Being remembered, does it matter?

I have been thinking about what pushes me into action, like why do I paint or write, is it because I feel the urge to leave some kind of Legacy, a sign that I was here, that somehow I mattered?

I heard Jean Pascal the Boxer on a radio talk show, and he said "some people read or write about history, I want to make history!" Obviously not everyone is called to make history, some of us disappear leaving nothing behind. It is a bit like if a tree falls in the forest did anyone hear it? What compels us to leave our mark, and what if the world ends, then who would remember any of us then? Does it matter?

In some ways this urgency to leave our mark propels us to action, to create or do something that we hope will last the passing of time. Our ego needs recognition and appreciation, this makes us believe we are worth it, it boosts our self-esteem.

This brings me to my family, I remember my grandmother and some stories about my great grandmother, but really, I know nothing of her family and friends, none of them did anything worth remembering them for in history books.

I have my grandmother's old pictures in a box, filled of her people that I don't know and, there is no one left to tell me about them, none of them made history, yet I am sure they wanted to leave a Legacy or be remembered like the rest of us.

They only came to life when my grandmother and her siblings would tell stories to each other about them, I am afraid that back then, when I was young, I lost interest during some of the story telling because I did not know them. Today I wish I had paid attention.

One of my great aunt was exceptionally good at story telling, but her stories were mostly make believe, she lived in a magical world of her own, and I loved her for it. She made my every days special days, she would foretell how my day would unfold, how I would go to the pond and run into a frog, how I would build castles in the sand, and play house outside with some old blankets and chairs, or how I would play cowboys and Indians with the neighbor's kids. I was in awe that she knew all that I would do before I even knew it. She did not make the history books, but she lives in my memories, memories I have to share of this incredible joyful woman that made living a fun adventure.

She was an animal lover and she talked to them, somehow they seemed to understand her. She would talk to birds and would give them rides on the clothes line. She would guide the bees to pollinate certain flowers. She even had a pig as a pet that followed her around. She was the clown of the family, I remember a certain car ride with her, my grandmother and their friends, she had us all in stitches we were laughing so hard, she was the light of the party and she did not even drink.

Nora liked to cook and bake and she liked having her family around her table. She made her own jams and pies to the delight of all. And, one of her money making hobby was to pick up worms to sell to the local fishermen. She would leave with her sun hat, her bucket and her shovel and walk into the cow field and dig for the wiggly worms. Also, during the strawberry harvest season she initiated me to the art of strawberry picking, I worked along side of her on our neighbor's strawberry farm. My aunt would sing and make jokes as we worked to the delight of everyone in the field. These were the best summers ever.

There were people in my life I wish my children had the chance to meet and know because they made my life so much more happier. Aunt Nora was one of them. You can see her on the left of the black and white picture, I am sitting next to her with my grandmother and my brother, my fifth birthday. And, in the color picture she is holding my son, unfortunately she left us not long afterward.



I guess it is up to me to keep my family history alive by writing about it so that my children can learn about all those incredible people that have shaped our family.

Northland

This is one of my favorite paintings from Tom Thompson, it is currently at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal.

The setting is a scene of a forest surrounding a lake, it depicts a virgin forest with no human imprint. Maybe that is why a birch tree is lying amidst the standing forest on the edge of a bed of rocks, knocked down by the force of nature. Through the forest beyond the lake we see the continuity of the forest around it.

The predominance of red, orange and ochre tones used for the leafage covering the rocks and parts of the trees sets the tone of an autumn scenery. There are no symbols or anything suggesting anything else than what it is, a representation of a forest at a specific point in time.

The artist has used both warm and cool colors just like fall, cool and colorful. The mixture of red and orange tones of the autumn leafage that are spread across the bedrock in the forefront guides us into the painting. Inviting us to go deep into the bright birch forest, the artist is using a mixture of beige and pink colors for the trees, making them stand out by their lightness in contrast with the predominant red, orange and ochre tones against the dark blue lake. By using this same mixture of pinkish beige Thompson leads us around the dark lake forcing us to fallow its shore line in a circular movement, there is a faint repetition of the red and orange tones on the far shore of the forest. The intensity of the colors and his choice of palette are reminiscent of the Fauvist period.

