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The Artist’s
Almanac
July 2008
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Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept
finely shorn.
- Francis Bacon
This July is different. After a mild
winter, a frost-free spring, and abundant rain we have the finest
harvests anyone can remember. Cumulus sails high overhead and a
breeze makes shade comfortable this Fourth of July. We have, in
plenty, apricots, apples, peaches, figs, and shall make our first
pecan crop. The pears are like to break the laden limbs as they
ripen.
Languorous lunchtimes lead to lazy
afternoons in. I think of days at the old millpond as a boy, under
the deep shade of overhanging trees, watching a bobber through a
half doze as the gar sun themselves just under the surface and the
dragonflies flit from rotten log to mud bank. Today the blowsy
trees I see from my studio display dozens of rich greens, with
draping clusters of leaf and mysterious caverns of shadows. This
day rhymes with the memory of others far away, on the creek, when
the definition of eternity was, all summer long.
History does not repeat itself, but
it rhymes. The resonance of one place in another is cherished by
the Japanese in their packed island – so crowded that even the
spaces between railroad tracks are cultivated. Their tiny walled
gardens may image an ocean, with raked sand, or a carefully chosen
boulder, a mountain. Little wooden bridges are placed artfully,
leading the eye to an old forest of two or three miniature trees
in the far corner. Perhaps a tiny reflecting pool. Imagination
does the rest. Contemplation ensues.
In America we have plenty of space
and no need for models. Or don’t we? Our golf courses are our
gardens, giving an illusion of space within a subdivision crowded
with look-alike houses. The energy crisis may yet limit our travel
and drive us back to cities. There we may build falling water into
our private gardens with fish sunning themselves in tiny ponds.
Nothing is more sumptuous than a
kitchen garden, where one thing follows another, a succession of
hope and plenty. Spent pea vines are pulled and potatoes are dug,
to be replaced by corn, eggplant and okra. Although farming passed
as a way of life over a century ago, who of us does not retain
some notion of ourselves as farmer and long for a vegetable garden
to sustain our independence?
My granddaughter has hers – a source
of immense pride and her daily occupation in July. From it she
brings us squash, beans, tomatoes and dill, for seasoning the
buttery new potatoes.
Just as the Japanese gardener, the
artist rhymes nature. Avoiding surfeit in green is a challenge and
he avoids tube colors where possible, to mix green, itself a
secondary color, from the primaries on his palette. He can never
equal nature, but may encourage his viewer’s imagination and
memory to take part in the rhyming.
Yet nature has surely outdone
herself this year. Perhaps, having taken away our frenetic bull
market, she has compensated us with abundance and with beauty.
I planted my orchard trees ten years
ago and they are just now coming into their finest fruit. A
forester once informed me that trees compound growth over their
lifetimes at a rate of 6% per annum. Given today’s market, I’ll
take it.
Lodi cooking and pie apples
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