Painting in "Plein Air"

Since we became part-time residents of the Finger Lakes region of western New York, Ponczka has become part of the arts community there. In particular, she has become a regular participant in a couple of “Plein Air” festivals, which celebrate the practice of painting in nature, out of the immediate experience of a time and place. Plein air painting requires an element of surrender to the elements, however they might manifest, and challenges the artist to convert an experience directly to canvas.

This week, Ponczka and I have been in Geneva, on the northwestern shore of Seneca Lake, where the Seneca Lake Plein Air Painting Festival is drawing to a close. It’s a great time for the two of us, who have come to regard this region as part of “God’s backyard”, to borrow a Polish expression. It also feels more and more like home, like the place we’ll be coming to when working for a living is not so much our focus, and when what we do will be measured more by the satisfaction it brings than by the size of a paycheck. Painting is what Ponczka is likely to be doing when that time comes; I aim to be writing.

And this Plein Air painting festival offers a tantalizing glimpse into the potential of such a future. First – it’s astonishing to see what gets produced in a mere two days, by a bunch of artists enduring sun, wind and rain for two days, trying to capture scenes despite constantly shifting light and shadows, and with the challenge of managing easels and paints, heat and cold, distractions, tiring eyes and muscles, transportation, the need to eat and sleep, uncertainty and self-doubt, and the relentless passage of time, which transforms the subject of the painting between every brushstroke.

It’s dazzling and inspiring to see the range of conversations that take place between artist and environment – how this one speaks to the vegetation, that one to the hills, one to the waters, another to the rich earth; one communes with buildings, another with the sky; this one catches the movement, another the deep, solemn stillness underlying all movement. Some paintings aim to capture a single moment, while others are steeped in timelessness. Some dance with color and light; others forego all sparkle or shine and emerge from some weighty place, singing the language of gravity, transcending life and death. So much beauty, seemingly from nothing. But that they exist at all says so much about the fertility of that apparent nothingness.

It’s a fun and exhausting and thrilling and fearful two days. Ponczka is studiously attentive to what she sees and transposes to canvas. But her painting – to my eye – can seem almost aimless and without care. It’s fascinating to watch her quick hand, swiping and stabbing the brush almost recklessly it can seem, while her eye darts from subject to canvas. I sometimes cringe inwardly as she smears on dabs of color – “NO, not that! Not There!” I’m thinking, as she gets it all wrong. But of course, I’m not seeing what she’s seeing.

So I turn away, or wander off for an hour or two, find a place for a beer, or sit and write for awhile. And when I come back, there are no more dabs of paint on a canvas, but instead, three dimensional life. But not exactly life, because... well, there’s so much on the canvas that it calls me to look again at that street scene she’s painted. It doesn’t look quite the same anymore. I see more now, feel more, want more. Connect more…? Something. There is something more now, between me and this street, that I draw from this canvas that has her eyes and her energy all mixed in with it, and with the brick and the grass, and that wall rising up, and that window, and that vague walking figure.

And everyone sees something different. In every painting. At the gala this evening, the awards are given out, and all the works are up for silent auction. Many pieces are sold, most to a solitary bidder. But others are hotly contested. And quite a few get no bids at all. One of the top prize winners has no bids on her work, but it is rich and detailed and evocative of time and memory, and the awards are clearly deserved. And while no one has yet bid to have one of the works adorn a wall in a home, one of the awards comes from a musical association that will use her work to style its programs and announcements for the coming year. And Ponczka gets no bid on her piece that both she and I like best, but another is purchased by the same couple that bought her work last year, and who happen to be the festival organizers.

It’s Art. And every eye, every taste is unique unto itself. And, as Ponczka likes to say – every painting has its rightful owner, but it can take mere moments or many years for the two to find one another.
 

A Heartbeat for the World

Nelson Mandela has left us. The television and radio are full of reports of the world’s mourning. I have no doubt that many tears are being shed, but mourning is not a feeling I can easily associate with Mandela. The man exhibited such an enormous ability to rise about suffering that, even now, I can only experience a sense of joy and celebration in thinking of him.

I’m not much given to adulation, or hero worship. We are all human, with sprinklings of Godliness, I think. We have the possibility of taming our hungers and minimizing that which is small and greedy in ourselves, and we realize these possibilities to varying degrees. One of the things I so love, in experiencing my fellow humans, is witnessing the channeling, the releasing, the maximizing of this potential greatness, this Godliness, I referred to, usually in small flashes. In the case of Nelson Mandela, there’s a particular and profound emanation of this quality that continues to astonish and amaze me more than twenty years after I first witnessed it.

