Writing Up A Storm

A Thanksgiving Painting

I've been saving this painting by Oleta for Thanksgiving, for it seems to speak all by itself for this time of year and this particular holiday. The old man feeding a chipmunk and the glowing golden color make such a lovely autumnal image, and, of course, it is the sharing of food that is at the heart of drawing everyone to the table on Thanksgiving Day to celebrate thankfulness.

The holidays are difficult times for many people, and not just those who are homeless or alone but also those with enormous Texas-size families that include grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. In the United States we have our two major holidays back to back, way too close together for comfort, and right smack in the middle of my favorite season of the year.

I really do like to turn away from the great hustle and bustle of the world into the quietness of this painting, for here Thanksgiving has been distilled into its essence, and, truly, I cannot think of one single word that I could add to this extraordinarily beautiful painting. It speaks so perfectly for itself.

 

My husband and his mother Oleta and myself will spend Thanksgiving together. We'll eat at a round wooden table in our kitchen by the window that looks into our backyard. And after we have eaten, we'll take a little tour of the backyard to view the progress of a brick path that is being laid down there, with old bricks slowly gathered from here and from there. The path is a winding path, and it is more than half-way now to one of its destinations: the back gate.

We'll look at the wild roses that grow on our back fence to see how they are doing. These roses all came from cuttings that Oleta gave us that she got from here and from there. Our little world is filling up with bits and pieces of the outside world. 

We'll look at our garden which is in a very sad state, but I have high hopes for it for next year, and we'll gather pecans, if we can. This is the year for pecans, for we have a crop every other year, but the summer was so dry for so long, we are not sure if there will be very many this year.

And we will be thankful for our own list of blessings. Amid all the great bounty of this world, it is sometimes the very tiniest of blessings that are the most precious, the most poignant.

Thank you, Oleta, for this wonderful painting which captures one of those most precious of blessings. Happy Thanksgiving to all! And I will be back again after the holidays.

(Courtesy of Phil Armitage, Glacier National Park, USA)

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Three Duck Decoys

This is another of Oleta's wonderful oil paintings: Three Duck Decoys. Oleta, my mother-in-law, grew up in rural Texas during the Great Depression among people who did not go "hunting and fishing" for sport; they went hunting and fishing to put food on the table. They gathered wild plants along the creek banks and wild berries from the fields and wild mushrooms from the woods. I love to hear Oleta's stories of how her family lived through those times.

This painting of hers reminds me of her stories. Partly, I suppose, it must be the deep-autumn colors in the painting that take me into the woods of my own memories, and into my longing as a child to actually be able to survive on my own in the woods behind our house. I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn over and over. But Oleta actually lived the long-ago county-kid life that most of us fantasize about as being the way childhood should really be.

Our nostalgia for such childhoods often overlooks the hard times that many country folk lived through during the twenties and the thirties in our country. But even Oleta says: "We didn't know we were poor back then."

These colors really enchant me: those forest-green heads and antique-gold beaks, the russet autumnal browns, the charcoal black, a white as soft as the early morning fog, and that touch of slate-blue, as if Oleta had painted in a reflection of the sky. I picture the restraint it must take an artist, with all those colors on her palette, not to splash on too much.

And I love this little duck (see below), so unexpectedly upside down at the bottom of the painting! It is lying on the floor beneath the other two duck decoys. If you look closely, you can just make out "Oleta Cates, '75" in the far right-hand corner.

There's a sweet little story behind how this painting got painted in the first place. Oleta's very closest and dearest friends, a man named Jack and his wife, had a cabin on a fishing lake in East Texas. Oleta wrote me the story:

There was an old boat house, once used by the old timers when they went duck hunting. The old timers were long gone, and the younger generation built houses and used the lake for fishing and partying. Jack had the old wooden ducks in his cabin there and I fell in love with them. He asked if I would paint a picture of them for him. I painted two, one for him and one for me. He had his on the wall of his cabin, so he gave me the ducks. He passed away in 1990, and his wife not long after . . . and I don't know what happened to that painting."