There is a great balancing act in the composition and his usage of colors. He reintroduces the blue of the lake in the forefront to enhance the rocks or maybe it could be thought to be the shadows of unseen trees.

The open composition allows for our imagination to see beyond the canvas, you can picture the lake and the forest extending on for a distance on either side of the canvas, or imagine the forest behind you casting shadows on the forefront, you know there is more to the place.

The harshness of the light suggest that the artist chose a direct pointed light source that would explain why the trees are so sharp and seem to reflect the light. Thompson is successful in creating an effective contrast effect with his usage of the dark and intense hues. This effect is even more apparent as you back away from the painting, the trees appear to be white and as you get closer your eyes detect the subtleness of the light pink against the darker shades.

Thompson was born around Claremont, Ontario on August 5^, 1877. Although he started to draw and paint at an early age, he only took to painting seriously in the year 1912. His first trips to the Algonquin Park inspired him and he produced hundreds of small sketches of the region. Many of Thompson’s major paintings began as sketches before expanding into large oil paintings.

His paintings are an acquired taste, as you revisit his work and really pay attention to the details and the color choices, you really get a sense of the artist's passion and you can't help but feel it. Writing about a painting forces us to go beyond the imagery, it helps us notice the subtleness and the technicality used by the artist, questioning certain brush strokes, looking for a clue as to the initial approach. It is bringing us closer to the process while trying to unmasked its secrets.

I would suggest you try this exercise and see if it will change the way you initially looked at a particular painting.

Patience and painting

I don't usually put this much effort in to a painting, but for some reason this particular one is a never ending process. Each time I go for a walk in the woods I notice something more, this year the forest has undergone some major transformation in its landscape. It is chaotic, disorderly. No one has tempered with it, broken trees and branches are all over its leave carpet, the wind has done a lot of damage to the weak and fragile trees.

Consequently I am learning about patience through my brushes, I am learning focus in order to achieve a texture or a specific result. The act of painting lets me be in the moment, the focus lets me forget about the mundane stuff and the whole teaches me patience.

An ongoing project, I can't count the time I have spent over this canvas subtracting or adding shapes and colors. Will it be what I hope it can be once it is finish? I don't know if I can bring out its full potential but I won't stop trying.

I have other pieces on the go, but none inspire me like this one. I am drawn to the forest, I get lost in it. The abundance brought forth by nature, the continual renewal of life every spring is a strong motivator. Even with the destruction left by the force of winds gives it charm and creates a new tableau. Every time something is moved or broken it opens a door for a new beginning, moss, mushrooms, and insects will take over and create a new image with the broken or dead. Patience, for everything transforms, everything changes, we just have to wait for it.

On an other note, while going trough a book on Impressionists I fell into a Renoir painting called "Trees in the forest of Fontainebleau" that was done in 1860. The simplicity of it gives it power, yet the light is divine. Renoir was able to give it life, or should I say a soul, this is what I would like to achieve in my paintings.

Mother's Day

Mother's Day is more than just an other commercial holiday, yes I know it is a great business day for the flower industries, restaurants, and any other businesses catering to women. But, most of all it is one of those special days where your family gathers together to remember and create special moments.

I have been blessed with three great kids that are now on a journey of starting their own families. This year we have a new addition to our family, baby Brooke was born last March and soon, around November, there will be an other addition.

Today was a reunion of mothers, grand-mothers and mothers to be, we celebrated together what it was and is like to carry a child within, to give birth, to watch his or her first step, to dream all that is possible and to love like you could never imagine you could. Yes today was a special day, one of those days when you feel proud, a day to be happy, grateful to be alive. This is a day when you make time for the people you love. Yes, I know, we shouldn't wait for a specific day to do that, however our fast paste living swallows us up and turns us into robots, sleep, eat, work, eat and back to sleep. We had to invent a bunch of holidays to remind us that we are alive and that we have families and friends we love but hardly spend time with. I wish we had invented more special days.

A great day, yes it was!

Painting in progress

Ok, it has been a while, but here I am again playing with paint and brushes. This time I decided to tackle a forest, my forest, the one in my backyard where I go and walk for hours with my dogs Charlie and Fanny.

