Landscapes of the Mind – Six Singular Experiences

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art, art analysis, art essay, color, creative process, inspiration, landscapes, Nature, Paintings

The Devil’s Bridge, St Gotthard Pass, JMW Turner, 1803-1804,

It’s all about the mind, of course. All experience filters through it, the outward and inner, nature and the art it inspires. But some paintings arrest the mind more than others and invite you to linger. To become part on one’s own mindscape, images we return to again and again to express the inexpressible. And that call upon us to articulate what it is that moves us so.

The one above by JWM Turner is one such painting that looms large in my mind. It’s the gold that captures me first, the light that dazzles. A feast for the eyes, the mind, before you ever enter the painting. And then, what depths! What flow. The water coursing down the chasm, the travelers flowing across the bridge, the airy clouds lifting us up. The dark shadows carrying us, like the two tiny birds, far before.

The drama of it all. The mystery. Like life itself. Dreamlike. So deep and wide and far away and dissolving in a moment. Yet for all of that, it matters. This matters. This moment, this painting. Something so deeply significant is happening here and even though we do not know what it is, it  matters.

Henri Manguin, The Parkway

Here, a very different landscape to enter. Again, what captures me first is the tangle of colors, the reds and blues, soft greens and sparkling golds. The deep shadow in the forefront with the mysterious woman sitting so quietly, turned away, inward, while the forest path winds past her, lost in the distance, and the trees loom over her, curving, lifting, a tangled torrent of upward movement. The glimpse of clear blue sky in the top right corner, a whiff of promise.

But the light, the light!  Filtering down through the trees, dappling the path, dazzling the daisies, and gilding the ground before her. The light that surrounds her and lifts the path out of darkness, that filters up through the tangled trees to the crisp blue promise overhead.

Paul Gauguin – Mata Moe

This one, for all its similarities, has a different feel. Again, it’s the colors that grab, that tantalize before we even begin to decipher what we are seeing. Not a tangle of colors like the last one, but great emphatic splashes! The mountains in the distance fairly shout, look at me! And the eye does not know where to go next, there’s so much to see! All my exclamation points make the same emphatic point as this painting.

We’re like a traveler in an exotic location. We don’t know what to look at, where to go first, so much calls us. The large birds lazily crossing our path, the man about his mysterious work, the path curving toward the women walking, the whimsical house, the dense forest, the palm tree leaning upward. So much movement, so much color, excites us. We are there, we are there, immersed in the moment. This is not a dream.

Children at the Beach by Maurice Prendergast

This one just makes me happy. Pure bliss is written all over it. The children at the center, enveloped by the sea and sky, dazzle the eye. Their playfulness, those splotches of light-hearted color, are mirrored in the dappled sky above, the dappled sea-shadows and reflections below. It’s as if they are floating in some aquatic space, cradled, cuddled.

Oh, I want to hold them forever! I could stay here all day watching. They make me so happy.

Van Gogh, The Sower

Here, so different from the others, the mood more mellow. Yet that golden sun, setting or rising, we know not which, like Turners golden mountain, commands the eye. I’m not just drawn toward it, I want to enter in, to rest there, in that roundness. I want to sink deep into it.

The rest is just framework. The dark tree leans toward it, the orange leaves a fitting crown. The man below, the sower, sprinkling seed-gifts in its wake. The solemn fields patiently awaiting its warm rays. I feel at peace here. Even with the dark-shadowed man silhouetted so softly before it. He’s on this way home. His long golden rest awaits.

‘Pelican Island’, 2006 – Peter Doig (b.1959)

When I enter here I find silence. No words. That is the painting’s most salient feature for me. The merging of sea and sky, the fairy-like bird and trees, the trailing leaves above, the blue boat below, are all dreamlike in the distance. All mere contrast. The mirage-like details that draw the mind downward into that deep warm pool, the stillness below. The stillness of no words.

