greenheron's Open Salon Blog

Herons X Heron

Tue, 29 May 2012 08:05:13 -0400

Since early April, I've been sticking my beak daily into a great blue heron nest camera set up and monitored by the Cornell Ornithology Lab in Ithaca, New York. For several cold weeks in April, I watched as a pair of great blue herons lay five eggs and brooded them in all sorts of inclement weathers. One morning, I tuned in to find mom hunkered down in a bowl of snow, the nest buried, the temperature, 27 degrees. I worried about her all day, so much that I kept the classroom computer tuned to the cam. Late in April, the eggs began to hatch in the order they were laid. The last egg, Number 5, pipped out on May 2nd.

In addition to freezing temperatures, nights of snow and days of cold rain, the heron couple have had to defend their nest against multiple midnight owl attacks. Mom lost some head feathers during one attack, and an egg was dented during another, but hatched. So far, no chicks have been harmed.

In the early morning, the woods and pond below the nest are filled with bird song. The night sounds are all peepers and bull frogs. Two cams are trained on the nest: one is stationary, and gives a close-up side view of the chicks, the other cam is overhead, and can be manipulated. At various points during the day, a lab monitor focuses the second cam on the parents as they fish, bathe, and gather fresh nesting sticks in the pond and woods below. Sometimes this cam is focused on the parent heron as they stand guard on a branch over the nest. I am undone by the dignity and beauty of this, of their natural equanimity and patience.

Not long after the chicks hatched, I began taking screen shots on my computer and drawing from them. It’s been fun watching how fast the chicks grow, onscreen and in my sketches. They began life appearing as punk mohawked bobble-heads. Now they look like small adult herons, even though they have not yet learned to fly or catch fish. Their parents urp up fish for them, the urp stimulated by the chicks yanking on the parent’s bill, a kind of noisy clacking theater when all five grab at once. They sleep in a sweet snuggled pile, using one another as pillows, dreaming of what, I wonder.

The world might be a much nicer place if we played by bird rules: take only what is needed, delight in unexpected opportunity, sing in the morning, preen, be fierce when necessary, know our place in nature, dedicate ourselves wholeheartedly to caring for our young, and when it is time to go, leave without a trace.

A video of feeding time is here, and the cam here. Some of my sketches follow. I tried to keep them in chronological order.

dad

love this googly eyed view

Can You Draw Me?

Thu, 24 May 2012 10:05:16 -0400

As a child, I spent countless happy hours practicing my budding skills on the scholarship challenges from the Famous Artists correspondence school advertisements in TV Guide. Clearly, an artistic life made you sexually attractive and gave you a great build. Look at what happens to your biceps from drawing all day!

Cartoon Saturdays seem to have gone somewhere. With so many creative types at OS, much interest in the pirate theme, a sense of healthy competition, since the EP thing has lost cachet, we could fill the void. Imagine a beautiful cover page peppered with pirate drawings, rendered by beginner and seasoned renderer alike, sassy irreverent OS commenters, testing the envelope of pirate possibilities.

In throwing down the gauntlet, I must likewise put up. Here you go:

Fail

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:12:37 -0500

My first painting teacher gave me an F. How could my attempts to learn to paint warrant failure? My attendance was perfect. I completed each assignment on time, according to directions. Forty years later, I remember his harsh response to my confused inquiry nearly verbatim: he hoped I did not plan to major in painting, that in his view, I lacked talent, and had no future in it. Crushed, yet unbelieving, I transferred to a different school, and relinquished an entire semester of credit. It meant that much.

At my new school, I excelled in painting classes, was asked to be teaching assistant to a successful Boston painter, completed a four-year program in three years, and won the annual painting prize. After graduation, I began to exhibit my work, was selected to be in the Boston show at the Rose Art Museum, was awarded two Mass Cultural Council grants, got reviewed in Art in America, and had gallery representation. Yet each time I addressed promotional cards for a new exhibit, I polished my grudge, and fantasized about sending one to my first painting teacher, angrily scrawled across the back: “Remember me?! You told me not to major in painting! You said I had No Future in it! Dig this, Professor Stupid!”

A friend who’d become a department chair at my first art college called one day to ask if I could teach a drawing course after an instructor bailed three days before the class was due to start. I said yes, and soon discovered that my former painting teacher and I were now colleagues. I was teaching full time with the man whose F grade was one reason why I sat beside him in faculty meetings. The irony. Did he remember me? I could not tell, and was afraid to ask.

