narrated landscapes
adapted from a presentation delivered at PechaKucha Santa Fe, 2019
”Thanks for the advice but I prefer to steer my boat into the din of roaring breakers. Even if the journey is my last, I may find what I have never found before. Onward must I go, for I yearn for the wild sea. I long to fight my way through the angry waves, and to see how far, and how long I can make them carry me.” Thanks for the advice. Tak for dit Rad. These are the words that I may be seen mumbling as I walk down the street alone, gesticulating wildly in those walks that precede every departure. For I leave a lot. I am very good at leaving. Head down and determined, I walk out and make my own path. Over and over again. “Who blames me?” Jane Eyre asks and answers, “many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.”
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Thanks For the Advice watercolor 1993
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fabric and watercolor on board 2018
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watercolor 1992
I don’t bother to keep a tally of my departures, my head is heavy enough as it is. But my feet are more sentimental. My feet remember every path that they have walked, and sometimes when the ball of my foot hits the pavement I am enfolded by the dappled shade of the magnolia, the leathery petals of its flowers carpeting the floor beneath or the feeling of my toes sinking into the wet sand as I gaze upon the indigos of a wine-dark sea. Sometimes the click of my heel places me on a stone staircase. The stone is warm where a stripe of sunlight caresses it and I lean against a column in the shade. I am very pleased that I have put on my heels today, and carry my passport in an embroidered clutch. For the most part, my feet carry without complaint the history of places that I have been. There is just one callus on the small toe of my left foot the shooting pain that occasionally radiates from it resembles the cracks on the ceiling in that bathroom in which I sometimes took refuge. Lit by a single lightbulb, the cracks appeared to my small self a map on old parchment illustrating my contemplated escape.
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watercolor and eggshell
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watercolor
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watercolor
Echoing my mother, I am apt to claim that I carry my home with me—in the paintings hung on the walls using the nail holes put there by the prior tenant; in my copper paella pan; in the bags of seeds that I carry from place to place, starting gardens that I know will die when I move again. My sense of place emerges about me, it is in the golden light that plays about the walls at 4 in the afternoon; it is transient and eternal, but never tied down. Some years ago, I strapped a few possessions onto my back and walked out again. But walking out this time was different. I walked away with the knowledge that I had failed a responsibility. I was leaving behind a compost pile that had received the clippings of my infant son’s fingernails and the egg shells and coffee grinds of breakfasts brimming over with laughter. I was abandoning the drip of a faucet that I had never fixed. I was turning my back on the garden and trees that I had planted and cared for but were now pale and yellowed by thirst despite that care. For this was the year of the fires. And my marriage could not survive a metaphor which linked our happiness to the health of a dying rosemary bush. For many years, I carried my house on my back from place to place.
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watercolor
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watercolor
These are a series of paintings that I began a few years ago when my life was at its most chaotic. Educated for a career that I didn’t want, renting a house I could ill-afford and not knowing what else to do I picked up my paint brushes. My return to painting was in itself a coming home and required a sort of bending of the knees and a request to the muses for forgiveness, for long ago I had walked out on them too. But my hands remembered how to hold a paintbrush: “What a lark! What a plunge!” These painted landscapes merged the colors and textures of my memories with my memories of the places described in a handful of books that have been my closest companions through the ups and downs of a life lived as fully in imagination as in fact. I moved five times in three years, in each house finding a spot in which the sun crossed over a table wide enough to set up a piece of paper, a glass of water and my paints. With each painting, and each return to the words that have narrated the interior moments of my life, my own roots became visible. I stopped fighting the angry waves and found that I was firmly tethered to the mountain desert. Painting a walk “in a lane noted for wild roses in summer…and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws ” there appeared the hues of my own favorite walk by the river. Anne Elliot’s insistence that one “does not like a place any less for having been unhappy there” gave me back so many places I have left that I might remember them and grieve them properly.
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watercolor
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watercolor
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watercolor
About a year ago, my son’s father bought a new house. My son gently refused to leave the protection of our family home. Once again, I packed up my furniture and my books and I returned to the ground that I had worked and abandoned. The apricot tree that I had planted the year I left had survived and greeted me in full bloom. The Choke Cherry was not 2 feet tall, yet flowered and bore some fruit. Even the dirt under my fingernails tasted like home. The tenacity of life rooted in earth nourished by the decomposed matter of my family’s detritus offers a new metaphor in the vigor of the roses that bloom through drought and monsoons alike. The drama between the magpies, the jays and the songbirds is played outside my window. They chatter as they nest and eat the seeds generously distributed by a mostly neglected garden. And I am given the great gift of a return—a second chance to care, for now, for a place that has welcomed this prodigal child back home.
