Loss and absence, art and nature

 

From Celia Paul: Self-Portrait (Jonathan Cape, London 2019, p.152)

  

 

"A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself." May Sarton

 

"[W]hen I look at this painting, even in reproduction, even in a black-and-white reproduction, it inspires in me an almost inexpressible tenderness that is close to pain [...] But again, why do I feel like weeping over a glass of water standing near a coffeepot? A real pot and glass of water would never have this effect on me, unless perhaps these objects had belonged to a beloved person who had died [...]

Chardin's body has left its mark on the canvas, and even though for many viewers that imprint may be subliminal, it is felt - the simpler the subject matter, the more opulent the human presence." 

Hustvedt, Siri: Mysteries of the Rectangle. Essays on Painting, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2005, pp.35f.

 

 

Knits, reads, paints

 

|  Knitting cushion covers in two-purl-two-knit squares and washcloths with leftover yarn from my jumper (bamboo washcloth pattern by John's cousin Lisa. My sister also makes her own washcloths) - I love spotting and noting random beautiful colour combinations, such as this one in my knitting basket: sage green, mint, magenta and silver grey.

|  This is not my current reading list (I am always late taking photos, and I already posted this on Instagram), but some highlights from last year, though not all recent publications. I am trying to remind myself to incorporate what I learnt from James Nestor's Breath (especially taping my mouth at night and doing coherent breathing: inhale for 5.5 seconds, exhale for 5.5 seconds), Glennon Doyle (stop caring what other people think, for example) and of course Pema Chödrön's wisdom. I read so many self-help books, and while I often take notes, once the books are back on a shelf, it is easy to forget the aha moments.

|  Working on a portrait of John: I am taking a lot of photos along the way, as he has given me permission to use this as an example in the online classes I am teaching, and I might add the work-in-progress shots to my website, if I ever revive the art blog I sporadically update on there (I am thinking of merging it with this one). The above photo is cropped; the painting is portrait format and will include seaweed, flowers and a bee when it is finished, symbols of John's love of nature, gardening and the sea and his new passion beekeeping.

In the studio

 

 

Just a few glimpses of my studio/office (a spare room in our house), where I am spending even more time now that I am also teaching remotely:

 1  |  I have four of these bamboo picture ledges in two rows on one wall, with finished canvases and paintings that are drying. On the wall opposite I put this one up behind my desk to keep pencils, pens, small brushes and other supplies I use frequently within reach, but where they don't clutter up my desk. This is currently the backdrop for the majority of my video calls and classes.

2  |  One of these skinny drawers (which are great for storing work on paper) holds an antique letterpress tray I got John as a gift, with the type pieces he had bought. We use these to make cards and similar and are going to create the text for our next picture book with them. The plan is to get a glass lid made for the tray and put it on a frame with legs, so it can be used as a side table, but for now it is stored away in this drawer.

3  |  I have a couple of desk easels for smaller canvases and one standing easel. I try to paint standing at the large easel as much as possible, and the desk easels are great for displaying work-in-progress, as I tend to have several paintings on the go at any one time and like being able to have them all in view.

4  |  For oil paintings I mainly use water-mixable oils, for environmental reasons and so I don't have to breathe in turpentine fumes and other toxic solvents. Cleaning up is much easier with these, too. I bought a Dyson purifying fan heater (with a cooling function and a detailed analysis of potential pollutants) a few months ago, as I was worried about the air quality in the room, but it tells me everything is in the green range, so that is reassuring. We also had the house tested for radon after I was diagnosed with lung cancer as a young non-smoker. I try not to worry too much about all the external factors that may contribute to cancer, and some, such as electromagnetic radiation, are beyond my control to a large extent, but it gives me peace of mind to have these tests done. 

5  |  Marion Milner's books have their own shelf (most of my art books are kept in this room). I have started using my ink pen (not pictured) and bottled ink more again. The beautiful glass pen was a present from my aunt - I had kept it at my mum's house for years and finally took it with me after my last visit. 

6. We have plants in every room of the house and I am trying to keep these two happy. The vegetation in the self-portrait is a field with thistles close to my childhood home in Germany.

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The window is to the right of my desk and I can see a large part of the garden, including our three new hens and one of our bird feeders. There is a white horse in the field across the road, which offers some consolation in the wake of the departure of 'our' beloved donkeys that used to come to the wall in our back garden. They must have been moved to a different field, as that land was sold recently. We miss them a lot.

I have rituals around working from home that I have been using for years to mark some sort of division between work and home life (though the lines are blurred), but now they have taken on extra significance. At the moment I am recording videos for some of my classes, and I plan my outfits, jewellery and nail polish for those, whereas on days nobody will see me I put on my large painting jumper or apron (I am looking into sustainable boiler suits and dungarees for more coverage, even though I am not that messy a painter, but I still manage to get stains on unlikely areas of my clothes).