One particularly cold snowy winter, the college sent faculty on a retreat designed to explore teaching methodology, at a remote conference center somewhere in New Hampshire. The first morning, we were paired up to work on facilitated exercises. You can probably guess my randomly selected partner.

The initial exercise had us take turns wearing a blindfold while our partner led us around the wintery landscape. As we walked, the blindfolded person was to relate something that their partner might not know, the objective, to build trust. He wore the blindfold first, and I cannot remember what bit of information he revealed, because my mind was focused exclusively on my incredible pending opportunity: when wearing the blindfold, I could tell him that he was my first painting teacher, that he failed me, and that his F had helped shape and define the trajectory of my creative life.

It was my turn to wear the blindfold. He took my hand, and off we went. Silent at first, frozen by the largeness of the moment, I hesitantly offered, “I took a painting class with you when I was an art student.” “Really? When?” “1974,” I answered. “That was the first year I taught!”

I had not known that. I did know about the first year of teaching though, of saying things I did not mean, and of not saying things I might have, to students only a few years younger and a bit less skilled than myself. I could not recognize what the seeds of a future painter looked like in the work of a first year art student, had not yet grown a third eye for potential. Most certainly I’d made some cry, others angry. Maybe I drove some away from painting, and maybe I drove some to it, with an I’ll show her. I hope so.

“Did you like my class?” he asked. I answered truthfully. “You gave me my start.” There was no more to say, so we tramped through the snow, blindfolded, my mittened hand in his, an experience sweet enough to be called revenge.

Shimmy, Shimmy

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 08:12:57 -0500

Once I was a resident in a monastery, a real one, with men in brown robes and shaved heads. It often felt a little like prison, and if you’d been allowed to visit on those days, which you couldn’t, because it was not permitted, I might have begged you to break me out. You did not come though, so I stayed and had this experience.

When I was not yearning to escape, I lived the profound. Authentic Zen is not the same as the cast resin Buddha Zen for sale at the Dharma book, cd, and incense store. It is physically and emotionally rigorous, brutal even. And yet.

One day someone approached in the dining room and asked if I would take a meal to an old priest who lived in a cottage on the grounds. He had Parkinson’s disease. I was told that he would not be able to speak, but would understand when I spoke. He was a painter, and it was suggested I take some of my own art to show him.

Like an ant-sized figure in an ancient Chinese landscape, I ascended the hill to his little house. He greeted me at the door in a motorized wheelchair, silently, as I’d been told, which did not feel strange. Much time in a monastic community is spent in enforced silence, sometimes a week or more. “They’ll never shut you up”, my mother snapped before I left. They did, and I grew to love the silence. We moved into the priest’s studio, where he pointed to a flat file drawer. I opened it, he removed a painting from a pile, and we looked at it together.

He’d come of artistic age at the height of Photorealism: Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Audrey Flack, et.al. His paintings were watercolor landscapes on full sheets, rendered using projected slides. The details were so tightly executed that the painting appeared as a photograph, impressive in terms of technique and skill, but lacking in content or feeling. I complimented a few of these, then he indicated a different drawer. From it, he pulled out another painting, another landscape, only this one was painted with a shaky hand. Brushstrokes and droplets of gouache spilled over the surface, pointillism without control, layered over an older image. Between more recent passages, he’d allowed original passages to remain. I tried to imagine the courage it took to return to an earlier, some might say perfect image made during his prime, to mix pigment, load a brush, then boogie it around the surface.

The surprise was that the paintings were not ruined. The revised landscape breathed, vibrated, shimmered. Light broke into shards and reassembled. There was heat, and wind. The land was as alive as the photorealist version of it was dead. My eyes welled up. He smiled. We looked at another half dozen paintings. All the same. He’d signed and dated each painting twice.

Visibly tiring, he extended his shaking hand, and I understood he expected me to put the small sketchbook I’d brought in it. I’d been drawing a small stone every morning for several years, had made hundreds and hundreds of these images, and no one, not even me, could look at more than ten without flipping to the end. There might have been four or five dozen in the sketchbook. He looked at each one carefully.

His hand reached out again. I understood and put the stone in it. He turned it over a few times, rubbed it on his forehead, then put it in his mouth like a meatball. We cracked up. It was a perfect response.

