Nooksack Falls painted from memory / The sight of trees / The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

"... The marvels of technology did nothing to impress the Arabs.  They wept, however, at the sight of trees.  These Arab bedouins had never seen a waterfall, a river, a rose.  The only natural world they had ever known was flagrantly stingy with its gifts.  Years of desert attentiveness had trained them to expect only shortfall and subtlety.  Back home, where water was precious, they might walk for days on end in search of a tiny spring, maybe a handful of palms.  So when they stood in a high alpine meadow beside an enormous waterfall in the French Alps, its water roaring out of the mountain in a huge braided column, they had no way of comprehending such lavishness.

'They stood in silence.  Mute, solemn ... gazing at the unfolding of a ceremonial mystery.  That which came roaring out of the belly of the mountain was life itself, was the life-blood of man.  The flow of a single second would have resuscitated whole caravans that, mad with thirst, had pressed on into the eternity of salt lakes and mirages.  Here God was manifesting Himself:  It would not do to turn one's back on Him.' 

(am's note:  This is a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars, pp. 138-144, used by Belden C. Lane as he writes about Saint-Exupery's North African desert reflections)

They refused to leave, adamantly declaring to their French guide that honor required their waiting ... waiting for the end.  Knowing the water could not last much longer, they awaited the moment "when God would grow weary of His madness," when this wild extravagance would suddenly and finally exhaust itself.  Resolutely, they stood their ground.  "But, you see," the guide at last proclaimed, "this water has been running here for a thousand years!"

Having known the depths of desert thirst, these men could scarcely fathom a surging torrent of water, rushing forever from the rock.  Nothing had prepared them for it -- other than desire itself.  Their hearts set aflame by longing, they had learned through the years an indifference to everything less than love.  Apatheia had taught them that purity of heart is to will one thing.  Hence, they could fiercely say no to locomotives and Gallic conquerors of the sky.  But they must stand in silent awe before a raging cataract, beholding in wet-eyed wonder the unwearying madness of their God."

Perhaps this is where we all eventually stand, held attentive by what we cannot understand but vehemently love.  The heart trained in poverty lives perpetually in hope of wonder.

(transcribed from pages 203 and 204 of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes:  Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, by Belden C. Lane, 1998)

My painting from 2007 in gouache and watercolor is "Nooksack Falls Painted From Memory."  If I get in my car and drive east toward the Cascade Mountains for one hour, I can visit Nooksack Falls.  For some reason, it is rare for me to be drawn toward the mountains.  My instinct is usually to go in the direction of the Pacific Ocean, which to me is a fierce desert-like landscape which has given me solace for much of my life.

Undefeated Then And Undefeated Now

"52nd Month: Speaking Without Words About Holy Contradictions," painted by am in gouache and watercolor in June of 1989.  The numbers reflect the years of my life up to that point, beginning with my birth year.  As I was painting, I was meditating on the fact that there had been war throughout my 40 years of life.  Coincidentally, 1989 was the year the South Dakota state legislature passed a bill proclaiming 1990 as the "Year of Reconciliation" between the state's American Indian and White citizens.

Some of you have seen this painting before in different contexts.  As I was thinking about the events at Standing Rock, the image appeared in my mind again.

Bob Dylan / Painted from memory and from photographs

In a beginning painting class in the early 1980s, I painted an image of Bob Dylan in watercolor.  During the 1980s, I often used photos of Bob Dylan as a starting point for drawings and paintings.

Bob Dylan is 75 years old today.  Happy Birthday, Bob!  Thank you!

ADDENDUM:  Just for fun, here are some songs collected by Bob about "Friends and Neighbors":



ADDENDUM:

Speaking Without Words

Calendar Series: 52nd Month / Speaking Without Words About Holy Contradictions (painted by am in 1989)

Calligraphy by Thích Nhất Hạnh (Plum Village, France)

November 15:  Addendum

"Just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful and imaginative after a disaster, we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting."
 - Rebecca Solnit

Beloved Person in Bird Costume Crossing the Night River

From the Calendar Series, "Beloved Person in Bird Costume Crossing the Night River" -- a gouache and watercolor painting from the 1980s by am.