I took an old canvas 40" X 40" and covered it with the base colors to cover the old image. From there I sketched some trees and made the composition with oil pastels and oil paint.

I was on a roll, I kept adding colors and trees and ground leaves, but I sort had a mix of a summer autumn scenery. So I redid the top part by covering it with more skies and branches, I want to go towards softer tree tops and more texture.

This is where I am at, a bit stuck.




I've worked out the bottom and somehow I have to blend it with the top...More to come.

Midnight thoughts

It's 1:40 and I can't sleep, I ate chocolate and had some wine, and lets not forget the brownies! I am sensitive to chocolate, caffeine and alcohol, somehow these substances seem to activate my thought process, and the more I think the more awake I get. Usually, I stay in bed hoping I will dose off, and this can go on for hours. However, tonight I decided to share my thoughts on aging.

Some kids are eager to turn eighteen, I wasn't one of them. It actually scared me, it meant that I had to become responsible and enter the adult world. The only cool aspect was that I could drink without worrying about being carded. Then the twenties have come and gone, I fell in love, got married, had kids and got a divorce. A few relationships later and I am in my forties. Still I think I can do it all, and yes, the forties is the best sex phase of your adult life and you do hope it will last forever. However, it doesn't.

You cross over the fifty yard line, and you feel these little changes happening, sometimes they are so subtle that you forget about them, but they are persistent and manifest themselves in the form of aches and pains that get to scream louder as the years pass by. So you start wondering if it is your diet, must of had too much sugar, or maybe the food was too greasy...should of taken my calcium and glucosamine!

You start reviewing your life and sometimes you don't like what you see, some say we should not have regrets, I don't know why they say that because I regret a lot of things, sure everything I did up until now has shaped who I am today, but still I regret not knowing who I truly was. And, because of that identity crisis I regret some of the crazy choices I made. However, I do have a bag full of stories. Maybe my stories are a bit crazier then some, a bit weird and unusual, sometimes even funny but, I can't say they are worth the "no regret" saying.

My biggest regret is not asking more questions about my family's history or maybe I should say my family's stories. Now I would like to know how my aunt Nora met uncle Jedeon, and why I never new she was an alcoholic until my uncle got sick and died. Why she felt she had to lie to him every time she bought a new piece of clothing, she would say "That old dress, it's been in my closet for years, don't you remember it, I wore it to so and so's wedding" or "I borrowed it from my sister", she had an open account at the New York Fashion store and she sold fishing worms to pay it, she would take off to the fields with her shovel and bucket and turn cow dungs over to rake the harvest. I can still see her in her black skirt with her sun hat and her rain boots digging for those wiggly worms...what a sight! I wonder why no one took a picture of her that way.

I wish I had asked more questions about my great-grandmother, about how it was for my grand-mother to be a single mom in the nineteen thirties. I did ask a lot of questions, however, they were not the questions I would of ask today, and back then adults did not answer all.

I wish I had taken more interest in my mother's family and visited them more than once a year, I wish they had taken more interest in me.

I wish they hadn't been so wrapped up in their secrets and shared their real emotions, their fears, their anger and their love. I feel that most of my life I was missing pieces of information that would have explain their behaviors, I am sure this would have calmed some of my anxieties. Instead, I wondered what was wrong with me.

They all died, my mom, my dad, both my grandmothers, my grandfather, my great uncles and great aunts and my aunt...and most of them died with their secrets.

So what does it all have to do with aging? Well I guess it is about knowing you won't live forever and wondering if you did anything that anyone will remember after your dead. It's about going through an identity crisis at fifty five because you still don't know what you want to do with the rest of your life.

It is about watching older people waiting their turn to die while they lose one more friend or family member in the waiting process. It is about choice, choosing to age miserably or gracefully. It's about knowing that the clock always goes forward and that somehow you have to eat more vegetables and less sugary stuff. It is about relationships, about loving and being love, about listening and sharing your stories. It is about being afraid of illnesses, about fear of needing help, fear of dependency.

While I was growing up I thought my grandmother was the strongest women on the planet, then one day she was eighty and she seemed weak, fragile and needy, and that scared me. In my defense, I was young and did not yet understand the cycle of life.

Birth, growing pains, bliss, aging pains, death. It is as simple as that.