In any case I attempt to generate a 'going to work' feeling by getting ready as if I were leaving the house. This also involves a few morning routine clichés such as meditation, a yoga sequence, making celery juice and writing my morning pages. I air the room for a few minutes and clap to clear stagnant energy, and I mix essential oils for the diffuser that are stimulating and help with concentration or create an uplifting atmosphere, so a lot of peppermint, rosemary, clary sage, geranium, lemon, orange and lemongrass. There are endless mugs of (mostly herbal) tea and some of them get spoiled by accidentally dipping my brush in them, but I try not to eat in this room (as I want to eat mindfully - nothing to do with weight control; I am trying to put on weight!), though snacks will find their way in here.

I have my laughing Buddha on a bookshelf to the left of my desk and a stuffed elephant my younger sister made for me on my desk for a similar reason (or up on a shelf when I am recording videos for children and the elephant represents my audience - this was a tip we were given) - it keeps me in touch with my inner child and the playful side of life and is a reminder not to take anything too seriously.

Portraits

I have been painting and drawing a lot of people and animals, especially portraits of family and friends. If anyone is interested, I posted some work-in-progress photos of two of the paintings above on my long-neglected art blog (though the plan is to merge the two blogs in an effort to simplify). At one point I had all my nephews keeping me company in the studio, albeit in 2-D!

While I sometimes have people sit for me, the examples shown here were all based on photographs and screenshots of paused videos - the latter works very well, as I can choose the 'pose' from a much wider range. I tend to start out with a very rough sketch and let the face emerge gradually.

In Enda's portrait (third picture above - when he was one year old and pre-haircut, for those who know him only with short hair) he is wearing a soft knitted top my sister had made for him that is tied at the back with a ribbon. I loved painting the stocking stitch and the ribbon and the light in his hair. With Henry (fourth picture) it was the oval of the snap fastener on his little shoulder that caught my attention - sometimes it is those small details that I find particularly poignant.

Love, compassion, light: Celia Paul's Self-Portrait

This memoir by the artist Celia Paul has accompanied me for the last few months, moving from bedside table to coffee table to dining table to my desk in the studio. I read it almost in one go, but I have been going back over certain passages and revisiting the reproductions of her work and the photographs.

While substantial parts of the book are about Lucian Freud (another artist whose work I admire - Celia Paul was one of his lovers and muses and they had a son together), she emphasises that he is made part of her story instead of the other way around, "as is usually the case".

I was more intrigued by her relationship with her family and her mother in particular and the work that arose (and continues to arise) from those family bonds. Her paintings of her mother and of her sisters are very moving and tender. Paul does not consider herself a portrait painter, but rather an "autobiographer and chronicler" of her life and her family, telling their story in images.

The memoir charts finding her own voice as an artist and breaking away from the role of the muse. So many artist couples have played out the dynamic of the woman making sacrifices that enable their partner to thrive. Paul shares a lot of insight into the challenges and obstacles to becoming an artist that women face and offers up her experience of working out "a strategy" to carve out the solitude that is essential for making art. This involves not living with her husband, as she needs to have her own private space*. She also talks about the conflict between motherhood and artistic creation, how being with her son makes her unable to work, as "all my concerns are for him" when he is present, and how she feels the guilt and separation acutely.

This interview includes interesting observations about Paul's connection to other artists (I love her voice; she emanates such calm and poise). She feels "this moral quality to Constable, this kind of love and compassion that comes through...", informed by familiarity with the subject matter: "you can't do anything unless you understand it".  As she writes in her memoir,

"I only ever work from people and places that I know well. This insider knowledge gives me freedom to take liberties with the forms and structures of the faces and figures, the clouds, the waves, the houses. [...] If I know my subject well, it's almost as if I don't need to look at them in order to give them intense attention, and yet I need their physical presence."

(Paul, Celia: Self-Portrait, Jonathan Cape, London 2019, p.3)

This is what gives her paintings their intimate and empathic quality. Even in reproductions in print or on the screen the spectral light in her paintings is powerfully conveyed - her work contains a "juxtaposition of the mystical with direct observation" (p.5). Her mother would regularly travel to London from Cambridge, climb the 80 steps to Paul's flat and pose for long periods of time, during which both artist and sitter would enter into a meditative, elevated state. Paul often uses spiritual language to describe the process of painting people, and her sisters and husband also give their perspective of what it is like to sit for her, by all accounts a transcendental experience.

In the interview the curator asks her about the evanescence of her seascapes and Paul reveals that she only really started working from water after her mother's death, when "forms broke up, nothing seemed permanent. So my subject seemed to be water, in a new way." She also talks about her "struggle between dark and light", with the light always emerging from the darkness, and the influence of Goya, how the light behind the figures in his family group paintings seems to be the subject of the painting, and how there is a "melancholy feeling about that, that the light will actually outlast the figures".