Watch the river flow, here and here. Thank you to Candy for the inspiration for this post.

Remembering fearless dreams

When I was in my 30s, I had a recurring dream of running at top speed from the top of one building to another in an unknown large city, performing astounding acrobatic feats. Someone was chasing me, but I knew they could never catch me. I was fearless.  What a revelation to see my younger dreamself in these young men flying through the air with such grace and landing on their feet with no loss of momentum.

Many thanks to Doonesbury's Featured Videos for another splendid offering!

That gouache and watercolor painting I did in the late 1980s is "Beloved Person in Bird Costume Crossing the Night River." Here is another one from those years.

Something of that old fearlessness is coming back to me in my 66th year. It comes and goes.

"How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness?"
(Bob Dylan)

For the child that cries when innocence dies

"Working with Intuition and Three Angels," gouache and watercolor, painted by am in 1992



Suddenly, inexplicably, I'm wondering if I still can get a ticket to see Bob Dylan at the Paramount in Seattle on Sunday, October 19.

Yep. There are still tickets left. I'll be sitting a little bit closer to where my seat was for the first Bob Dylan concert I saw at the Paramount Theater in the early 1980s -- up near the roof in the second to the last row.

Until just now, I had decided not to go to another Bob Dylan concert. A baffling process. Working with intuition and three angels. As my father used to say, "We'll see what we will see."

This is what I wanted to post before I began this post:

"The universe came into being with us together; with us, all things are one."
(Chuang-Tzu)

Painting

Survival Prayer / Talking About Raven

"Survival Prayer"

Recently I discovered and bought a copy of this splendid film directed by Benjamin Greené.  I'm not sure, but my guess is that he grew up here in Bellingham, Washington.

From his website:

"Benjamin Greené studied Neuroscience at Oberlin College and co-directed a documentary about the struggle for shelter and community in post-Katrina New Orleans.  After college, he spent two years in a brain-imaging laboratory before leaving academia to pursue filmmaking.  He went on to co-direct Bury Me in Redwood Country about the tallest and largest trees on the planet.  Survival Prayer is his solo directorial debut.  Benjamin is a 2012 graduate of Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School and an IFP Fellow participating in the Independent Filmmaker Labs.  He loves the process of turning ideas into films, leaning into the light, actualizing dreams."

(Gouache and watercolor, "Spectrum Series:  Green," painted in spring of 2007 by am)

Remembering My Valentine

(Painted from memory in gouache and watercolor by am in 2002)

Work in progress / artists' studios / winter birds / wanting to work

Artists' studios

When I looked out a little while ago this morning, I thought I saw a person with a brown corduroy jacket and yellow hat standing at the edge of Scudder Pond.  I thought I could see the figure moving.  When I got my binoculars out, I saw that what I had thought was a person's head was the few remaining bright yellow leaves on a small tree, and that the brown corduroy jacket was the tree's dark wet branches and trunk.  The blurred photo only gives a general idea of what I saw.  As I look out right now without binoculars, it stills looks to me as if a tall thin contemplative man is standing there on the trail.

The gouache and watercolor painting up at the top of this post is something I'm working on.  It's something about a dialogue at the ocean at night.  I think I like it better transformed by my computer into a black and white image.  I began working on it more than a week ago, while listening to music from my past, organized in chronological order beginning with music I heard when I was 10 years old or younger:

This week I visited the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham where I saw a traveling exhibit of California Impressionist paintings.  I was drawn to the landscapes of places familiar to me but much changed since they were painted so many years ago before California was so densely populated. The images below are of the California my Minnesota-born parents moved to in the late 1930s and early 1940s and that my father's father traveled through as a young man from Minnesota in the early 1900s. As far as I know, my grandfather only made that one visit to California and the West Coast, living the rest of his life in Minnesota, although he did visit relatives in Norway in his later years.

