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The Artists Almanac
February 2004
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February is mud month.
The town dweller,
going from carpet to concrete to car, scarcely gives it a thought.
But in the country it is the season’s bane.
Just haying the horses
or filling the bird feeder can yield a week’s supply. It comes in
several varieties and colors: as clods, slime, paste, red, black,
brown and yellow. It hides in cleated shoes, later to sift as dust
into the pile of carpets and to grit our polished floors. We sling
it, slog through it, slip in it, fall in it, and regard it as little
above a cuss word.
We despise it, yet we
are made of it, live from it and eventually return to it. For it is
the stuff of creation.
It is the worst of
judgments on a piece of art. A muddy watercolor has lost the light
of transparency, and a muddy complexion in a portrait is to be
abhorred. Yet mud is the universal medium, and many of our best
paints are but special muds. Taken singly they regain their mother
colors but in combination they may sing. Smart painters know the
best grays are made by mixing a mud pie from the leftover colors on
yesterday’s palette. Pure white never appears in nature except in
the center of the sun, which is why experienced oil painters tone
their white canvases gray or red earth before beginning.
A sunny day in
February, if we can but pull ourselves from the Super Bowl or our
computers, is the best of times for a walk. A four-miler is no
sweat, and there is much to see. Jonquils make their first
appearance, and we can look for trout lilies in Hidden Valley. Its
delicious scent discovers wintersweet in the fencerows and the
exotic helleborus appear in the wildflower beds, hanging their heads
against the return of snows. Nights reveal the starry firmament,
Jupiter courting close to the half moon. My astronomy club is abuzz
with emails about the spectacular displays and the Mars landings.
The great owls call their mates and the distant sirens start the
coyote chorus.
Serious fishermen know
this is the time for trophy catches and they churn the lake with
their motors and lures. Friend Frank, baiting with a one pound jack
at the TVA Steam Plant boils, hooked a rockfish that all but towed
his boat ‘til he slipped the hook. His trophy is safe in his
imagination now, but will one day resurface in one of his shining
watercolors.
Winter fights back,
but we are almost two months past the solstice, and she knows she is
beaten. Wasn’t it Thoreau who said, “Spring comes in as a wastrel,
scattering her flowers everywhere and promising more than Summer can
possibly ever deliver”? Maybe so, but for the artist, the gardener,
and the fisherman, things look promising in February.
Bill Puryear
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