The days are becoming brief; the sun already slipping off at odd angles. There’s a cold secret in the morning air, and clouds breaking their soft bodies over the mountain.
I go to see the eye doctor and he is so thin, I wonder, what it is he wants to see. “Any questions?” he asks, and I look up and see that everyone around me is wearing glasses. “What does it mean?” I ask, and he sighs. Or I imagine the sigh, the way we imagine a prayer into a wood-cutter’s mouth.
“We are all going blind,” he says. “When God made the world he gouged on the sight – wing & seedling & tiger breath & pine – God saw, God saw, God saw, the way a woman knows the cost of living is to open her eyes and so tears a chunk out of the loaf of bread she kneaded over the hours, her life in her hands and in her mouth – God saw.” The eye doctor sets cold metal to my chin and forehead, begins clicking through slides. “Tell me the smallest thing you see.” Bricks. Brambles. The heron. I squint. “Please don’t squint.”
He brings a bright light to my eyes. It is too bright. I pluck it, pop it in my mouth, burst the white cherry. Light like juice fills my mouth.
For the last few months the sun has been so bright, I haven’t had time, properly, to see. Since the end of May I have been trundling out to farmers markets and art shows – two, four a week – across the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, kneeling and wielding a ratchet, nuts and bolts to set up pegboard displays – I’m missing a few washers and the soft pine wood is beginning to chip at the feet – and hanging art. And then, for four, or five, hours, I am available to anyone who chooses to stop and talk about art.
After a day, or a string of days, of vending art I’m grateful to have heard so many stories from so many people but also I can sense that my skin has woodened in the blaze of so many lives – this is, I tell myself, the summer of exposure. Exposure burns. I’ve been surprised, this Summer, at how much joy is also in the exposure.
There is a painting that has been drying for a month in my room - the oil paints, applied thickly, have taken over a month of sweaty humidity to set. I’m calling it ‘After the Storm’ because of the Mumford & Sons song and because we have to keep making these promises:
“But there will come a time You'll see, with no more tears And love will not break your heart But dismiss your fears . . . ”
When I brought it to the market on Sunday several people stopped to look at it and say: “the colours – it just makes me so happy.”
I find that after the fact, I can see why a piece of art works. In this one, the right side is heavy in greens and the mountains on the bottom have purple, a complimentary colour. On the left side is stark blues and reds, which also complement. The painting is balanced, north and south, east and west, but it’s also traveling. Like a poem, you can’t pin it up too neatly.
I had no idea this was what I was making. As I type, a tall canvas rests on an easel next to me, fan blowing on the oil paints. It’s a deep-sea scene with just a bit of sky at the top. I filled the sky with gold leaf – I have never done this before – because it needed to be heavier. It needed to press into the waves. How did I know this? I don’t know. Some past self, or future self, knows.
Now that the summer is over, I’m asking: What was made by showing up at markets? It’s something about seeing and being seen: the generosity of that, and the vulnerability of it.
For the next month - or two? - I’ll be unwinding the experience of selling art, and the stories I’ve heard on the streets, in this space with you. Meanwhile I’d love to know: what is your chosen form of creativity? And what is it like, to extend it towards others?
You wrote this so beautifully.. my preferred form of creativity has always been writing (mainly poems) but I also find solace and an unwinding in music, paper understands, the keyboard understands and so does the guitar and so, sometimes I sing. I used to be quite closed off to extending it to others but over the years, that has been changing and I've come to see that there's parts of us that can lift others up even when we gather pieces of ourselves and try to create something worth encountering..
It is a journey after all. Thank you for sharing :)
I can respect a painting that takes many weeks to dry and become itself. ♥️