How could a man be so loving and forgiving? I can hardly get my head or heart around it. Mandela was imprisoned for his belief in fundamental human dignity, and for twenty-seven years. He was separated from wife and family and denied the opportunity to pass his days and nights as he would. He experienced the passing of decades while his adult vigor faded away. And when he emerged from prison, he did so smiling, and offering love, friendship and forgiveness to those who had stolen from him all those years of his life.

I listened to a bit from an interview this evening, in which, shortly after being released from Robben Island, Mandela was asked about this lack of bitterness. And he responded – and I paraphrase – that it is difficult, when one is occupied with purposeful and rewarding activity, to give much thought to bitterness and disappointment. And he said that it is idleness that leads us to focus on our hurt and loss. Powerful words; all the more powerful in that he was a living manifestation of their truth.

I was privileged to be in Mandela’s presence once. A public school in Regent Park, here in Toronto, where I was doing youth work, changed it’s name to the Nelson Mandela Park Public School in 2001. It was being said at the time that this was the first school outside of Africa to be named for him. Mandela attended the ceremony, and I was blessed with tickets for my wife and I. What I remember more than anything was how he danced his way into the school gym to the rhythm of drums, beaming all around, especially at all the children. I don’t remember the specifics of his message, except that it was all love.

How fortunate we are to have had such a one among us.

Walking Cloud

It’s nine acres, in the western hills of the Finger Lakes, New York state.

Ponczka, the fiercely creative woman that I share this life adventure with, had one of her frequent brilliant inspirations. She got it in mind that we ought to buy one of the fantastically affordable getaways somewhere in those hills. We love the area already, from driving through on our trips to the City, and from our stay at the Millay Colony this winter. And I, also from further back, when my brother lived in Rochester for all those years, and I drove there along route 20 a few times.

Ponczka had attuned all her revived nesting energy into dreams for a schoolhouse, built in 1880, tucked just off a winding road on Canandaigua Lake. We saw that when driving through from my reunion a month ago. But she’d found other interesting properties, and so we looked at them too, almost as a formality. And the last of them captured us before we knew we’d been caught.

It’s inhabited by Shadow Hill, artist and therapist, who had the small cabin built by Amish neighbors, and who has tended the grounds, the small pond, the workshop and paddock, the beautiful outhouse (yes, it’s one of many special, inviting spots on the grounds) with an embracing care. Shadow is Cherokee and she says it’s been a spiritual home for her, and a healing place, and that the goodness of her neighbors is in the wood they built with. Shadow is a practitioner of “fallen art”. She merges found, fallen objects into sculptural and totemic tools of living: scepters and dream-catchers and smudging fans. And the imprint of her is on the place, giving it depth and story, and a welcoming energy.

Ponczka was instantly drawn to this vibrant place, but emotionally, she’d already moved into the schoolhouse. She’d planned the sleeping loft to be built off of the single, large schoolroom, had visualized a gazebo for the yard, and a small roadside gallery for displaying her paintings.

We slept and talked and emailed and dreamt and phoned about it for a couple of days. Then, on what happened to be solstice, the first day of summer, we drove down again in the late afternoon, and spent an hour and a half, strolling and lounging, looking and feeling the place.

And suddenly, possibilities begin to rain down. There’s an awareness of the space, room to stretch out into. I’m recognizing all sorts of choices, a sense of play welling up, and of freedom, qualities I’m reminded are always in reach, despite that I so rarely really embrace them. What I’ve been feeling was a narrowing that I’m groping my way into suddenly spouts corridors, and walls mist away. (Of course, it’s never so simple. But so much of life is in the eyes, after all. So, so much to see. And what do I choose to see?)

After awhile, Ponczka too begins to see us there and feel us there. She will have her painting gear in the workshop, and I’ll be on the shady side of the house, writing. She can feel the cold of winter pounding the walls and the metal roof, while the little wood-stove radiates its heat. And she sees herself plunging into the pond on a summer morning, just as it’s getting hot.

There will be lots to do, from mowing the grass, to chopping wood, to lugging water and fuel for the small generator – no water, no electricity. A different life and world to get to know. Shocks to absorb. Oh, man! What changes are ahead. Hopefully, we have only a few, minor illusions to be shown our way clear of. It will take time.

As we are leaving, I ask Shadow if the place has any kind of name. She says that someone once called it Cloud Nine. We will drop the nine.

Cloud.

Perfect.