p e n c h a n t

one: to repel flies while working in the garden, tie lemon balm in your hair or rub it into your skin. I do this frequently, because I don’t like commercial sprays, and the buzzing and biting of flies is annoying

two: when creating a work of art, capture the essence of the idea or the subject, then stop—in this case, the greenery in the hair. to continue on to complete the face would have been fine, but it also would have changed the focus. once the art becomes more developed, it’s easy to forget the original inspiration. if I had gone on to create a full painting, I would have put the lower portion of the face in shadow

this is a visual journal sketch, drawn quickly because the garden was calling
ballpoint pen & acrylic on paper

is the gasp
or the yawn
or the sneeze
or the song
or the symphony
of the self

or the shards

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is the soar of the wings or the flit

or the flailing

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is a stone that sleeps
in the somewhere soil
a star that winks
in the sometime sea
a sun that shines
from a somehow stalk
a cloud that shifts
in the somewhy sky

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is the line
or collection of lines
or confusion of lines
or clarity of lines

of thought

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is a dream outside a dream within a dream

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written in an attempt to capture the uncapturable / by troy howell

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AND THE END OF ALL OUR EXPLORING

WILL BE TO ARRIVE WHERE WE STARTED

AND KNOW THE PLACE FOR THE FIRST TIME.

from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Little Gidding”

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collage © 2002 by Olin Howell

There is one scent that has always stirred my senses: the enchanting pungency of artist’s oils and linseed. As a student I’d enter the halls of the Art Center School of Design and feel both comfort and excitement. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that comes with the smell, that creation is at work: the head and the heart and the hand laboring together to produce a vision not yet fully realized but full of possibility. You peer in the door and see the quiet, repetitive dip of the sable or bristle hair brush into the paint, the certain stroke across the stretched linen, the wiping of the brush into the rag. Stepping back, tilting the head, squinting the eyes, stepping forward, dipping the brush—the artist is taking the slow dance of creativity under the revolving sky of the artist’s dream.

Ink has a poignant, serious smell, and ink is absolute. Watercolors have the fragrance of subtle charm, and charming and subtle is their effect. Sketch, charcoal, print papers—these emit the ancient memory of trees, and their fibers absorb the marks laid on them, like expressions of passion etched into bark.

The American artist, Walter Meigs, said, “Experience, even for the painter, is not exclusively visual.”

Of the many allurements of art, one is its bouquet.

and a crimson of cardinals burdens the birdfeeder, five crows—one with a hiccup
that follows its every caw—come harassing, the cat who wanted out wants in again,
both wood stoves, upstairs and down, are coughing and choking, and the ink in my
pen’s gone cold.

artwork is charcoal—the real stuff, right from the hearth—on charcoal paper

Yesterday my wife and I took a small break from the pressures of work to visit the studio of Gari Melchers, which overlooks the Rappahannock River in Falmouth, Virginia. Melchers (1860-1932) was a world-known American impressionist. His wife, Corinne Mackall, who was 20 years his junior, was also an accomplished artist. They had no children.

The Melcher home is undergoing restoration and their personal collection of paintings, which includes works from Morisot and Rodin, is currently on display in the gallery off the studio. There is a portrait of Corinne and her brother, Leonard, painted by an unidentified artist when the two were young golden-haired children; he might have been four, she, two.

On the way home my wife remembered that years ago she had bought a set of books that had Corinne’s name written in them. I found them behind the glass doors of the secretary.

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I have always liked the books and made sure they’ve been kept safe; I’ve always been on the lookout for a matching volume of Shakespeare’s histories, if there is one. I opened the volumes, and found the same inscription inside each, handwritten in ink.

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Leonard Mackall was a bibliophile, and was known for giving books away to people he believed would appreciate and take care of them, rather than sell them at exorbitant prices. He gave away as many as 200 books a year, yet maintained a 12,000 volume library of his own. He was also known for discovering rare books. Once while in London, he visited the British Museum to ask to see a particular book on American exploration. The librarian refused his request on the reason that the book was too rare for even a specialist to handle. Not put off by the librarian’s aloofness, Mackall went to Oxford in search of another copy, found one in a second-hand shop, paid two shillings for it, and promptly returned to the British Museum. The librarian was speechless.

Corinne, ever sensitive to the needs of the community here in Fredericksburg, may have loaned out this two-volume set (to a student, I’m thinking) and never got them back (something my wife and I have experienced all too often). They ended up in the old junk shop in which my wife found them, years ago. Corinne (1880-1955) willed the Melcher estate to the commonwealth of Virginia. We plan to return the books to their rightful place.

The books were obvious birthday gifts from her brother: Corinne was born on February 27.

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Painting by Gari Melchers

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I wrote this years ago as a creative writing exercise. It’s a little quaint, but I think there’s something here worth saying.

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It wasn’t from anger or frustration, but from passion and pressure and overuse.

