Recent Work Continued

Red Hill, April 2012, mixed media on archival paper, 13"x19"

Recently I have been working on a series of small paintings that combine photographic and painterly elements. I am interested in the juxtaposition of texture and image and in isolating those aspects of a photograph that embody colour or tonality that can be incorporated into an abstract composition. With this work I am also trying to loosen my touch and work spontaneously and intuitively and not spend time refining and reworking the compositional outcome of a given piece.

Ice In Trinity Bay

The ice came in for the first time in two years and filled Trinity Bay. It happened on Thursday April 5, 2012. When living there over the winter I remember waking one morning to the sight of the bay full of ice. It stayed around for a few days and then just as mysteriously as it appeared it was gone a few days later.  It then returned and again disappeared. It didn't melt but moved away with the currents. These pictures were taken by Janice Vivian.

Village Life

Today the island is shrouded in fog and looks mysterious, something tropical that a ship off course might discover near Mozambique. It would be an island inhabited by creatures never before seen unlike the bleak rock it is in reality supporting a few shrubs and the gulls that on occasion line the shore in anticipation of capelin or herring or mackerel. The barren island is the note that makes the composition of the coastline complete. It would be static without the island, quietly receding. The island makes it resonate.

The fog hangs above the bay, a curtain blocking the view of the other side, wanting to be drawn opened with the sun. The other side is a black wall of hundred foot rock cliffs half a mile away.

The curtain runs from the open sea to the beach at the end of the bay. The bay is still, no ripple on the water except for the wake of the gulls that wait below the fishing stage for the cod ghosts thrown to them by the fishermen who keep the dense fleshy fillets for themselves. The gulls are happy for what they can salvage from the bones and they fight each other for the remains.

There is only one fishing stage in the bay now when there used to be fifty.

The fishermen are at work after a few hours securing their catch. It is a period of grace, the personal fishery that lasts for ten days. They are men who worked with their fathers fishing throughout the year until that practice was brought screeching to a halt by the federal government who deduced the ocean was running out of fish and we would do our part to save what was left. Other countries have paid the depletion of fish stocks no heed and continue to fish merrily off the shore giving the finger to all these men who once lived only by what they caught at sea. They stand up in the boats and there is not a life jacket in sight. The posture of the men improves each time the food fishery is opened.  It is like their genes realign and there is a unity of purpose in their being. The fish is better in the autumn. Too soft and well fed on capelin in the summer. Cod is the only meaning of the word fish.

The routine of the fishermen takes them into the little shed at the end of the stage. It is where the filleting is done. It is their clubhouse and it is exclusively a man’s place.

A knife cut of sunlight slashes through the fog. The curtain thins and becomes more translucent.

The women read the weather and transmit their wisdom. Getting a line of laundry out is a sign that the day will be clear. They know this by the feel of the breeze against their skin, by the smell of the wind, by the force of it.

A line can be twenty yards long supported by a forked stick in the middle that allows it to move with the wind. Jeans hang from the belt loop, shirts from the collar, solid darks then colours, public garments then things more personal closer to the house. 

Little has changed in the village. Three new houses is all and more decay of the old ones that have been abandoned for years. Lovely old wooden houses with mansard roofs and bay windows caught up in family feuds. They are worth money now but there are quarrels to be won with siblings and with the village that shaped the mind. Land had no meaning and now it does. Land had no value and now it does. The traditional two storey houses, saltboxes, sixteen by twenty-four feet are a rhyming poem unto themselves, lyrical in the way they sit so firmly on the ground  amongst buildings that have been truncated, cut from two stories to one, the modern bungalow, clapboard replaced by aluminum siding and wooden windows now plastic instead. To the white one on the shore the owner added a twelve/twelve pitched roof and made her house larger instead. A single woman undaunted. She lived away for many years in Ontario where you can never have too much space.

There is no order in the village, no design, no plan. A house here another there, fence posts running randomly like the pencil lines of an infant on the kitchen wall. There is no burnish, no glamour. It is just a remote village on the sea where people have lived for three hundred years.

The crows are calling, screeching, hags all of them but comforting like the hag that fed the wild cats in France and called them with her scarred vocal cords, Minou, Minou, Minou and put a bowl of gruel on the ground and their tails shot up and waved and they rubbed against her legs and purred as she sang, Minou, Minou, Minou.

