Life Is about Art

(Chicken-pot-pie, eaten at the dinner described below...)

We were having one of our animated dinner table conversations about life, the universe, and everything, and something caused Oldest (22 and a Sophomore at the NC State College of Art and Design) to toss in the comment, "Life is for art." It took me several twists and turns in the conversation to catch his tone, and to come back, during a pause, to say to him, "You really meant that, didn't you." He just shot me a grin and that laser look in his eyes, the one that's always been his silent equivalent of, "D E F I N I T E L Y." I mentioned Oscar Wilde (who wrote that life imitates art - for example, that London hadn't been foggy until artists painted it that way...), and then the conversation moved in other directions.

But I keep coming back to his remark, and I've told the story to a number of people over the last few months.

During a recent drive to Atlanta, GA and Columbia, SC, I was listening to From Eternity to Here, and therefore thinking about space, time, entropy, determinism, Special and General Relativity, gravity, quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, and more. Several times I had to turn off the rental car's CD player to howl with laughter and delight at some revelation of how things fit together, or to gasp and stare amazed out the windshield while ideas moved around in my head and I tried to predict the twists I thought the author (Sean Carroll) might propose next. Some of it was really hard to follow (especially since I couldn't see the diagrams) - but other parts made sense to me and the epiphanies were like seeing the Grand Canyon appear through parting mists...

And during one of the noisier moments, when I was awestruck by the mathematical concepts that allow all things (even black holes - maybe especially black holes) to be described in terms of "information," it struck me that riding along with the "everything" and the "information" are complex human concepts like emotions, and philosophies, and ART. Many layers of meaning are held by creatures of great complexity and then communicated using intentional arrays of the stuff of the universe. And other people GET THE MESSAGES. The SCALE of what is going on when we describe the ineffable in a work of art... and when someone else GETS IT... From the Big Bang to this? Even when something simple, like making an image with a knife in a pie crust, is noticed by someone else (message received - even if it's not much more complex than "flower"), we are playing a marvelous, clever game in a playground incredibly rich in forces, atoms, and "information."

I could hardly breathe. I thought my smile might endanger other drivers (and leave permanent stretch marks on my face).

Blowing Rock

We take our autumn vacation each year in Blowing Rock, NC. It's a pretty town, beautifully set, with lots of colorful maples in the fall.

Mountain towns are different than Piedmont towns, the two having been settled and founded by diverse groups, with almost opposing views on issues like slavery, the purpose of the farm, and styles of local government. 150 years after the start of the War between the States, the architecture is different, the landscaping is different, and even how you are greeted on the street is different in Eastern NC vs. Western NC. I recall my first semester at UNC Chapel Hill, where the two cultures meet, how people from the two halves of the state seemed to stick together in their own groups. As a transplanted Northerner*, I had never noticed it before then.

This sketch is my first attempt to capture a view of Blowing Rock. I have always felt the camera can't capture enough in one shot, and photographs have always disappointed me. This is the Blowing Rock Museum (on the right) - a tiny white building which is only open a few hours each week. The larger building to the left is the Martin House, and has been home to some of our favorite shops over the years. In my mind's eye I can leave the boundaries of the sketch and head left down Main Street to Kojay's Coffee. Or I can move just a little to the right and see the playground where our children have played every autumn for almost twenty years, and where the line of benches is set to observe the street over the beds of Japanese anemones and bleeding hearts, a perfect place to eat our regular dose of Kilwin's ice cream.

* I feel like a person of dual citizenship. I moved to NC as a teenager, and I learned the manners of this slice of the South. I would not willingly move from North Carolina, and in my head I hear a line from an Indigo Girls song, "When God made me born a Yankee He was teasin'." Yet when I visit the Midatlantic States, particularly NY north of Westchester County, or the west half of Connecticut, I feel at home there, too.

My Big Pumpkin

Every few years I find a pumpkin stand with the big deep orange pumpkins I love the most (not the dull brown-orange ones you find everywhere) and I splurge on a large one. Then I put it in the house and enjoy looking at it and thumping it gently for weeks after I buy it. As Oldest put it, "It's wonderful that there is a fruit that gets that big." This year I put it on the hearth. I put a little one near it so you can get some idea of the size.

I compared this to Don Kennedy's photo from the NC State Fair of the prize winning pumpkins. Mine isn't that big by a long shot, but it's plainly a close cousin, and it took two adults to carry mine into the house... It's silly, but I love the color (it's close to my favorite color in the universe, which is a particular shade of orange - some goldfish and some nasturtiums are also very close), and I just get a big grin every time I look at it. That's hard to put a price on, but I'm definitely getting my money's worth.

Happy Halloween, everyone.

More Grandfather

On one end of Granfather Mountain is the attraction the Morton family built years ago to support their protection of the rest of the mountain. It's been updated and added to for decades, and it's better every time we go.