Arroyo Seco Bridge in 1912:

Arroyo Seco Bridge in recent time:

Today here in Whatcom County there is snow in the foothills to the east.  Here's the view from the porch this morning.  You can hear the Chickadees and Red-winged blackbirds singing:

"I definitely look for things to inspire me or to get me wanting to do work.  It doesn't come all that naturally.  The thing that's helped me the most has been figuring out when I could work best.  This thing about working best in the morning with nobody around, I figured out a long time ago.  If it weren't for that I probably wouldn't get half as much done."

(Dale Chihuly)

As I walk in good company

"A sense of Mystery can take us beyond disappointment and judgment to a place of expectancy. It opens in us an attitude of listening and respect. If everyone has in them the dimension of the unknown, possibility is present at all times. . . Knowing this enables us to listen to life from the place in us that is Mystery also. Mystery requires that we relinquish an endless search for answers and become willing to not understand. . . Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years, I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company."

~ from MY GRANDFATHER'S BLESSINGS, by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

That's the kind of medical doctor I will listen to.

("Beloved," gouache and watercolor by am from the late 1980s or early 1990s, my late 30s or early 40s. The words in the painting are a poem I wrote when I was 17 years old, in December of 1966)

CONVERSATION

For the last three days, I've been able to sit down at my painting table for short periods of time late in the day to do more work on a small watercolor block painting I started in May of 2007 but didn't finish. The last painting in that series I started in early March of 2007 is here.

Although I did a series of "trackpad drawings" in December 2007 and January 2008, this is the first time I have used my gouache and watercolor paints since May of 2007. Above is a detail of the still-unfinished painting tentatively titled "Conversation Between a Blue and Green Place and the Sunrise." It didn't have a working title until yesterday. Holding a brush in my hand and mixing paint with water and applying the paint to the paper on a watercolor block feels good.























My sister who lives on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi asked me if I could identify this large bird. I can't.

On Wednesday, after talking with my next-door neighbor who had also seen hummingbirds on her porch, I put my hummingbird feeder up. Yesterday I saw a single hummingbird on two occasions. This morning the surface of the pond is frozen again. but the bulbs on my porch are a little more above ground each day.

STAND UNDER THE OAK

"They walked softly here. So will the others, the 

ones I seek.

The only way I can think to find them, the only 

archaeology that might be practical, is as follows:

You take your child or grandchild in your arms, or

borrow a young baby, not a year old yet, and go 

down into the wild oats in the field below the barn.

Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill,

facing the creek. Stand quietly. Perhaps the baby

will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to

somebody there, somebody from home."

                  

                 Towards an Archaeology of the Future

(page 114, WAY OF THE WATER'S GOING:  IMAGES OF THE

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA COASTAL RANGE, with 

photographs by Ernest Waugh and Alan Nicholson

and text from Ursula K. Le Guin's ALWAYS COMING HOME)

("Person with Questions," gouache and watercolor on 

Arches watercolor paper, painted by am in the early 1980s)

Thank you to all who continue to visit NEW MORNING 

IN THE NORTH COUNTRY. I am grateful for your

presence.

HIRED

It's a black and white and grey morning as the summer solstice approaches.

This is the first morning since RTN died that I have had some of my usual energy again. Last night I dreamed that I was hired to do pencil drawings of objects that were found buried in sand. I was working alongside a man who is the same age I am. His drawings were very good, and he gave me encouragement. The first object I found in the sand was a small black plastic toy horse from my Roy Roger's Ranch set, which I given as a child and which was one of my favorite toys.

With a little more Google searching this morning, I found this and this, too.

Hello COWBOY in the sand?

