you in. I probably will do a few more drawings to find another painting.

River Flotsam

This is the pastel version of the river flotsam that has collected on the New Jersey side under the Washington Crossing Bridge on the Delaware River. The boat section that is visible in the upper right is now no longer there since the water is going down releasing some objects to float downriver.

Flotsam

The bottom image is a pastel view up the Delaware River at the end of the street. The top view is a drawing view of the trash collected by the river under the Washington Crossing Bridge. The river has some ice in it. I hope to do a painting of the drawing's view tomorrow.

Two Landscapes

These two landscapes are different, and also similar. I am trying to work at making marks, suggestive marks. It was Richard Schmid who wrote that it's a mistake "Trying to paint things instead of color shapes." The bottom is an oil, and the top a pastel on acrylic wash.

Listening Trees

Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek writes, "I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment...I live with trees. Trees are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and, in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach...they abide."

Later she asks, "What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?"

Modest Weekend

Only a small corn field without corn, and a bush without leaves this weekend.

Stream Side

Lately, I have been reading a lot about Winslow Homer. Of course, I tend to favor his late paintings which are more pure landscapes (or seascapes) without all those people. He did preparatory drawings, sometimes years earlier than the paintings that followed, even though he liked to give the impression that everything he did was "plein-air". His drawings are quite remarkable. I hope to say more about Homer in future posts.

The above drawing is from the same location as the previous "weekend drawings".

Silver Maple Trunks

Early in the morning on my daily walk I continue to visit the colonnade, but I want to do some other images. Last week I sat outside and drew these silver maple trunks in charcoal. This is an 8x10 pastel on uart paper.

Colonnade in the Afternoon

This is the larger colonnade, a 9x12 pastel.

Colonnade Study

Have no fear! This is a study for a larger pastel that will take me a couple of days to complete. I ran up into the woods when the sun broke through the clouds yesterday to get a late afternoon glimpse of the colonnade. The sun streamed directly into the opening just like Stonehenge. It's a 7 1/2 x 10 image with pastel over acrylic on watercolor paper.

Weekend Drawings

Even if I am away from the studio, which I was this weekend, I still carry my bag of stix and charcoal. So, when I had a chance, I wandered off and made four drawings over two days, here presented in the order that I made them.

Last Colonnade

This will be the last colonnade for a while. The above painting is one of last week's oils, and the higher painting is a pastel on Wallis paper with some acrylic wash applied beforehand. It's a view from this morning with sun unlike last week.

Last Fowles quote: " Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse. It is quintessentially 'wild'...unphilosophical, irrational, uncontrollable, incalculable. In fact it corresponds very closely--despite our endless efforts to 'garden', to invent disciplining social and intellectual systems--with wild nature."

The colonnade represents an old attempt to subdue and train the 'wild', but it has fallen into neglect, and wild nature has taken it over. I think I need to be wilder in my oils.

Luce Road Bend and Sojourners with Gifts

The first painting is from the colonnade. The top pastel is the bend in the road that leads up to the farm and the mountain, the entry point to a remarkable place.

I want to give Fowles a rest. I recently read another interesting book however, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. Here's a quote that grabbed me:

"We are sojourners with our gifts, not their owners; even our creations--especially our creations--do not belong to us. As Gary Snyder says, "You get a good poem and you don't know where it came from. 'Did I say that?' And so all you feel is: you feel humility and you feel gratitude. Spiritually, you can't be much poorer than gifted."

Also from the Hyde book, I learned that Ezra Pound wrote a short poem titled "The Tree". Its first line is, "I stood still and was a tree amid the wood".