The cats here are not wild.

Dogs are everywhere in the village. Half of them descended from the same black Labrador and none of them care for strangers at all. The once fierce beagle is horse with age and can hardly move but still manages to bark, an ancient diner chocking on a piece of meat.

The black one runs with barred teeth and tries to come from behind and tear some flesh from the rump, a snarling irrational package, fifty pounds of determined white fanged darkness barreling down the street, like Gericault’s horses, with all four feet in the air at once.

Weekday mornings the school bus, a yellow dragon in a Chinatown parade, winds through the village scooping up the children, barely coming to a stop. The bus is as wide as the road. The little stand to keep the kids dry and out of the wind, an outhouse without a door, blew over in a storm and has been lying on the ground for weeks and the kids just stand beside it oblivious to the rain.

The roads adhere to the landscape. They are of the landscape. They are a dark outline on the landscape flattening out the illusion of depth. The yellow school bus races along the dark line of the road. One road is paved. It bisects the headlands. The rest are all gravel. They wash away with the heavy rain and require constant grading. One man has the job of grading the roads. His work is like Sisyphus, or The Woman Of The Dunes.

The fellow in the white bungalow facing the cove moves his cars around. He has a pickup truck and two sedans with another parked across the valley at his brother’s place. He changes the direction they face according to the weather. He is not the only one. It’s the male version of the weather forecast.  If the car faces the house things are calm, if the car backs to the house a storm might be coming and if the cars are all parallel to the house and lined up on the lawn all hell is going to break loose. The fellow in the white bungalow facing the cove owns the once grand house next door. It has been for sale for many years. He doesn’t want to sell it is just a way of having strangers come by for a visit to engage in conversation. There is an upstairs bedroom that he won’t open when he shows the house. He always conveniently forgets the key. The Tony Perkin’s moment on the tour. Either this fellow’s mother is in there under glass like Santa Catarina of Asisi or his alternate personality is blocking the door. It’s a real deal breaker for those looking for a house with an ocean view.

The sea rolls into the cove not in waves like other places but in an undulating curl that advances and retreats meeting the rock wall with a roar.

The sun pushes through the clouds above the cliffs on the far side of the bay, the black cliffs angled striations of rock and a thousand individual plains. It’s Cubism a billion years before Picasso, a stark beauty risen from the sea.

The Alchemy of Change

that pebble placed

so thoughtlessly

like a chain letter on the brim of your cap

cannot be dropped

for fear of death

be still absolutely still

on the edge of the cliff

holding tight a grass tuft

on the ancient head

while pouring out the accumulated

regret of time lost and self doubt

broken dreams and misplaced emblems of success

an empty vessel

a hundred feet above the ocean

a scratch mark on the cobalt stain

of the open sky

rejected as a roost for gulls

the squawking crows wanting more

than they deserve

remaining still in the midst of all

this after sixty frantic years

fighting to stay awake and not perish

tasting the wind now

that carries trace portions

memories of the sea

over which it sailed

the eternal sea in perpetual motion

rolling and breaking against the black rocks

the shaman’s rattle hissing

the ritual dance soft moccasin

shoes in the wet sand

the alchemy of change

pain to love

the aching heart rocks against

its cage looking for a way out

Devil's Cove

The Wind

It starts out as a conversation

and ends up raging

in a voice beyond reason

a courier of unease

jabbing a finger

into your chest

crossing a line

it began as a walk

with talk in whispered

tones sharing moments

of embarrassment and regret

like in the early

throes of love

then something

about the painter

at the party

who made a clumsy pass

in the kitchen

touching your breasts and ass

what painter

it was nothing

he was drunk

you never mentioned

this before

in a voice pushing against

the velvet

curtain of the night

the wind is like that

it starts out as a conversation

and ends up raging

stealing the air from your lips

and slamming it against the side

of your face

and the bed shakes 

in the pounding gale

in the house built

on a hill overlooking the sea

and the roof struts

hum in dark tones

the wind plucking hard at the clapboard

and the shingles as it races

in and out of the trees

like a lover in a game

of hide and seek with

no intention of ever

being found and the child

within is rattled by the force

parents in another room

raging and mean spirited

conjured by a B movie medium

the wind is like that

it starts out civil

and ends up with its shoes off

its stockings torn at the toes

kicking against the door

having forgotten the keys