Art Adventures

July Reading: Pushing Through the Dog Days

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Summer: not my favourite season, as I have said here many times before. July included – as it so often does – a stretch of really hot weather. I was grateful for my portable air conditioner, which I trundled from living room to bedroom as needed (sorry, downstairs neighbours!). Fred finds the heat a bit dispiriting as well: she has not been as playful as usual (but the vet has given her a clean bill of health, don’t worry) and she even gets off my lap sometimes and just stretches out on the floor. I get it, Fred! It’s weird to find myself almost (almost!) looking forward to winter, just for the snuggles.

My reading slump has somewhat improved this month, I am glad to say. The most fun I’ve had with a book in a while was Belinda Bauer’s The Impossible Thing, which was one of those serendipitous bookstore choices. Its cover caught my eye–I had never heard of it, or Bauer, before–and the premise both amused and intrigued me, so I decided to risk it and was glad I did. It’s not a particularly weighty or cerebral book, but it’s an entertaining story set in a world I never knew existed: the world of high stakes and now illegal egg collecting. Who knew! The Impossible Thing is based on a real historical incident to do with a fabulous rare egg that disappeared. It’s got good characters, a nice sense of time and place, and a twisty plot that just avoids being too wacky to care about. So many much-hyped books these days aren’t much fun (I DNF’d John of John, just for instance–I’m sure it’s very good and all, but it’s so dour!). If you are in a slump yourself and trying to gin up more enthusiasm for reading, you might give this one a try. I am curious now about Bauer’s other novels, one of which, I see, was a Booker nominee.

I also quite liked Kate Worsley’s Foxash, which I bought with similarly little advance knowledge and thus no clear expectations. It wasn’t fun, exactly, but it’s very atmospheric, and its attention to growth and renewal and life cycles nicely draws together its farm setting and its plot about pregnancy and birth. I am not sure how to characterize Foxash in terms of genre. Is there such a thing as “a novel of foreboding”? There is a mounting sense across the novel that things are not quite what they seem and are not going to turn out well (both of which are indeed the case) but Worsley avoids heavy-handed signals of suspense or threat. Like The Impossible Thing is is very detailed about its time and place, in this case the farms established by the British government’s Land Settlement Association during the depression. Its main characters have fallen on hard times with the closing of a mine and taken up the opportunity to resettle in the country. There’s a lot in the novel about lettuce, in case that piques your interest.

I already wrote about finishing Woolf’s diaries, and I have also written before about Peter Grainger’s mysteries (I have read more since then!). Thinking about Elizabeth George for that post inspired me to go back to one of her earlier ones so I reread With Noone As Witness–the one with the BIG plot twist, IYKYK. It’s pretty good, better (more focused and engaging) than the more recent ones I’ve struggled with. But then I tried Careless in Red and my interest ran out. Basically, she gives as much if not more attention to all the characters in the case as she does to the ‘main characters’–and they just aren’t the ones I care about, which is on me really, not on her. I have never enjoyed Louise Penny in print but I saw that the narrator of the audiobooks of her Gamache series has won prizes so I listened to Glass Houses and the narrator is indeed very good, though the book itself still seemed heavy-handed and portentous.

I also struggled with Tana French’s The Keeper–which as I noted on Bluesky clarified for me that this series is really not set up as crime fiction, or at least not as ‘mysteries,’ but as inquiries into Irish village life. I would have to reread the Dublin Murder Squad to be sure but I expect you could frame them the same way: that in them, she is using the structure of detective novels to explore and expose aspects of Irish culture, especially the way the country’s past weights on people in its present. I got through The Keeper by allowing myself to skim when I got too impatient with the lengthy reports of conversations: yes, I have defended the scenes at the Rainbow in Silas Marner on the grounds that (as GE herself argued) you can’t expect country rustics to be scintillating, but hey, I wasn’t reading this one for work! I will say, though, that the last 100 pages or so were quite gripping, and I know that the slow build-up and the attention to the community lading up to it contributed to that effect. Still, I have put my stack of Cal Hooper novels into my ‘donate’ pile as I can’t imagine rereading them.