I love knowing the story behind this painting: the three duck decoys in a cabin on a fishing lake, the two paintings, the gift of the ducks, and the mystery of where the second painting is now.

Here is where the painting that Oleta kept is hanging now, in this corner of our kitchen. That's a tangle of garlic flower-heads that my husband brings in from the wilds of our backyard ~ it's Oleta's garlic and it grows wonderfully rampant. There's another hot-air balloon ornament just to left of the painting, and another flying aeroplane hanging from a cattle yoke that is hanging from the ceiling. And there's the usual clutter of books, candlesticks, and teapots on the shelves just under the painting. I'm standing on a chair to get this view. The lamp is just over our kitchen table.

Well, there's no getting around the fact that our house is not quite ready for Decor 8 ~ yet, but we do have the very finest of original fine-art paintings on our walls. Thank you, Oleta!!

Here is Oleta's hawk on the other side of this window, hanging over its pair of shelves (you can't see the second shelf here ~ probably way too cluttered for viewing).

Anyway, my point is that you can plainly see that there's a smidgen of symmetry going on in our kitchen: two beautiful paintings with two matching shelves underneath. And, just to show you how symmetrical this really is, please do take note of the two duck napkin rings on this shelf that mirror the decoys in Oleta's painting on the other side of the window!

You can go here to find out more about the hawk painting.

I don't want to leave Oleta's painting without mentioning the window on the far left and the "lay of the land" inside the room. The window opens into the room where the two decoys are hanging on the wall and one is lying on the floor. The little one on the floor seems to almost float upon that floor. Like a decoy, it tricks us. It makes us look a second time. It challenges our sense of perspective. I'm not sure in this painting if we are meant to see everything in one particular way. It feels like a painting with secrets of its own.

I love the light coming through this window. I have always loved how Vermeer posed so many young women in front of light coming in through a window, and I feel that Oleta has captured the same light coming through her window, too. It enlightens the whole room with soft gold.

Plus, there is nothing more magical than just a sliver of a window into the world to pique our imaginations!

This is a little pond within walking distance from where I live. There are ducks that live here, too, but the day I took this photo they were all at the other end of the pond, and I was not thinking about ducks that day. This beautiful pond is very long and meandering, and has a bridge across it and a walking path all the way around it.

The next time I go back, I will be remembering Oleta's duck decoys, and all her childhood days, too, and I will try to get a photo of the ducks, and the bridge, and the path.

I'll be out of touch on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I will be back on Thursday. I hope your week is an especially good one for you.

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The Red Geraniums

These red geraniums were painted from a photograph. The photograph was of geraniums that my mother-in-law Oleta grew herself. And then she grew them again, here, on this canvas with oil paints.

I read somewhere that, in the pioneer days of America when there were people living in sod houses on the lonely prairies, sometimes the only bit of color a housewife might have would be her one pot of red geraniums. I don't know if this is true, but I love the image of a pot of geraniums by the doorway of a sod house. What precious jewels such bright flowers would have been to these pioneer women living in the brown earth in that brave new land.

There is something so intense about the color red. We use it for such opposite extremes, don't we? For red lights and red-letter days. It stands out and calls to us in the landscape of our lives as a warning or as a thing of beauty. I do think the color red is fascinating. Blue is my very favorite color, but oh! how the color red catches me!

I love how Oleta has painted these fragile red petals a little indistinctly, a little bit blurred, making them glow with a soft red warmth.

And here is the very humble and homey clay pot! Really, there is nothing that says home and garden more than the flowerpot. And what I love here is the light that Oleta has captured.

But how does a painter paint sunlight??

It seems an impossible task. But Oleta has done it, for there it is, dancing upon the terra cotta pot and glancing off the table surface.

Well, speaking of clay pots, here are some weathered old ones of ours on a makeshift shelf alongside our weathered old garage.

To the far left, you can see a collection of plant identification tags ~ honestly, neither my husband nor myself can throw away anything!

Above the flower pots are two old temperature clocks. The one on the left says it is 83 degrees today, and the one of the right boasts 82 degrees.

