Caspar David Friedrich freezes up on our shore

I have to admit, it was Bree Zorel's hilarious photographs of mini-bergs--tiny accumulations of snow around Halifax, each one resembling a minor iceberg--that started me wondering, "and what do the pans of ice that stack up on our shore look like?"

Because I'm much more serious than Bree is (well, in demeanor only; a comedic artist is really about as serious as one can get, and that's what she is), my thoughts turned instantly to romantic images of ships stuck fast in the ice. (Ah, the tragedy, the mockery of human ambition, the dashing of the well-laid plan! You see how German philosophy fits me like a glove. I'm steeped in it and cannot get these tea stains out of my head.)

In particular, I thought of Caspar David Friedrich (a Swede by birth, a fact that did not exempt him from darkening romantic thoughts; he too received German training and is usually considered German), and of that painting known variously as The Wreck of the Hope, The Polar Sea, and The Sea of Ice.  Completed in 1824, during a period of great despair in the painter's life, the work was not particularly well-received.  Even contemporary commentators have described it as overwrought--a work that "goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference." (This is, itself, quite dramatic wringing commentary--was the painter ever particularly "documentary" in ambition or execution? Really?)

But there we are. I have my model, such as it is, for what this ice resembles, and what--perhaps--it means.

Do you see the Hope there, a dark shape, a crushed and splintered ship to the right of the largest stack-up of slabs of ice? That it will founder is a conclusion we cannot avoid. Still, how beautiful the ice!

Caspar David Friedrich, Wreck of the Hope, 1823-4, Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Caspar David Friedrich freezes up on our shore, a set on Flickr. To see enlargements of the photographs, click on each one.

Quote about Friedrich's painting comes from "Art: the Awe-Struck Witness," Time, October 28, 1974.

Real Estate Speculation

Real Estate Speculation

You never liked to be cold.

As soon as you died they came and took your things away.

(Yuppies’ trumpet).

Curtains beds sheets hassocks dressers rugs dresses shoes towels smocks scarves

--that infamous panama hat!—

boots umbrellas jackets your pea coat mules slippers and long lace up boots.

Estate sale.

They boxed your paintings—six donated to the local museum--then sold your horde of paint tubes and jugs on craigslist

rolls and cans of brushes bolts of raw canvas gessoed panels  stretchers frames frameboxes buckets of turpentine pencils and pastels rulers glass belayers pliers hammers saws nails shears

--everything but the chalkboard you used to plan (wipe errors easily away!)

Gestalts and spectral surfaces buried here

When the plants died—who came to water them? Your executors? She’s in Ontario, he’s in Calgary—they tipped them out at the edge of the drive then stacked the pots beneath the stairs. Lumps of dry earth and brittle leaves.

(Chester L Stump Crust has joined a men’s group.)

They can’t wait to sell the house.

Anyone can see what they missed—

Gestalts and spectral surfaces buried here--

Yuppies’ trumpet scribbled on the wall or

a mouldering rind of cheese in the fridge

a half empty jug of orange juice a frozen chicken an open tin of salmon-flavoured catfood--where is your kitty anyway?

and that crude icon painted by your friend Fred.  You bought it at the art fair just to encourage him—the title you figured worth $30

Chester L Stump Crust has joined a men’s group.

Silly junk of carmined wood stowed on the garage ledge with the spare key.

Your fingerprints span the doorframe trace rainbow patter on the thermostat dial.

You never liked to be cold.

These photos were taken at an estate sale property in Curteis Point, Vancouver Island, BC, June 2011.

The life of a painter imagined here is a fiction, and bears no relation to the life or works referenced in the photographs.

The Solace of Colour

Grief. And Grace. II

After Linus died, and the bees came--and the wind, pinning us into one harbour after another--I began to dream in colour.  Marike and I would pack a lunch, bottles of water and gatorade, our swimsuits and snorkeling gear, and paper, brushes and boxes of paint, and head to shore.  We walked, swam, looked out to sea, and painted.  What mattered, to me anyway, was not so much the quality of the final product, but the fact of making something, the layering of colour, like a laying on of hands in our hearts.  Not healing exactly, but solar solace, a bouncing of light beams, a rendering of the world which rent us, at once awful and beautiful and more vast than we could tell.

Broken rocks for broken hearts.

 
Images
Watercolour sketches, San Juanico, BCS, Mexico, 18 March 2010