I have tried to keep up my summer art (and other) adventures. I had an enjoyable trip to Fisherman’s Cove which turned out also to have a little gallery; I particularly liked the watercolours by Edward Wedler, whose work you can see at his own website. I bought a small print of his painting of the Margaree River in Cape Breton (which you can see on page 5, if you are scrolling through his web gallery). I also took the little boat out to Georges Island in Halifax harbor, something I really should have done years ago. It’s a nice 10-15 minute trip (they go once around the island on the way there, so you get a full circle view) and an interesting historical site.

Art Adventures II

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I have been on two more small art adventures so far.

One was accidental! I was cutting through the lane that now runs between Birmingham and Queen (past the new Fluevog store, locals will know what I mean) to get to Weird Harbour (again, IYKYK) and happened across a small gallery that had just opened a few days earlier. It is called ARTport, and it features “local artists from the Halifax Regional Municipality.”

Once again, I was particularly drawn to the watercolours, especially those by Judith Orr. You can see an array of them on her Facebook page. I am wary about posting photographs of working artists’ originals, so I don’t have specific examples to show you, but it struck me again that the qualities I like include looseness, transparency, and simplicity.

Then last night I took advantage of the AGNS’s free Thursday evening admission to go check out their exhibition of watercolours by the early 20th-century artist Henry Rosenberg before it closes in early August. I did take a photograph of one of these just as a sample; it is the same one that they reproduced on a much larger scale on the wall.

Visiting local galleries means, probably inevitably, seeing a lot of paintings of local scenes. In addition to whatever I might learn about art or art appreciation, it is possible that spending time with these works is going to enhance my appreciation of Nova Scotia’s landscape, with which I have long had an ambivalent relationship. It is just so not like the landscapes I grew up with in B.C., which are not only precious in that way our childhood landscapes are because they are so entwined with our earliest memories and oldest loves (see The Mill on the Floss for more eloquence about this) but just more grand, I might even say more sublime. Everything here has always seemed so flat, and for so many months of the year, so drab.

I have come to love specific nearby locations, especially Point Pleasant Park, which has reconciled me somewhat to those strong horizontal lines and the colours of the Atlantic, but I do not get excited about Nova Scotia landscapes in general. I realize that I have never been to some of the more spectacular parts of the province, including Cape Breton. Heck, I still haven’t even been to Peggy’s Cove! That’s also on my bingo card for this summer – but because I hate car travel so much, it’s just really difficult for me to get around and see what I might be missing. By showing me what they see and love, these artists are helping me see the province a bit differently, perhaps a bit more positively.

I popped in to look at Maud Lewis’s house again. It’s very sweet but I am not really sold on the artistic merits of her paintings. I get that they are “folk art,” not . . . whatever the alternative is. They are bright and cute, I guess. And I wandered for a minute in the Joan Jonas exhibit “We come from the sea” but it was not for me.

Art Adventures I

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

As I have written about here before, I don’t typically enjoy summer all that much. Although I’m not sure how much that has to do with the season itself as opposed to the change in – or absence of – routines and structure and sociability that comes with the break from the teaching term, I did find this discussion of “Summer SAD” interesting (the segment starts about 20 minutes in). It’s definitely true that the expectation that you are having a wonderful time simply because it is summer can make it harder to be honest about how you are actually doing.

The expert advice in that discussion is to get out and do “fun” summertime things, but I don’t swim or bike or hike, and NS’s beaches (like most of its destinations!) are hard to get to without driving on highways, which I hate. So in the spirit of what they call “behavioural activation,” I decided to devise a summer activity list for myself that better reflects my actual interests and preference, including a list of local art galleries to visit. One of the main themes of the painting class I took in April and May was that aspiring artists need to look at a lot of art. Halifax does not have a major gallery on the scale of MOMA or the National Gallery or the Tate or MFA; our biggest, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, is (sorry) not a very rich or inspiring space, though over the years I have had some good visits there. But the city has quite a smattering of small galleries showcasing local artists, most of which I have never checked out. I put their names, and a few other ideas for outings and experiments, on a kind of ‘bingo’ card in my bullet journal. I don’t have a prize picked out for crossing them all off: while gamifying my plans will (I hope) help me actually do the things, the reward should be the experiences themselves.