Finding Our Place in the Family of Things

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Despair, inspiration, Mary Oliver, Nature, poem, poetry, Solace, Wild Geese

I often turn to the poetry of Mary Oliver when seeking solace, when trying to negotiate a path through the cares and sorrows of this world and its grace and beauty.

“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine,” she says, simply.

As if she and me and despair are old friends. As if despair, with all its sharp, broken edges is as common as grass, as remarkable as wild geese shrieking across the sky. Just another thing among the many that make up a life.

Not to be avoided. And not to let drown out the other voices that call to us, or whisper up from deep within.

Here’s one of my favorites.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things

October Trees, Falling Leaves, Bursts of Glory

Tags

art, Autumn, landscapes, Nature, October, trees

Larisa Aukon

October is my birth month. I’ve always had mixed feelings about that. Being born when the days are growing shorter, the nights colder, the leaves turning yellow and red in a last burst of glory before they drift away. Life coming to an end, hunkering down, readying itself for hibernation, for hiding beneath a blanket of snow. The melancholy of it all.

And yet that bright burst of glory, brief as it is! There’s nothing to compare to that. And nothing melancholy about such brilliant defiance. So, on the last day of the month, here’s to October trees, falling leaves, and bursts of glory.

Wolf Kahn

Tom Thomson, Autumn’s Garland

Erin Hanson

Egon Schiele

Matthew Wong

Claude Monet

Claude Monet

Wolf Kahn

Resting in the Grace of the World

Tags

Addiction, comfort, Family, grandparenting, greif, Nature, opioid crisis, personal, spirituality, Wendell Berry

“Crystal Light” by Erin Hanson

“When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” ~ Wendell Berry

I have not lain down where the wood drake rests, but I am coming to find a kind of grace in letting loose, more than letting go, in pressing steadily forward without attachment to the outcome, in a kind of letting be, come what may.

My granddaughter came to live with me at the beginning of summer and she is with me still, having started first grade at a nearby school in which I enrolled her. I am petitioning to become her legal guardian. This comes with the blessing of my son, but not the child’s mother, who will fight this. Both are struggling with addiction, both victims of this opioid crisis.

I grieve for my son and my heart breaks for the mother, even as I fear for my granddaughter. Sometimes it seems overwhelming.

Then I take a deep breath and do what must be done, regardless the outcome.

I move toward “the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief.”

I rest in “the presence of still water,” and feel “the day-blind stars waiting with their light.”

I cannot say I “am free.”

But I do feel the grace of the world, and love of God, surrounding me and mine. I lean on that, and it comforts me.

On a Quick Walk to the Mailbox

Tags

inspiration, life, Nature, photography, Spring

After so much rain this year on the central coast of California, the hillsides around our home are green and lush. The wildflowers are beginning to pop out in our neighborhood and the cherry trees are in full bloom.  Here are just a few quick photos from a recent walk to our mailbox.

Poem & Paintings, A Song

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art, inspiration, John Muir, Nature, Paintings, poetry

Edvard Munch

The sun does not shine on us
but in us.

The rivers flow not past,
but through us,
thrilling, tingling,
vibrating every fiber and cell
of the substance of our bodies,
making them glide and sing.

Wassily Kandinsky

The trees wave

Gertrude Fiske

and the flowers bloom
in our bodies as well as our souls,

Joaquin Sorolla

and every bird song,
wind song,

Edward Robert Hughes

and tremendous storm song

Edward Dulac

of the rocks in the heart of
the mountains

JMW Turner

is our song,
our very own,

Joaquin Sorolla

and sings our love.
–John Muir

Three to Share: Beauty, Art, Place

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art, Blogging, blogs, inspiration, Nature, photography, quotations

I love discovering new blogs that inspire me and want to share three, among many, that I discovered this past year.

