New England Love Letter, part 2

My garden after five months away-sad and lonesome and oh-so-weedy.

We are back home if not quite back in the swing of things, and are so busy getting everything back to normal it’s hard to think of anything else, but Harvard Forest sneaks up and grabs me by the throat when I’m not looking. It’s hard to believe I can’t just turn the corner and pull up to Benson House anytime I want. I miss it, miss all my friends new and old, miss the place absurdly and rather painfully. I imagine it grows more beautiful every day and those sugar maples must be about to put on a splendid show of color. I imagine a lot of things.

Oklahoma, bless its Southern heart, is putting on some welcome-home autumn finery, too, albeit a subtle variation of the Northeastern version; here the light is growing honey-colored as the days grow shorter and the prairie strikes those burgundy tones as the grasses flower and go to seed. The sky, however, is where the real action’s been. Grand storms cruise like frigates above the endless horizon. There have been very fine skies following the latest hurricane activity- Gustave and Ike both brushed past us and gave us good rain and great sunsets.

Gustave's last gasp

I spent nearly a week pulling giant weeds- there was a ragweed forest nearly nine feet tall surrounding the house and some of those stalks called for a saw; telling your housesitter not to worry about keeping up the garden while you’re gone for an entire growing season has some consequences when she takes you at your word.  We’re back down to the bare dirt now, and the surviving plants suggest a Tex-Mex style garden:  yucca and salvia and one desert willow.

Returning to my previous mash note: just so you know- this is an abiding relationship and not some harmless crush. I’m getting ready to send New England a bouquet of roses and a box of candy and ask it to marry me. So here we go again- some of my favorite things, part 2.

5. Teetering Rocks
People have put rocks to interesting use: stacked stone walls, house foundations, or just plain old whimsical cairns and balancing acts.

A Petersham cairn, at the Swift River preserve.

Stacks at Halibut Point, MA

The latter seems to be popular for some reason. Has it always been so? This spring I found a cairn in the woods and it looked like a gentle breeze could blow it over but months later, the day before we left, I visited it again. All is fair and balanced in the Petersham woods. What is this obsession with balancing stones?

6. Whoopie Pies. A Maine traditional dessert to which Cindy introduced me. I’ve found them since at farmer’s markets and country stores, each made locally by farm wives sweating over hot wood stoves and packaging them in clean, natural cellophane. A whoopie pie is a pair of chocolate cake buns with a creamy white sugary filling. It’s a guilty pleasure, and one you should have at least once in your life, if not twice. What I don’t understand is how you can make one of these from scratch and have it taste exactly like a Hostess cupcake.

A perfectly done Whoopie Pie to top off your New England meal. This one followed a boiled wharfside lobster.

7. Really Weird Wildflowers.

It's pink, it's stylish, it's a Lady's Slipper.

Weird and sticky, eats bugs- it's a Sundew!

8. Sugar Maples and Maple Sugar. Beyond wonderful. A grand tree of great strength and character in every knot and twist, it gives shade and sweetness in equal amounts and turns a glorious red hue every autumn. Plus I’m a sucker for pancakes with bacon and a fried egg on top, doused with maple syrup. I know I’m not the only one who does this. Anyone up for breakfast?

The maple at the end of Benson House driveway, Petersham

9. Friends. I am blessed with having many fascinating, talented, warm and loving friends. Some of them I’d known already, some of them became friends as soon as I met them, all of them are close to my heart. If you can have many BFFs (Best Friends Forever) in your life, quite a few of mine will come from the New England states.

l to r: Mike DiGiorgio and Barry Van Dusen at Hammanassett, CT

Cindy House with yours truly at Plum Island, looking like two Venuses rising from the sea.

10. Benson House. The sweetest little cottage in the lane, right at the edge of Harvard Forest, an artist’s retreat and a birder’s heaven. I think, of everything I love about New England, I will miss Benson House most of all.

Our little house in the forest.

New England Love Letter, part 1

Cardinal Flower in the Swift River, Petersham

This is a love letter to a great North American region; I’m about to get mushy and more than a little verklempt, if you’ll permit me. I’ve been more a little emotional the last few days just thinking how quickly the time has gone by and how soon we must leave Benson House and Harvard Forest: tomorrow morning. I have fallen badly in love, seduced by scenery, sweet little towns with steeples, rivers and lakes, goshawks and fishers, and above all the air and light in the New England forest. The songs of the wood thrush and veery top my hit parade of great musical experiences, along with a magnificent Beethoven’s 7th at Tanglewood, performed in a thunderstorm.

Herewith are things I love about New England, in no particular order, with love and kisses from the Motmot.

1) Cemeteries.

Eternal rest, and all those warblers. Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Boston.

New England keeps its ancestors where you can see them every day. Out west, cemeteries are dull monocultures of gravemarker plaques planted down flat for easy mowing. Here in New England every little town has a real honest graveyard, a good solid tribute to townspeople who lived here short and long, their lives told in a few well chosen words. I’ve spent five months across the road from a small one begun in Revolutionary times; I’m looking at it right now as I sit on the front porch of Benson House.

Would you have expected any less? Martha's Vineyard.