Maybe the dream is the result of having carefully looked through BOB DYLAN: THE DRAWN BLANK SERIES yesterday morning. The drawn-and-then-painted images remind me how much I love working with gouache and watercolor. I liked Bob Dylan's drawings when I first saw them in his first book of lyrics in the 1970s and then again in 1994 in DRAWN BLANK. I like the way Bob Dylan has added vivid color to the drawings he made from 1989 to 1991 or 1992, some of which were drawn in New Orleans. His drawings and paintings speak to me. They say, "She's got everything she needs, she's an artist."

Or may it was a result of having found this by way of a link at RConversation, the blogger who first inspired me to create a blog of my own.

NOT FAR FROM HOME

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
- Robinson Jeffers

Click here for the inspiration.

SAILING DOWN MY GOLDEN RIVER

Sailing down my golden river,
Sun and water all my own,
Yet I was never alone.
Sun and water, old life givers,
I'll have them where e'er I roam,
And I was not far from home.
Sunlight glancing on the water,
Life and death are all my own,
Yet I was never alone.
Life to raise my sons and daughters,
Golden sparkles in the foam,
And I was not far from home.
Sailing down this winding highway,
Travelers from near and far,
Yet I was never alone.
Exploring all the little by-ways,
Sighting all the distant stars,
And I was not far from home.

Words & music by Pete Seeger, 1971

("Calendar Series: 24th Month / Virgin Forest, Golden River and Seedings," by Old Girl Of The North Country, painted in gouache and watercolor in 1987)

MAY YOUR HEART ALWAYS BE JOYFUL

May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
(from "Forever Young," Bob Dylan, 1974)

(Gouache and watercolor painting by Old Girl Of The North Country, 2002)

A PLACE TO DRAW / A PLACE TO PAINT

(1/2 hour drawing, 5:00 to 5:30 a.m. -- 6B pencil on heavy weight, medium tooth surface, 9 x 12 Canson drawing pad, while listening to "Chants of India," which plays for approximately 1 hour and is a work of love by Ravi Shankar and George Harrison)

















"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it
most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it,
loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image." ~ Joan
Didion

(Gouache and watercolor painting titled, "Calendar Series: 42nd Month / Gifts Of Love From Imaginary Brothers," painted by Old Girl Of The North Country in 1989)

I've been enjoying reading Loren Webster's recent posts on the Tao.

DESIRE / GIFTS

Never relinquish the fiery sadness called desire
(Basho He's young and on fire Full of hope and desire In a world that's been raped, raped and defiled If I fall along the way And can't see another day Lord, protect my child (Bob Dylan, 1983, from "Lord Protect My Child"
See gifts (post from November 16).

(Gouache and watercolor on Arches watercolor paper, painted by Old Girl Of the North Country in 1999)

STARRY MESSENGER

"In a world illuminated only by fire, Galileo described in detail the surface of the Moon, which we now know is 238, 857 miles away. His Sidereal Messenger, also translated as Starry Messenger, was the first-ever treatise to detail astronomical observations made through a telescope."

(quote from the The Teaching Company's introduction to The Sidereal Messenger, written by Galileo in 1610 )

A treatise by Galileo came to me via email recently. I put it aside, meaning to read it when I had some time. When I finally read the treatise a few days ago, I felt as if I were reading someone's blog entry because, in translation, the tone is somewhat conversational, like a letter. Galileo's voice and times came alive for me. It's a verbal telescope into the time when the telescope was first invented. I like what I am guessing are his drawings and a diagram of a telescope.

Imagine how bright the moon, planets and stars were in 1610!

Coastal Northern California in Mendocino county just north of the Gualala River, between 1973 and 1994, is a place where I was able to see the vast night sky as it appears only when one is far removed from large metropolitan areas and their artificial lights.

(the above image, THE BLACK AND WHITE SERIES: INDEPENDENT CHILD / HIS FIRST WORD WAS "LIGHT," was created by am in 2005 on Arches watercolor paper, using Payne's Grey (watercolor) and Permanent White (gouache). The moon and planets are from drawings my mother made as she looked out over the ocean and saw the Moon, Jupiter, Mars and Venus on June 14, 1991)