That’s a lot of preamble – sorry! The main point is that, just as “Poetry Serendipity” has encouraged me to take more chances in the library in an extremely risk-free way, “Art Adventures” will hopefully encourage me to look around at more visual art, moving on from what I don’t like, enjoying what I do like, and not overthinking it. Since I am trying my hand at painting, but not at poetry, though, I am curious about what I might learn from what I see. As we talked about in the painting class, the possibilities are really infinite; figuring out what you actually want your own art to do or be like is easily as overwhelming as trying to master any of the technical stuff.

I have been to two galleries from my list so far. One, the Craig Gallery at Alderney Landing, was a bit chaotic when I was there as one exhibition was literally ending (people were taking down and packing up the paintings as I wandered around). I did see some paintings I liked, but it wasn’t really possible to absorb much, so I’ll have to go back, though I guess I won’t see any of those same ones again.

I had better luck this morning at the Prow Gallery on Lower Water Street. It’s a bigger space and there was quite a lot to look at, including some works in wood, or combining wood and fabrics or threads. I really liked “Mollusk,” by Douglas Drdul: there’s something so satisfyingly glossy and tactile about it, and the wood grain is so beautiful and used so ingeniously to create the look of the shell. If I lived with it, I know I would be constantly running my hands over it. (I was very good in the gallery and obeyed the signs saying no touching!)

I was mostly interested in the paintings, of course and here’s one thing I learned from them about my own taste or aesthetic. Quite a lot of the paintings were done in acrylics and were what I would call very highly finished (I don’t know the right vocabulary for this). They were perfectly smooth all over; the lines of the pictures or designs were also smooth and clear. You could not discern any brushwork; for some of them, even quite close up they could almost have been glossy prints, not originals. I’ll use this one as an example, not to call it out but because I actually think in some ways it is really lovely. Here’s another one: I really loved how the artist did the water and reflections. Despite their clear technical excellence, none of the paintings with these qualities really spoke to me, for lack of a better way to put it: I would not pick them for my wall. There’s something too smooth about them, not painterly enough.

The one artist whose works really did appeal to me was, as it happens, also the only one who had any watercolours on exhibit there. His name is David Lidbetter, and when I got home I looked him up and found his own website, where you can see more of his work, including a lot of oils but also more watercolours and others using mixed media. I’m going to be grasping for vocabulary here, and my previous experience with studying art has not led me to think there is necessarily a good set of terms ready to hand. What I like about Lidbetter’s paintings is that they are not completely abstract (I react much like Olivia to art that just looks like a big mess) but they are also clearly not attempted copies of reality but ideas about it, or impressions of it. They feel like looking through someone’s eyes, rather than just seeing what someone saw – does that even make sense, as a distinction? Something about the other paintings feels too fixed to me, too static; I like how Lidbetter’s evoke scenes without getting too literal about them. I particularly liked both “Northern Lake” and “Fading Light,” which are quite minimalist.

The painting at the top of this post is one of my own, from last year, of Black Rock Beach in winter. It remains a personal favourite, for its simplicity and minimalism. Simplicity is hard to paint, it turns out. Getting an even wash for the sky, for example – I was pretty happy with the way that turned out here, with the lighter glow near the horizon. Stopping before you do too much is also really hard, and, with watercolours, usually irreparable. This is not a very accomplished painting, and yet I haven’t done one since that I have been quite as satisfied with. I don’t know what to make of that, especially as I have been taking more classes and practicing diligently. It is possible that the effort I have been putting in has worked against me by making me more self-conscious.