The Landscapes Of Our Lives

Often, as early in the morning as possible, I hoof up the slope above the house to a favorite spot in the woods. Up among the white pines and princess fern, there’s a metal bench where I can sit with my morning thoughts or just see what there is to see. It’s always different.  
I’m much higher than the house and can see only it’s roof line. Through the woods and our neighbors’ adjacent woods, the view drops steeply down to a road that’s out of view, and then further down to a fast-moving stream, and then straight up again to the next ridge line that, if you follow it, leads the eye out to the hazy blue Berkshire mountains.
The trees here are middle-aged and mixed species, the trunks at angles to each other, and the light - oh, the light!  It’s the thing I come up here for.  That and the different air quality at this higher level.
So this is what I look at.  These vertical, quiet friends. And the air-light and fragrant soil that is their home. Our home.

What do you look at a lot during your days?  Is there anything there that is precious to you?  Does its energy affect your energy? How does what’s precious affect the things you make, the way you spend your time?

I grew up in farm country in south central Pa.  And from the school bus, I watched the rows of corn go by, farm houses dwarfed by old maples, drainage streams that cut through pastures, and occasional wooded hillocks.
In high school I sometimes got off the bus a few miles from home to walk through a pasture, cross a stream, roll under an electric fence and travel the long rows of corn, the corn leaves rustling in conversation as I passed.  Here the light was often with thick humidity, and the air was decidedly of sweet cow manure.

Much later I spent a decade on Cape Cod where I built marginally productive soil on top of a “glacial dump”, the land that ran along the Cape’s ridge bone. Layering beach grasses and horse manure in rows on top of that thin soil, over some years, yielded a market garden in a clearing of a scrub oak and pitch pine barren.  And what I could grow, I could sell at the farmers’ markets there. Here the light reflected everywhere off the water that surrounded the Cape. Here we watched shooting stars pass overhead on clear, black nights. And here air smelled of brine-y decomposition and the spicy understory of the pine barren.

And still later we spent sixteen years in an old farm house in eastern NY.  It was here that I started to notice more detail of leaf form, visible soil structure and weather patterns, as I built a market garden to serve a farm stand.  Here I met Jack Frost on winter windows, saw hoar frost on the metal roof of the chicken coop, the colors in a flower’s face or a beetle’s back, and the “unisoned” flight of starlings, flashing black together, then platinum.

Sometimes I think we wear our landscapes like skin, and all our lives carry them with us.

Now in the studio, I ask my hand to do as it pleases, right?  I make a mark, then respond with another mark, and another, trying not to get in the way of the process that can get set up. This is the process that best yields what I so long for - a glimpse of energy between things or behind them, made visible. I don’t think it’s such a stretch to hope to see, with a smile of recognition, not a “memory” really, but a reconfigured sensation of a precious landscape, right there in oil paint.  

#71-2022 Oil on two wooden panels, currently unframed 12” x 24”

Thanks for joining me in this brand new year!
My very best to you all,
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