The language in the book is often sparse, and this minimalism, coupled with clear-eyed honesty, carries an even stronger emotional impact. There is one passage, when describing her mother's childhood, that relates a tragedy her mother was witness to and haunted by, and it is something I haven't been able to get out of my head.

Gwen John was another inspiration that is apparent in the two paintings above and below, in the containment and stillness of the self-portraits (John is also another example of a female artist having an all-consuming affair with an older male artist - Auguste Rodin. It appears Freud expected a similar subservience from Paul).

The book is also a meditation on the intersection between the written word and visual art. Paul says writing the memoir - she had not written much previously, apart from early diary entries and poems, and found 'freedom of speech' in painting instead - has affected her art: "I feel a new assurance in my painting, through a growing confidence about using words again."(p.5)

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* Her husband Steven Kupfer wrote this essay about Celia Paul's art: "Celia Paul - Painting her Life"

Birthday, houses and home

From Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (we sometimes put on subtitles in German if available, as John is learning it, or French or Spanish, as a brush-up exercise, but I put on English subtitles when I rewatched some of this, as there were so many quotes that I wanted to see in writing in addition to hearing the voice; it can add a layer of something I can't quite put my finger on)

‘I realised [the novel Play It as It Lays] was about anticipating Quintana was growing up. I was anticipating separation. […] I was actually working through that separation ahead of time. So novels are also about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with. In that sense that a novel is a cautionary tale, if you tell the story and work it out all right, then it won’t happen to you.’

Joan Didion, in Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold

What I paint and what I read and think about and feel, and things that come into my life without my prompting them, seem to constantly interweave in astonishing - or perhaps expected - synchronicity.

It was my birthday yesterday, and talking to my mentor and friend Margie, the themes of home and rebirth and becoming through coming home to ourselves came up. I am working on the painting above, which was also born (excuse the pun) out of conversations with Margie and inner child work (my younger sister had recommended the book by Stefanie Stahl, which is about accepting our ‘shadow child’ and thus freeing our ‘sunshine child’) and may call it 'Birthday' (also as a nod to one of my favourite paintings). 

Margie had asked me a while ago whether I had something symbolic that could represent the child in me, and while I searched I kept thinking of a blurry sepia photo of me on a beach that I had saved when my sister sent me a digital copy of it and that I had been meaning to use as the starting point for a painting. 

The book I mentioned in my last post, On Chapel Sands, starts with a girl – the author’s mother - disappearing from a beach, and the memoir is about where we come from, among other things. And incidentally, I just started swimming in the sea again last week.

The house my sisters and I spent the best part of our childhood in is being transformed into a home for my younger sister and her family, with an integrated apartment for our mum. I am so glad they will be under the same roof (the guilt of having left my tribe and moved to another country remains), but there must be something potent in the symbolism of the dismantling and rebuilding, as a lot of my dreams these last few weeks have been about home and a nostalgia for my childhood. Not being able to go to Germany at the moment comes into it as well, no doubt. There is a walk John and I like to go on here that, even though it is at the edge of wild dramatic windswept Connemara, has a softness that reminds me of the fields and ditches surrounding our village at home.

In a sense a lot of art is ultimately about the journey home; it is one of those archetypal themes that underpin pretty much everything. Yet I am still struck by how it is such a dominant thread in my reading and painting at the moment. 

John gave me the recently published Lives of Houses, a collection of essays about the physical homes of various artists, literary figures, composers, politicians, etc. and how they shaped their lives and work. And I bought (and have read the first few pages - then I put it away, as my currently-reading pile is about to topple) Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's The Grassling, about place and landscape, memory and grief. It also includes wild swimming.

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We watched two excellent documentaries that are available on Netflix at the moment. Becoming, about Michelle Obama’s memoir of the same title, which also has some moving scenes of her revisiting her childhood home and reminiscing about her late father, and Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, a portrait of the iconic writer, created by her nephew. 

I realised recently that I had quite the collection of literary works dealing with grief and packed away some of them to donate, but I still have Didion’s exceptional memoirs about the deaths of her husband and daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, and I want to reread them after watching the documentary.

A lot of my recommendations these days are the opposite of feel-good escapism*; between my choice of books and TV and the themes of my paintings (and the sea-swimming!), salt water is featuring heavily at the moment!

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* We are also watching After Life.

Routines for staying grounded

 

 In the studio

 

Some recent and current reading

 Spinach 

There are no weeds

Routines, be they daily, weekly or monthly, are an anchor in life, especially in these extraordinary times. We need structure. As a natural introvert I haven’t had trouble adapting to the lockdown, and while I share the global anxiety and heartbreak, just as I feel it about global warming, wars, human rights issues, poverty and other crises, and am worried about other people (and in awe of the frontline workers), I am used to dealing with massive uncertainty and am embracing the gifts and lessons in this situation, something I have had plenty of practice in since being diagnosed with cancer.

