I hope you didn’t think I’d abandoned my art adventures! It’s just that July and August were mostly so drearily hot and humid that I lost a lot of energy, sometimes for going out, and other times for reporting back. But I have in fact crossed off nearly all the galleries on my summer bingo card. A couple of them turned out to be closed for the summer, but I happened across others that I hadn’t originally known about or planned to go to, like the little one at Fisherman’s Cove (an outing that was also on my bingo card). I may fit one or two more in before classes begin for me next Wednesday: I see 14 Bells is actually open weekends, for instance, unlike a lot of the others on my list.

I continued to find it a hit or miss experience; I continued to find myself more drawn to watercolours; and I continued to puzzle sometimes over what makes paintings that (to my amateur eye) seem to display little technical skill worth framing and displaying. I’m not going to call out any specific examples. I do know something about modern art in a kind of general way, not just from visiting major galleries and from reading but also from watching the Great Courses art history videos; I understand that a lot of it is conceptual rather than what I might think of as pictorial, or aims to provoke ideas or reactions besides “that’s beautiful.” I understand some similar things about contemporary ‘classical’ music–but I still usually hate listening to it, and while ‘hate’ is too strong a word, some of the art I have seen is similarly unappealing. I don’t think this makes me reactionary exactly. I have very positive reactions to some abstract art! I think that for me, seeing something I recognize as artistry makes a difference, maybe.

Anyway! I took away from these outings a better sense of just how much artistic activity there is in this region, and how intensely local most of it is. I made more notes of artists whose work I did like: at the Secord Gallery on Quinpool Street, I lingered over the work of Kelly Mitchelmore; at 1274 Hollis I really enjoyed the paintings by Heather Crout and Helene Martin. In the small gallery at Fisherman’s Cove I was very drawn to Edward Wedler’s work–and was particularly interested that he does a lot of his painting en plein air. I bought a small print of one of his paintings and had a brief chat with him too, as he was on duty at the counter the day I was there. At Argyle Fine Art, I found Adele Webster’s paintings beautiful and calming: they are acrylic on board yet have something of the translucency I like in watercolour. I saw a lot of paintings at the Teichert Gallery, where you can pull out their many racks to take a look–but the process is a bit annoying and noisy, so I found it hard to be attentive or contemplative!

I wondered before if I would come to love the Nova Scotia landscape more through looking at it more often through an artist’s eyes. Maybe, a little? I was rereading some sections of The Mill on the Floss recently trying to choose a passage (for a purpose I will say more about in another post) and lingered over this beautiful bit:

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,—if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass; the same hips and haws on the autumn’s hedgerows; the same redbreasts that we used to call “God’s birds,” because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet, what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows,—such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.

I no longer consider Vancouver my home, but I feel things deep inside whenever I fly in and finally see the mountains, or walk along the streets or beaches and in the parks, that I never feel here.

I made a point of seeing more of the local scenery myself this summer by going on outings that did not require me to drive on the highways. (I just don’t see how, if you’re doing something for fun, you can be expected to do it in a way that you find genuinely and not unreasonably stressful!) One was to Fisherman’s Cove: I’d been there before long ago and remembered it being charming, which it is, sort of. The village itself is charming, and the colourful row of little shops is sweet too, except that what they sell is just so unrelentingly cheesy and touristy. The same is true of Peggy’s Cove, which I finally (after 31 years of living in Halifax!) visited in person. Peggy’s Cove is a spectacular site, and I really enjoyed my expedition there, including the funny and informative commentary from the guide on the bus tour I took–but it really does look just like the photos, which makes it weirdly anticlimactic, and I can’t see any need to ever go back there. Just in terms of value for money, I give the edge to my trip to Georges Island in Halifax harbour. For a fraction of what it cost to go to Peggy’s Cove and a fraction of the time it took to trek out by ferry and bus to Fisherman’s Cove, I got a delightful boat trip there and back, including a loop around the island before docking there, and an interesting time poking around the fortifications and enjoying the view of the city from there.

As you can tell, I made a concerted effort to have a better (richer, more interesting, less depressed) summer than I often have. (I did have work to do too, including a TLS review that will be out in the next issue, and another writing project I will say more about in a bit, as well as the usual preparation for the fall, an MA thesis to read, and bits of ongoing advising work.) On the whole, the effort was successful: it was a better summer. Still, the very phrase ‘concerted effort’ is a bit of a tell, right? I also worked hard to maintain the ‘social connections’ that my therapist is always reminding me are essential to our wellbeing. I was always happy to spend time with my friends–but again, ‘worked hard’ says something about the realities. People are busy with their own things in the summer, whether those are family things or travels or cottages: this is how it always is. Now they’re coming back and asking how my summer was and that says something too. I am working on being OK with that. I understand that social connection is a good thing, but maybe (and I have pointed this out to my therapist!) if someone just is alone a lot, it would be helpful not to constantly frame that as a problem but to work with them on approaching alone time as itself a good thing. I just finished Robert Coplan’s The Joy of Solitude and now I’m reading Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone by Netta Weinstein, Heather Hansen, and Thuy-vy T. Nguyen. Both books are really interesting on the research around solitude (including the need not to conflate it with loneliness)–and both books offer a potential counter-narrative to the familiar rhetoric around the current “epidemic of loneliness” or isolation that we hear so much about. There’s a chapter in the latter called “Can We Get Better at Being Alone?” and the answer, encouragingly, is yes.

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.