The "Mile High Swinging Bridge" is less scary since they replaced the board bottom with steel sheets; but it's still too much for many people, and most cross it carefully, with looks of concentration. Some revel in the height, others try not to look out to the sides.

On the other side you can look down on a smaller peak, and cliffs, and hills around Linville Falls Community beyond that. It's impressive. I stood there at the big stone wall and drew this sketch. People came up to talk to me and I found I could keep right on drawing while carrying on a conversation. I doubt I could do that at the start of a drawing, or with something more complex, like architecture or figures, but it worked well with this scene.

As with all sketches, my memory of the event and place is much more vivid than anything I've photographed.

The other sketch here is also of Grandfather, from the guardrail near the Linn Cove Viaduct. I started it in a howling wind, with wind chill probably in the thirties. I had to stop when I could no longer feel my fingers. I finished it almost a week later, when we came back on a much nicer day.

Been Forever...

It started with a two week vacation in the mountains, away from electronic distractions, with lots of time hiking and outdoors. Then there was so much to do when we got home, and so much business travel, that I have not been back on line even for e-mail more than two or three times. No time to write blog posts.

But I did do a good bit of sketching on the vacation, in a new horizontal format book like my large moleskine (about 6 by 16 inches when it's opened up - I call it "Horizon 1"). And I painted one watercolor that seemed like it painted itself, and says a lot about what I "see" when I drive the Blue Ridge Parkway, which we were on several times a day for two weeks. I'll post the painting later.

Much of our activity during the vacation is on and around Grandfather Mountain. We usually avoid the tourist attraction itself (though we did visit this year, at Youngest's request, and we had a great time on one of the most strenuous trails - that's another post) and instead we prefer to hike the Tanawha Trail (13 miles long, skirting the mountain lower down) in pieces from various starting points. Our favorite portion is Rough Ridge.

Here are two sketches done from the Rough Ridge boardwalk (recently repaired, and with a new bridge to a large rock). Both are done in pencil (click for larger views). The first is looking southwest, and shows the Linn Cove Viaduct - one of the engineering marvels of our time. The other shows part of the boardwalk stairs and a bit of the new little bridge. This (and the Bass Lake at the Cone Manor) is the hike we do the msot often during our vacation each year.

The last image here shows the fall colors this year, which came on VERY fast (just two or three days from green to this) and vanished just as quickly. In seventeen years of autumns in this area, we have never seen one this fast. Usually it takes about two weeks to do what this autumn did in about eight days.

I never tire of seeing Grandfather Mountain, in all his grandeur and craggy beauty. It's definitely one of the most impressive and inspiring peaks in the East. It's never the same twice.

Cicada Early Stages

A lot of my paintings are like found objects - pencil and paint handled almost subconsciously until things begin to emerge. Other come to me whole and then I plot and create them from the internal image. The Cicada painting is an example of the latter.

Here is the page from the moleskine, where the idea came to me - back on August 1st. (The octopus, by the way, was a doodle - he may also have a future in some other work.)

And here also, is the line drawing that was done in prep for the painting. I do not usually outline shapes in my paintings, but this one is all about the shapes and their edges - the individual cells of the cicada's wings, etc. So this one is inked (in green) prior to watercolor. Even my signature, in this case...

The Haw

Youngest and I took the canoe and paddled a bit over a mile up the Haw River from the bridge and dam at 15-501, South of Chapel Hill, NC. We began that ride with me capsizing the canoe, and dumping us both into two feet of water. I had been trying to get into the water from the bank, without getting my feet wet. "You did it wrong," as Youngest put it. We were cool for most of the trip as a result, regardless of the 85 degree heat and bright sun.

We worked our way between rocks and small islands up to where the slope finally climbed out of the long pool created by the dam, and the rapids started again. We nosed the canoe into the rapids and let the current turn us back. Then we pulled up on a muddy bank and sat on a long peninsula to eat our packed lunch by the sound of the rushing water. Everything tastes better outside.

Later, on the way back down the river, we stopped at one more large stone island, where Youngest thought the best sketch would include the canoe. Then he looked at me with gleaming eyes and suggested that only the boat (an unnatural Coleman green) should be in color. Here's how it turned out - and Youngest was right.

All of these sketches were done in my small moleskine, 3.5 x 5.5 inches on each page (these are double page sketches, hence the seam in the middle of the drawings). Fortunately I had the foresight to put the sketchpad in a plastic bag, securely sealed and with air in the bag to float it. The floating didn't turn out to be necessary at our accident, but the bag did.

Here, finally, is the last sketch of the day, of Youngest paddling the canoe alone, threading our way back through the rocks (and doing as well as I had earlier) while I drew. I'm not happy with this one - it misses what I wanted, and has a whole host of errors - but I like it anyway, because it reminds me of the day, and the bright beach hat Youngest wore, with flourescent colors, which attracted a butterfly (a semicolon) which sat on the side of his hat for almost five minutes.