Confessions and Ideas

Field No. 2
Oil on canvas, 8x24

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

OK, confessions first.

In the middle of the night, when I am roaming the house, looking for sleep, I have come very, very close to ordering Sham Wow, a sponge that holds 12 times its weight in liquid.

When my arthritis is acting up, I find myself wondering how handicapped you have to be to get a handicapped tag for the car.

Prompted by television commercials, I have worried that I might have peripheral artery disease, chronic dry eye, irritable bowel syndrome, restless leg syndrome and an overactive bladder. I can barely wait to see what I worry about when I hit 60.

Here are some ideas: If I had a landscaping company, I would call it "Lawn Order."

If I had a crane company, well, "Ichabod Crane."

The world would be a better place if we had a device that helped locate car keys. You know, there's that button you can press on the base of the cordless phone that tells you where your husband has left the receiver? I need one of those for the car keys. Also, maybe there should be an alarm that sounds if you get too far from the car keys. (I have mislaid a set of car keys, and have torn the house apart looking for it).

Have I written all this before? It seems so familiar, but then, of course, these ideas have been kicking around in my head for years.

Autumn Blowing In

Autumn Blowing In
Oil on stretched canvas, 10x20

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

This wind, it's what they'd call "a freshening breeze" in another century. It came out of nowhere, and brought rain with it last night. Today, it's tearing leaves from the trees, and brushing autumn along in front of it.

I've always loved a windy day. There's excitement in it, in the rush of air, and scents, and the very chaos of possibility.

A couple months ago, I got a great book on Andrew Wyeth, for $2 at a library book sale. It's probably a $100 book, and weighs enough to make you remember that paper is, in fact, made out of wood.

I spent part of yesterday poring over Wyeth's work, and the marvelous writing by Richard Meryman, and thinking about my painting in light of Wyeth's. One thing Wyeth and I share is a fascination with landscapes that are about nothing, and that contain nothing. He had the skill and vision to play them down from there; it is my tendency to play them up. And that's fine. I don't want to be Wyeth, and never will be, but I love his low-color approaches, his astonishing attention to detail, his quiet and intense brooding. I exult in these landscapes of nothingness, finding life and glee and optimism, where he finds death and sorrow and that luscious range of browns and sepias and colors of the quiet soul.

If I don't want to be Wyeth, well, I'd be happy to be one-tenth as successful.

Of Ears and a Nose

Black Dirt, Looking South. Oil on stretched canvas, 16x20

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

As I stood beside the road, painting, I began to imagine that I could smell corn. The sweet, soft, milky smell filled my nose, swept into my lungs, pushed the sense of spring and summer out to my heart, and my fingers and my toes. But no, I thought. It is too early for corn. And, hard as I looked, I saw none.

When my mother was alive, she delighted in sweet corn. A couple times every summer, we'd have whole dinners of sweet corn and tomatoes. Mom would boil an absurd amount of corn, heap it on a platter, and we would slather the ears with butter and salt and pepper, and the cobs would pile up and we'd eat until we couldn't stuff in any more.

But quintessential Mom is this: Time and again, summer after summer, she would pull the car over beside a cornfield, jump out, sneak to the edge of a field and take a couple ears of corn. She'd get back in the car, and we would shuck and eat those ears, reveling in their raw sweetness.

I was finishing my second painting of the day yesterday when the farmhands began to leave the fields. First, two carloads of them. Then came a truck loaded with... crates of corn. My nose had not been wrong after all. The smell of raw, fresh corn trailed after the truck and made me smile, remembering.

Thanks for reading!