It’s not my intention to get caught by detail, but that’s what happens. Show me a pebble or a pore, I’ll draw it. Lately, in attempt to loosen up, I’ve taken to tearing paper, gathering, sewing, creasing, rolling, dying, punching it with holes. I want the breath and the shimmer. Yet I crave control. The holes must have good edges. They must be stationed in the right location. The priest had no choice but to paint as he did. While I stepped up and gazed into the abyss briefly, I was allowed to step back. There’s a Zen injunction to “sit as if your hair was on fire.” I think this is how the priest painted.

He passed away not long after I returned home. I heard that he received a traditional Buddhist funeral, was cremated and his ashes sent into the breeze to sail across his beloved landscape. The stone sits next to my frayed cushion. Now and then I pick it up and put it in my mouth.

This essay was published previously in a different version on Fictionique.

Cancer Bitch

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 12:10:30 -0400

It is October. Again. Pink ribbons. Heart wrenching stories of the stricken. Images of courageous smiling bald headed women in pink T shirts. Companies that donate a percentage of product proceeds to research if you buy this or that shampoo, yogurt, deodorant, or spaghetti sauce. Everyone gets on board the pink boat, unified by the desire to cure cancer.

Cancer Bitches ride a different boat. Many of us dread October. We won’t tell you that. We would seem angry ingrates for your kindness and concern, so we quietly put our heads down until it is over. We endure the media voices speaking in hushed low tones, using the lexicon of war: battle, warrior, survivor, victim, courage. We walk down streets and supermarket aisles festooned with pink ribbons. We skip article after breast cancer awareness article that highlights anti-cancer diets, anti-cancer exercise, anti-cancer vitamins, recent anti-cancer discoveries, coffee/wine/green tea/chocolate/aspirin/tumeric.

October 1st, it seemed fitting that I’d encounter the woman who introduced me to my personal Cancer Bitch. Suddenly, there she was, getting out of her car in our local Stop and Shop. Our eyes locked and we did not speak. Zen Bitch tries not to indulge in petty social behaviors, but Cancer Bitch does. Nearly ten years later, she is still angry, just mindfully aware of it.

In the numbest of days following my diagnosis in 2002, I told a handful of friends. One of these friends told another friend, who told the deacons at his church, thinking that members of his congregation might want to reach out with support. No one asked how I might feel about spreading the news. I had not told the people at work yet, and was figuring out how I wished to do so.

One of the deacons, the woman I saw in the parking lot, stood up at Sunday service, lit a candle, and spoke to the church congregation about her grief on learning of “another woman struck down by breast cancer–my name here.” I was not there. I did not hear her words. I did not know her. She did not know me. She did not call or write to express her concern. I was Another Woman Struck Down by Breast Cancer. She was Another Good Person Outraged by Breast Cancer.

People I hardly knew approached me at the drugstore and the bank. As I checked out a library book, the face of the librarian changed when she saw my name. Her voice lowered, “I heard about you in church.” My diagnosis was less than a week old.

With cancer comes the recognition and understanding that you have precious little control in this life. The minutiae you are permitted to control, how and when you offer information, become monumentally important. I’d always thought of my life as an open book. With cancer, I discovered it wasn’t. On a dark roiling sea, I navigated my cancer experience through the gossip, pity, and fear of strangers.

One afternoon, believing I was calm, I found a telephone number for B, the candle lighter. Cancer Bitch isn’t polite, especially not in the beginning, and years later, she can still surprise me with unskilled eruptions and confrontations around this issue. When B answered, I told her my name, then waded in.

Have you had breast cancer? Did someone close to you have breast cancer?
No.
Why did you stand up in front of a hundred people and tell them about me?
Breast cancer is a horrible disease that kills hundreds of thousands of women every year.
That is true. How are you helping them?
I speak out.
For who?
For them.
I am one of them. You did not help me.

She did not understand my anger. She was not alone.

This month of October, instead of buying a bottle of hair conditioner with a pink ribbon graphic that contains suspected carcinogens, knit a soft cotton hat and take it to the chemo floor of your local cancer center. The nurses will know what to do with it. Write a note of concern and hope to someone you’ve heard is newly diagnosed, rather than pass on the news to another semi-acquaintance. Don’t put us on a courage pedestal, because we’re so brave and you don’t know how we do it. We don’t have a choice. Please don’t tell us about those women who’ve died. That is not a good topic of conversation to show your support. Try not to be afraid of our cancer. We can see it.

For further information, visit http://thinkbeforeyoupink.org/

Cancer Bitches thank you.