Oh, how we wish! It has been 102, 103, 104, 105 for days and days!

Here is a closer view of our jumble of flowerpots. I know you must be thinking, really, this is hardly high art! But I do love these old pots!

I love how they are paint-splattered and smeared with good old garden dirt and scoured with rain and wind, sun and earth. What we have here is a flowerpot laboratory awaiting further development.

Awaiting red geraniums . . .

The green and the red in Oleta's painting reminded me of this Vincent van Gogh painting on the left. Among all the swaths of green and brown and cream and mustard, there are those red chimney pots and that one red roof. I put Van Gogh's painting here so that Oleta's red geraniums can hang alongside the work of another master artist, just where her paintings belong . . .

And below is another masterpiece:

I searched Wiki for geraniums, and that is how I found this lovely young man above. "Rubens Peale With a Geranium" in 1801. Rubens was the brother of Rembrandt Peale ~ and don't you love the names their parents gave them? Rubens and Rembrandt, such glorious names! And perhaps such glorious expectations, too . . . Rembrandt obviously became a very gifted painter, and Rubens, the youngest child, had a love of gardening, hence this beautiful portrait with a red geranium.

I have included this painting because Oleta had three very fine boys, and there is not much about boys that she does not know. My husband, for example, had a very high-tech no-girls-allowed laboratory behind their house growing up.

If anyone would understand a son with an inclination for investigating anything remotely scientific, it would be Oleta, especially if it were a red geranium with some kind of antennae tapping into the son's mental powers! Hmmmmm. Is that little two-pronged thingie above a true part of the geranium plant or is it a quirk of Rembrandt Peale the artist?

(A Red Geranium, photo by Lewis Collard, WikiCommons)

Well, I will leave you pondering. I love how one thing leads to another, for I have wandered from Oleta's beautiful red geraniums into musings about the color red, clay flowerpots, Van Gogh, and the life of a young horticulturist.

And I do especially love having you wander with me!

Have a very lovely weekend!!

A Hawk in Our Hands

My husband's mother, Oleta, is a true artist. She painted this hawk for my husband because he has an eye for hawks and can spot them miles away, on telephone wires, among the branches of trees, or on fence posts. I adore this painting so much ~ I simply get quite lost in the poetics of its colors!

We love it that Oleta has given us her hawk, and many of her other paintings, too, to hang in our home. There is something wonderful about being in the presence of original art. It takes you very close to the act of creation, for here are her brush strokes, one on top of another, right here. Here is the very paint that she used. It has dried, of course, but you can touch it with your fingertips.

And here are some fabrics that I couldn't keep myself from searching out among my fabric stash, to try to find the colors that Oleta used: charcoals, autumnal browns, russets, that touch of turquoise and amber, those snowy-whites, and those pale greens and sands in the background.

And speaking of snowy-whites, here are two snowy hawklets with either mom or dad. This is a photo from WikiCommons taken by Thomas O'Neil: "Red-tailed hawk with two chicks in a nest." These chicks were hatched from hawk eggs, but Oleta's hawk was born in a very different way, from pools of paint mixed and stirred and brushed into a canvas upon her easel.

You can see how Oleta has infused her hawk, not just with color and a pose, but with life. Look at that all-seeing-eye!

And I love how she painted him (or her) perched on an old fence post, with that wonderful detailing in the fence wire. In Texas, where we live, you can find these weathered old fence posts everywhere in the countryside, standing in rows like old soldiers keeping guard over even older homesteads. And, yes, you will often find a hawk stock-still on top of such a post, becalmed, perhaps, or biding its time.

Below is Oleta's painting in our kitchen, keeping guard over us. It hangs above a little shelf that holds the very last of the sunflowers from our garden, a family of brass angels (these were also gifts to us from Oleta), and two mallard napkin rings. A hummingbird feeder in the shape of a hot-air balloon hangs on the right from a bracket. (Note: My husband is a hot-air balloon pilot, among other things, and our house is full of treasured hot-air balloon memorabilia. And other flying things.) 

Thank you, Oleta, for your beautiful painting!