Painting as Meditation

Painting as meditation is not about getting a good result but finding a place to play.  Here, for example, I am sitting with my back propped against a rock on a hillside amongst trees.  I want to be out here with the wind and the threat of rain, hard earth under my backside, birds around me.  My aim is not to find a picture and use artists' techniques to put it on the page.  That is not the anxiety I want to confront.  There are other anxieties that flutter at the back of my conscious mind, which normally I ignore or allow to whisper in the shadows: time is passing; I am going to die; am I worthwhile; do I please myself; do I please others?  When I paint these questions come into the foreground but in a healthy awareness of the present moment.  I learn to live with what my eyes see and the corresponding marks my hand makes.  This is what makes it a meditation and it doesn't have to be good.  It just is what it is.

Poetry and Painting

I have a copy of Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North next to my bed in Villandás. I don't so much read it as browse it.  It's chewy reading as you would expect from someone who spends time considering what he is about before committing the words to a defined form.

When I go out to the woods and sit amongst the trees, Basho comes to mind if only because he also used to sit under trees and took his name from the banana tree under which he sat for long periods.  If that is the case then I should call myself Roble instead of Jason because I often sit under an oak tree with my back resting against a vertical rock that emerges from the mountainside.

Recently I have been using text and image together.  I cannot see myself as a Japanese brush painter, though.  When I place a mark on the page I do not see the sword strike of the samurai master but something much more provisional and hesitant.  It started with a sketchbook I painted and wrote for my children and has developed from there, so it is part of a more prosaic diary-writing Romantic tradition.

One part of the benefit of painting to me is the manner in which it allows me to accept myself.  This is a continual struggle.  I place a mark on the page and recognise it as an extension of myself with all the tremor of my unsteady hand.  The image itself is painfully revealing.  The text should do something similar: slapped down breathing on the page.

As a teacher, both of writing and painting, how can I not be aware of the difficulty of this acceptance?  I have seen many children screw up their work, as if horrified at what they have in front of them.  I want to feel that horror.  I don't want to just paint pretty pictures.

Links to other blogs

I know I haven't been paying attention to this blog recently.  This is partly because I have been active on other blogs in other places.  I don't want to abandon this one, but in the meantime here are the links to my other blogspots:

jasonpreater.wordpress.com
menemenetekel.wordpress.com
openingchapters.wordpress.com

Why so many blogs?  I guess I'm just a junkie!

Painting in the Woods

Yesterday I was out in the woods.  I like to sit amongst the trees and paint, with the little bugs running up and down my legs and the breeze wafting the branches of the trees to its own special rhythm.  It was a sunny morning, and I had with me my new camera, so I decided to take a picture of the painting as it progressed.

I started with pencil, having an idea that I wanted to keep a white circle of light in the top right-hand corner:

Pencil underdrawing

A mix of light yellow and sap green for the light on the leaves, putting in shadows with Payne's Grey

Close up view of the green and gray.  I use water to get tonal range

Working in a further level,  Payne's gray admixture with the other two colours

I work into the trees with Raw Umber and Burnt Umber .  The next step is to get rid of all of the white where I don't want it.

I use blues.  This can look a little startling as you do it, but it will not all be so dazzling in the end.
I don't want it to be all green.

I use oxide of chromium to damp down the dancing blues and work on achieving the tonal balance.

Finally a mixture of rose madder and ultramrine will go into the trees to change the  hue.  I like to put a little purple in at the end.

This is a photo of the same view.

This is my paintbox.

Carrión de los Condes

Christ surrounded by the symbols of the Evangelists

Carrión de los Condes is a small town with two fascinating churches and a monastery.  There is not much more activity there now than there must have been in the times of El Cid.  The Condes, or Counts, of Carrión were two cowardly rascals who ran away from El Cid's pet lion, one of them hiding himself in the toilet chute.  Imagine a medieval castle's water closet and you get the idea!

Against his better judgement the hero married his daughters to these two ne'erdowells.  On the journey back to Castilla they stripped the girls, tied them to trees and whipped them, saying that they were not noble enough to be married to real counts.  Of course they got their comeuppance, which you can read about in the Romance del Mío Cid.  I have the version in Menéndez Pidal's Flor Nueva de Romances Viejos.  If you want an English version, you could try this one:  The Lay of the Cid, but I haven't read it and can't say if it's any good.

Archivolt Carvings Church of Santiago- two fighting knights

The Church of Santa María is slightly older than the Church of Santiago, but the main doorway of the latter is fascinating, with archivolts showing a range of figures, including dancing acrobats, a grieving woman and fighting knights.  I hope you can make them out from my picture.

This is Romanesque art.  Carrión is on the Camino de Santiago which is one of the best places in Europe to study this early medieval artistic style.  And walking along under a perfect blue sky across the rolling flat and empty plains of Castille, you can almost feel the pounding of horses' hooves in the distance and sense the imminent arrival of El Cid on his batte charger!

Parsnips: the Taste of Winter

The parsnips grew beautifully this year.  They thrust down their milky fingers deep into the soil and seemed to grasp hold of the earth.  More than one broke as I was digging them out earlier this month and they were so juicy that the sap immediately gathered in beads on the open end.

Now we are eating them.  To sweeten a soup they are divine; roasted with potatoes and pumpkin (also from the garden) they are excellent; but boiled and mashed to purée we cannot have them.  Carmen has discovered they make her 'repeat'.  It's a shame: mashed parsnips with a sprinkle of black pepper are a real wintry taste.

We used a whole bed to plant parsnips because you cannot buy them in Spain.  What is more, if you go into a shop and ask for 'chirivías', the Spanish word for parnsips, the shop assistant will more than likely look at you as though you are asking for jellied wombat.

There is no getting away from growing your own, then.  And I have learnt a lesson for next year: add a little sand into the clayey soil, to make the harvesting a little easier!

The Pedant's Apostrophe

Street signs have been the theme of the week for me.  Last night I snapped a picture of the sign that you can see here.  That simple misplaced apostrophe does not lose its power to irritate me even when it is a humble Asturian shopkeeper who has no business knowing how to place it correctly in the first place.

There is a famous Spanish knicker shop called Women'Secret in Gijón.  (It is on Calle Menéndez Valdéz, which I think of as Calle de las Bragas for the number of lingerie stores there.)  Every time I walked to work last year that sign with the misplaced apostrophe offended my pedant's eye.  What is wrong with writing Women's Secret?  If Toys R Us is a rock you stub your pedantic toe on, Women'Secret is an irritating grain of sand that gets stuck in your eye.

I should not complain.  It is also amusing to stand in the street taking photographs of shop signs.  People walk past and look at you as if you are completely crazy, especially when it is raining and dark.  It is one thing to look a little crazy and quite another to look like a pervert, however, and that is why there is no picture of Women'Secret here.

Here are two more street signs in English to enjoy.

Travelling: you really have to say it with a Spanish accent- the -ll- makes a -ly- sound and the accent then goes on the second syllable.  It comes out as travEying.

Shoespiel combines shoes- pronounced show-es in Spanish- and piel, which means skin.  So these are skin shoes, leather shoes.  At first I thought it might be Shoe Spiel with that hint of Yiddish telling you they really know their shoespeak here!