The Beauty We Love

I turn to this one often, for the captivating images as well as the inspiring quotations. Two I enjoyed most recently were by John Muir, the first enticing us to saunter reverently rather than “hike” when we are out among nature. He tells us how the word “saunter” comes from pilgrims who are traveling through France  ‘A la sainte terre’, or  ‘To the Holy Land.’ Another reminds us that we are kin to everything

When we try to pick out anything by itself,

we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell,

 and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals

 as friendly fellow mountaineers.

Recently I featured another post I loved in Seeing the Self in What We Love.

Then there was Wild Elegance, which speaks to why I named this blog Living on the Edge of the Wild. John O’Donohue from The Invisible Embrace, Beauty writes:

When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse the potential holiness of our neglected wildness.  As humans, citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief.  We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness.  What we now call ‘being wild’ is often misshapen, destructive and violent.  The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us.

The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul, the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation of the lonesome that is not lonely.  Our fear of our own wildness derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless – it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity.  The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one, elegant and seamless.

And moreover:

Beauty invites us towards profound elegance of soul.  It reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us.  We are no longer trapped in mental frames of self-reduction or self-denunciation.

Instead, we feel the desire to celebrate, to give ourselves over to the dance of joy and delight.   The overwhelming beauty which is God pervades the texture of our soul, transforming all smallness, limitation and self-division.  The mystics speak of the excitement of such unity.  This is how Marguerite Porete describes it:

 ‘Such a Soul, says Love swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity.  And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself.  She swims and flows in Joy… for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.’

The Eclectic Light Company – Paintings

For a stroll through art history and a survey of some of the major and minor artists through the ages, I love to visit this site, which always inspires and enlightens.

The painting that headlines this post is from his site by a lesser known artist, or at least new to me, Maria Fortuny’s painting of Portici Beach in Spain.

The best of his 2018 paintings and articles can be found at this link. It’s a two-parter, so don’t miss this one as well.

For a preview of what he’ll be covering this your, make sure you check out this link.

The Depth of Now

This blog satisfies my longing for travel, art, photography, soulful writing, and that fearsome urge to trust oneself in exploring the unknown. Here a young woman tells about uprooting herself to move to a new city, Istanbul, which she explores through photography and storytelling.

In her favorite posts of 2018 you can taste some of the many flavors she has to offer: joyful wisdom, finding home, writing about place, Istanbul street art, and more.

I also loved her interview with photographer John Wreford. She’s a wonderful photographer herself, and I think that’s how I met her, at a cemetery in Prague.

But where I fell in love with her blog was when I read Home is Where the Heart Is,  where she converses with a stranger she meets in a medieval courtyard and writes:

We talked about how everything at its core is fluid and he talked to me about the Tao Te Ching.

And suddenly we had left the party and were slowly meandering down the road of a deep conversation. And by deep, I mean that reality started to lose its edges as we both came to an agreement on certain points other than what is conventionally accepted.

I admitted to him that I had lived in so many places that I no longer could relate to home being somewhere outside myself. That secretly I was building my home within – letting go of the stuff of this world and instead focusing on the things that I can take with me when I die – the wisdom and knowledge of the world that may (or may not) serve me in the next life.

You see, I don’t believe that we die because what is there to die into? Everything is alive and remains alive in one form or another.

And something tells me that I have lived many lives because from time to time I remember something unusual. I will have a dream that will take me to another place so real that I must have been there before.

I hope you will fall in love with these blogs I discovered this past year as I have. And, please, share some of the favorites sites you’ve discovered with me too in the comments below.

Pied Beauty, Poem & Paintings

Tags

art, artists, beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins, inspiration, music, Nature, Paintings, Pied Beauty, poetry

Wassily Kandinsky, Waterfall II

Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

What is it about “dappled” things that so dazzles us?

I ran across this poem, a favorite of mine, not long ago, and was reminded once again of how much nature inspires and excites us. Painters as well as poets have been praising that pied beauty through their artwork down the ages.

A few of my favorite paintings praising dappled things follows.

