Painting Waves
Christmas Day 2023
When last I wrote, our front yard was a brown barren dry Texas flat mulch yard. Then, in October, some heavy rains came along with palm-sized hail. This was followed by more rain. Between the rains I noticed that what looked like marigold seedlings were popping up all over the front yard. Now our front yard is covered in bright yellow marigold flowers, and it looks like spring, and it's very cheerful. Since it looked like spring, I decided to pop some nasturtium seeds into some big pots I have out there with herbs growing in them, and now I have nice fat round nasturtium leaves; maybe they will bloom. Meanwhile we had an arborist come by to remove a tree that was growing onto the house roof and I asked Knut to ask the arborist because I was at work about my ginkgo tree. The ginkgo tree had three green leaves and all the other leaves had fallen off. He said the tree was OK. I hope he was right now the three green leaves have fallen off and it looks like a wintering ginkgo tree. Spring will let us know whether it is alive or dead.
After this difficult semester, Knut encouraged me to use some free travel points that he had accumulated to go to Florida and visit my brother which I did. It was so peaceful and beautiful there. Well not exactly peaceful because there was a 35 to 40-mile-an-hour wind which made this amazing noise in all the varieties of palm trees that are growing in my brother's backyard and around his neighborhood. I took videos of the palm fronds dancing frantically in this wind and making this amazing noise. It was percussive but also sweeping. Sweeping percussion, rattle and shimmy. Palm trees shimmy - did you know that? Even though the wind was blowing like crazy I HAD to go to the beach every day to paint. The first day the wind was coming off the water and I started noticing how the waves behaved when they crashed on the sand. The waves crashed in so many different directions. They curlingly crashed down and when they crash some foam goes up and some foam goes down and forward in bubbly bulges. At the same time, there is a wave coming backward towards the new wave coming in, so there's a wave coming forward as there is a wave going backward, there's foam crashing down and there's foam responding to the crash going up. I watched this for five days, and I tried to paint it. I had watercolor and I had some tubes of acrylic. So I used the watercolor for the grey turquoise and indigo ocean and the grey blue lavender sky and the clouds and I used the acrylic for the foreground of the dynamic waves doing their up-down forward-back curling and flat on the sand reversal dynamics I let the acrylics stay fat from the tube and textured with scratches from the pointed end of the brush to show the chaotic foamy directions. I'd never really thought of waves like this before, but I thought about waves like this for five days and had a blast only thinking about waves going round flat up down out in and foaming. It cleared my mind of curriculum design and meaningless faculty meetings. It was a wet and windy Gertrude Stein essay. I loved it!!! I never want to stop. But I drove the rental car inland to Orlando, got on the plane, and came home.
Composition as Explanation - Gertrude Stein
It is very likely that nearly every one has been very nearly certain that something that is interesting is interesting them. Can they and do they. It is very interesting that nothing inside in them, that is when you consider the very long history of how every one ever acted or has felt, it is very interesting that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different. By this I mean this. The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen.
You may be wondering how I painted in 35 mile an hour wind - good question. Clamps. You know those carpenter clamps that are like 5-inch metal clothespins? My brother, who does lots of jobs around the house, of course had some so I can clamp some wet paintings (5x7 inch paintings) and let them dry while I paint more. I paint in layers of wet on top of dry layers. But I also had even smaller sketchbooks with ring binding and did even littler paintings in the sketchbooks. I made a LOT of drawings of the surf.
After day 1, the wind shifted to come from inland and we were protected by big clumps of sea grape trees. At the beach where I painted was an elevated covered wooden walkway built over the dunes. It had a roof and picnic tables and became my outdoor studio. It was PERFECT. I put my paint, waterbucket, blank papers on the tables. I could step down some sandy wooden steps to the surf, then come back to change papers, clamp down the new wet pieces and work on the next layer on a dry painting-in-progress. YES! And one day the sun came out.
My brother, Hoppy, took me to the beach every day.
I'm still painting on the spontaneous direct drawings that I did in the little sketchbooks on the beach.
I hope your holiday season is full of surfy insights.