I am using this period as a retreat of sorts. Luckily I am still working part-time and only losing out on some of my income, and we are financially secure. Being at home has given me the space to expand the routines that have become such vital tools in my healing. It has been an emotional few weeks for various reasons, and some days I could barely do one or two of the things on this list, but I can feel the cumulative benefits from incorporating the below into my days and weeks as much as possible:

Exercise / gardening:

Two activities not everyone is able to do, and I never take them for granted. I dusted off the dumbbells I had bought in preparation for surgery and now rotate Christine Coen’s 22-minute workouts. She focuses on the mental health aspect of weight training and the workouts are varied enough to not feel overwhelming, though I still have to pause at times. I am also running more than ever, but I try not to be too rigid about it. One of my rounds involves stopping at the beach on the way home and wading through the water - we are very lucky to have so much space around us with access to beaches within the 2km radius our movements are currently restricted to. When I don’t feel like a run, I walk instead or spend an hour gardening. It has been sunny and dry lately and I am getting a lot of fresh air into my lungs and appreciating this heightened connection to nature.

Creativity:

Thanks in no small part to this wonderful course, I am in a state of Flow when it comes to painting and drawing. At the moment I am drawing and painting children a lot and working on my botanical illustrations and some personal projects. Last night John and I got our hands into clay, inspired by the Great British Pottery Throw Down (Keith Brymer Jones must be one of the most soulful people on the planet; he is regularly moved to tears by a piece, and those are moments of humanity that are a balm for the spirit!). Food preparation is a creative pursuit in itself and an exercise in mindfulness, and I am trying out recipes I had saved and making large bowls of rainbow salads, healthy desserts and cakes.

Meditation / visualisation / spiritual practice:

These days my practice usually involves one long Joe Dispenza meditation and/or two shorter ones each day. I also still listen to my custom hypnotherapy audio recordings a few times a week. Marisa Peer has been uploading a lot of free resources, including hypnotherapy sessions and visualisations. I read spiritual texts every day and listen to podcasts or Youtube videos, for example talks by Michael A. Singer (I bookmarked this one as I want to listen to it again).

Yoga / breathwork:

These are essentials for getting back into my body. Yoga with Kassandra has created a 30-day morning yoga challenge, so before I sit down to work I do one of those ten-minute sessions and later in the day one of her longer Yin Yoga classes. This one focuses specifically on the immune system.
Wim Hof (aka the Iceman) regularly shares free content, and I have been doing this short sequence of Wim Hof breathing.

Reading:

Reading is probably my number one activity right now; I have been reading so much, across different genres. A couple of standouts: Before lockdown I got Laura Cumming’s new book On Chapel Sands from the library and started reading it last week (as usual, I have several books on the go); I am savouring it at intervals, chapter by chapter, out in the garden. I finally bought Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Instructions on Writing and Life, which I had been wanting to read for years, and, as expected, it is excellent, a book to visit again and again. Elizabeth Hardwick's semi-autobiographical novel-letter Sleepless Nights is also remarkable and certainly in a category of its own.

Writing / correspondence / connection:

I still write my Morning Pages every day and am also working on a journal/memoir (that I might never share publicly either) about the last two years, something I have been doing on and off.

Correspondence is important, too, and I have been making and sending cards, writing letters and putting together parcels, and reaching out to people I had been meaning to contact for a while. Snail mail also offers a balance to all the additional screen time now that so many meetings and appointments have moved online. In a lot of ways this pandemic has brought people closer together. I now talk to my 86-year old friend almost every second day (she lives alone and is cocooning); there are more video calls with family and friends; my ‘Irish’ nephew has playdates with his cousin in Germany via Whatsapp; people are reviving old friendships and forging new ones.

Therapy:
I have regular appointments with my therapists, counsellor, healers and mentors, and these are very much part of my routine. They are expensive (with the exception of the Cancer Care West counselling service; everything they do is free - we are very lucky to have them), but so worth it, and I am thankful that I am in a position to afford them.

Rest:
When I am feeling well, I want to make up for all the time I lost or wasted and go all in. Thanks to energy healing from this man the previously continuous fatigue lifted not soon after my treatment, but in my excitement over that I tend to forget that my body still lets me know very clearly when I have overdone it - which is of course true in general, but now comes with the added sensations of cancer-related fatigue. So while it is tempting to do all the things I've been meaning to do, I remind myself to slow down and take rest days as needed, with no pressure to be productive.

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On the note of productivity, I hope to be back here with possibly shorter but more regular posts - I have a lot of drafts, but haven't had the mental space to edit and post lately.