Vincent Van Gogh

John Singer Sargeant

John Singer Sargeant

John Singer Sargeant

John Singer Sargeant

Gertrude Fiske

Anne Redpath

Rick Stevens, Immersed

Gustav Klimt

New Paintings, the Folding Hills of California

Tags

art, California, inspiration, Nature, oil pastel, painting, watercolor

I’ve long loved the way the rolling hills along the coast of California fold together and overlap, the sensuality of that “hot rise and cool dip.”  I’ve tried to capture a bit of that fascination in some of my poetry: Hot Hills in Summer Heat, and Playing with Light, loving the way the light falls upon those folds so that “the hills unwind, one at a time, to dance before us all.”

Lately I’ve been trying to capture some of that in a few paintings, some inspired by the work of other artists and some from my own photographs. I’m not wholly satisfied with any of them, but something of what I’m trying to capture comes through.

This first is watercolor and oil pastel, and even a brush of soft chalk pastel in the sea and highlighting the closest hill. This was inspired by a Dale Laitinen painting of the coastline along Highway 1 near our home called.

The one above and below were inspired by a local and much-loved artist Erin Hanson who works mostly in oil. My painting above is again oil pastel and watercolor on Arches cold press paper, which has much more texture than the smoother hot press Fabriano paper used in the other oil pastel paintings in this post.

This one was also inspired by Hanson which I painted some time ago in acrylic. I’ve only created three works in acrylic so far, but for some reason I feel intimidated by it. I’m not sure why.  The three I painted out came out well enough. Of course, none of these inspired by other artists come even close to the quality of the original works. But I learn so much each time I try.

This one and the one below are from my own photographs taken of the hillsides on my walks around our neighborhood. They come closer to those “folding hills” I wrote about earlier, “the hot rise and cool dip” in my poems. Both are oil pastel and watercolor on hot press paper.

In this last one I wanted to see what the hills would look like stripped down and closer. I’m not sure which version I like best. The mattings help a lot to set off the works. Someday I will learn to photograph my paintings better. That might help too (smile.)

Thank you for bearing with me as I try to learn this craft and share my efforts. It’s a fascinating pastime.

[Note: I created this post before the latest round of fires set these hills ablaze north and south of where we live. My heart goes out to all who have lost their lives and homes, and seen their communities destroyed, including the wildlife that inhabits these hills and forests.]

 

 

“Something in This Sleeping Earth” – Two by Whyte, One by Fiske

Tags

art, Blogging, David Whyte, Earth, Gertrude Fiske, inspiration, Nature, poem, poetry, spirituality

Gertrude Fiske, American Impressionist

All My Body Calls

All my body calls
for something in this sleeping
earth
we call the spirit.

But how
from lifted arms
where stars run through fingers
and the night is like sand
do I breathe a fragrance of its wisdom
do I call its name
or listen to the drops
that trickle down to earth
and hear
life being given
not only through the moving hands of the forest
but through the hand that reaches in
the dark unmoving regions of the chest
and uncovers slowly
the enormous
indistinct
shape of the ocean.

by David Whyte

Fallen in Love

That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.

by David Whyte

What struck me in the poems and the painting is that “something in this sleeping earth” that we are only half-awake to, what Whyte calls “spirit.” I see that spirit clearly in the painting by Friske, the two women immersed in the forest, in that yellow-green light, in those parting branches, those “moving hands.”

And in the second poem, that sense that there’s nothing to wait for, it’s all out here in the open, “speaking out loud in the clear air,”  as solid and humble and astonishing as the ground beneath our bare feet.

In another poem, Whyte writes:

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

What are we waiting for? Especially in these trying times.

All times are trying. All lives are trying. We have to grasp, right here, right now, despite all that, what’s waiting half-hidden all around us this very moment.

Many thanks to The Beauty We Love where I found these poems, and to The Uncarved Blog who shared two wondrous poems by Stephen Levine and pointed me toward this site. It’s one of the things I love about blogging, finding these hidden treasures that speak so eloquently to things I feel and cannot say.