On Martha’s Vineyard there’s a beautiful graveyard with engraved granite boulders as an option to the usual headstone (see Belushi’s for comparison), and at Mt Auburn in Boston the grounds in spring crawl with birders(me among them) chasing warblers and grosbeaks and a zillion singing migrants in the most glorious flowering landscape I’ve ever seen outside of a botanical garden. When I go, please bury me at Mt. Auburn. I’d like to spend eternity with birders walking over my grave. Especially if they get a rarity from somewhere around my kidney. That would be special.

Snagging a warbler for Henry Wadsworth, Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

2) Mushrooms

The fungus among us. Conic Waxycap, Harvard Forest

This has been a wet, wet summer, and the fungi are going to town and everywhere else. The diversity is astounding. I had to buy a field guide, of course, but if you knew what you were doing you could eat like a king. A king with a royal taster, natch. While I was painting up at The Ledges in Royalston last week, a couple climbed up beside me carrying plastic bags full of something pungent and black which they said would go well in pilaf. I personally will let others enjoy what I dare not eat. The price of bold and hungry ignorance is high in this arena. Bon appetit!

I think this one is bad for you. Just a guess.

3) Critters

The world's cutest rodent.

Daddy long-legs in ultramarine mixed with alizarin madder, a great combination for those ravishing shade tones.

I’ve managed to see a thrilling bunch of animals here, simply by being in their vicinity without making too much racket. In my tenure as Harvard Forest Artist-In-Residence (that’s my official title, in fact) I’ve had close encounters with mink, beaver, fisher, deer, squirrels gray and red, chipmunks and woodchucks. And that’s just the mammals. Sad to say I never got a look at a moose or a bear, but it’s probably just as well. I don’t run fast and I don’t climb trees.

4) Museums

Glass flowers from the Harvard Museum of Natural History

Museums floor me; since April I’ve been to the MFA in Boston three times, the Clark in Williamstown twice, the Bennington Center in VT once (to drop off my paintings for Impressions of New England). In May I went back to CA and spent a great afternoon at the Getty Villa, and in June dined in the Museum of Natural History at Harvard (the glass flowers are awesome and the wine was most excellent). I’ve discovered that the best way to enjoy a museum is with a sketchbook. Use a pencil; the guards frown on pens.

One of the Sargent ceiling murals at the MFA. Comfy leather couches are provided for easy viewing or closed eye meditation. You could get nightmares from this one.

Sketched at the Clark Museum: Degas' Little Dancer

Psyche by Rodin, marble, MFA Boston.

My dinner with the immortals. Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Ed Wilson was the dinner speaker on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the ant collection at the HMNH.

Tomorrow we will pack up the car and head south; I’m getting a little choked up just thinking about it. But I’ll continue this paen tomorrow from the road if I can. I’m just getting warmed up. There’s so much here to love.

Little Lands of Enchantment

Doyle’s Cascade, plein air pastel/graphite, 12″x16″

Lately water’s been my main theme, water and what I’m calling enchanted places, places that lure me in with fairy dust and siren songs. Forest interiors, green and lush, waterfalls, moss. Toadstools. Gnomes (someone with a nice appreciation of Harvard Forest’s mossy glens has tucked a few of the little folk here and there).

In the Harvard Forest, even the gnomes are happy.

It’s been a busy week or two and very hard to keep a running account in one post, so I’ll have to give some of the highlights: a painting trip to Maine( complete with a B&B that would have given Stephen King the creeps); a painting trip to Hamanasset State Park in Connecticut, a day on the Freedom Trail in Boston; Tanglewood and Beethoven’s 7th in a thunderstorm; lots of painting and drawing; and on and on.

Rhododendron State Park, New Hampshire

But back to enchantment- I was a kid who liked to ramble in the woods, and once upon a time I found an enchanted place of my own. It was a tiny spring coming up in a mossy depression in the ground. The water came up out of nowhere and went back to nowhere, but it burbled through rocks and ferns and made a little reflecting pool before it disappeared. To me it was magical.

Cormorants, Hamanasset State Park, CT. Watercolor on cream Arches Cover

I couldn’t wait to share it, so I got another kid to walk there with me and have a look. He gave it a glance and a grunt before walking on, crushing ferns under his boots. I looked again and the enchantment was all gone. It was just a boggy, charmless puddle.

I still love enchanted places but I have since learned it’s better to share them via art. In art the enchantment is the essence; the charm stays put, the fairies lurk around the edges and the trees are all inhabited by gnomes. That’s how I see it, that’s how I draw it.

Doane's Falls, graphite/pastel 22"x30" Rives BFK

This is today’s work, done on site at Doane’s Falls just north of Athol near Petersham. It isn’t quite finished but I wanted to share it with you, knowing you’ll respect the ferns and won’t trample the moss.

Other news: I have two pieces in a show called Impressions of New England at the Bennington Center for the Arts in Vermont, which opens August 9 and runs through the end of November. Both are large mixed media works done plein air in Harvard Forest. They were drawn from the same spot, in fact I looked in one direction and drew the first, then turned around and drew the other. The first one is called 19th Century Slab Quarry with Hermit Thrush (15″x22″, pastel and graphite on Rives BFK), and is one of a series of drawings of a single boulder granite quarry out behind Benson House. The other is titled Glacial Erratics (18.5″ x 24″, pastel and graphite on Canson Ingres toned paper). Both of these are for sale through the Bennington Center, so please do inquire through their website if you are interested.

And may your summer evening include fireflies and wood thrushes for maximum charm and enchantment.

Update 7/30/08: Here’s it is, all done:

The finished piece, Doane's Falls