Picture a cutaway view of a room, like a medieval painting of a monk’s cubicle, womblike. The light is dreamy. On the tarnished floor sits a black swivel chair—sometimes it is a throne, sometimes a hard stool.

At present  it is a stool, and on it sits a body, bent and laboring. It is a man: he is an artist. Above him hovers a cloud, and in the cloud swirl myriad colors and shapes, images, vagaries and histories, questions and definitions and elusive unknowns. He takes a swipe at the cloud now and then, and like a wide-eyed child after a firefly, brings the brush down to draw it across the empty surface before him. He does this defiantly at times, at times with uncertainty, but always with quiet anticipation.

And there it appears: a thing once invisible, to see. Proof of intellect, of desire, of pain perhaps, of love.

It is the most brilliant spot in the room.

But look! See the spot spread, watch it grow; it washes over the astonished artist, spills across the room; it appears greater than even the cloud.

The cloud grows bright too. Sometimes it swells. But sometimes it rains gloomy and dark; sometimes it shrinks, almost vanishing completely.

Yet the artist works on and on and on.

One day his weary hand breaks—his work-weary, gnarled hand. He bandages it up.

But how the cloud grows, grows to an enormous height, towering over him! So he straps the brush to his bandaged hand, and once again plunges and plunges and plunges into an ocean of turbulent hues, storm-wracked, severe under northern light.

One day the brush breaks. It snaps on a rugged landscape of a face: a commanding, crowded brow filled with concept, and stained-glass mysteries of eyes.

The artist is left with his broken brush, splintered at the heart and hanging by an impossible shred. This brush that conjured magical fog, ran across glorious hills, sharpened life into focus, stirred a vast sea of spirits.

He wraps up the brush—wraps it and wraps it as with a shroud. But underneath the wraps, the brush remains broken.

The light is fading in the cutaway scene; the room becomes lone and silent. The cloud blackens; it rains and rains and rains and rains. It rains until there is no more rain. The cloud is gone.

But the brilliant spot is propped up in eternity for all the world to see.

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I’ll be taking a break from blogging for a few weeks in order to meet some deadlines.

The works of both artists influenced me, those of N. C. and his son, Andrew. I remember the moment I first saw an N. C. Wyeth illustration. I was a boy and an artist, so the impact was sublime: pirates on the high seas, wind-blown, sun-seared, grim. It was a rich, bold composition for the cover of the Scribner’s classic, Treasure Island. The fact that Robert Louis Stevenson was one of my favorite authors heightened the experience. I was just as enthralled, if not more, when years later I saw the originals from the book at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Being a student of Howard Pyle, the father of American illustration, N. C. knew how to become his subject, whether pirate or Huron or Rip Van Winkle, in order to paint with authority. Not only did he live out the drama of his works in his mind, he surrounded himself with real articles of fading American cultures—many of which appear in his illustrations.

My first awareness of Andrew’s work was not Christina’s World—the famed painting of the stranded girl in the bleak, tense landscape (the real Christina was a victim of polio)—it was the graphite drawing of the bedpost for Chambered Nautilus. I had read that Andrew used a plain Number Two pencil—the kind I used in school—rather than an austere range of F, HB, B, B2, and so on. This told me it wasn’t as much the tools you used as it was what you did with them.

As Andrew developed as an artist under his father’s admiring eye, something unusual began to unfold. Father began to be follow son. Andrew explored directions away from book illustration, inspired by his environs rather than from literature. His art became a visual journal. I once thought that Andrew picked up where his father had left off—painting with egg tempera on panel, but it was N. C. who learned the technique from Andy, and with it sought to create art beyond illustration, which he undervalued.

The time came when father and son each entered a work for an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Andrew’s was accepted; N. C.’s was not. Son had eclipsed father, at least in the world of gallery work. At least at that moment. For Andrew, due in part to the fact that his father was the great illustrator and his own work had a straightforward narrative, would not be taken seriously by the highbrow art scene much of his long career.

His career now over, son has joined father to stand as a major fellow figure in the American composition of art and culture.

One of the best works written on the Wyeth dynasty is N. C. Wyeth, A Biography by David Michaelis (Knopf, 1998). Michaelis spent six years in research for the book, and had access to the family letters through the gracious permission of Betsy, Andrew’s wife.

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It is not so much a matter of what we see as it is understanding what we see.
Vision must be of the mind. This is true for the arts as well as for life itself.

“Without vision the people perish.” —a proverb of Solomon

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collage by Troy Howell

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One reason I like this time of year is that nature drops us little reminders that drab is not the only color. Where I live in the Eastern United States, the chlorophyll is gone, the light is low, snow comes. It’s against the snow you notice them most, those festive bright-colored spots: a cardinal, holly berries, rose hips. The red-breasted grosbeak is a sight, displaying a shocking splash of blood on its pure white chest.

As the leaves dropped off our maple tree, we wondered what the delicate tendrils were that lingered, circling the trunk, yellow-leaved with small orange pods. The leaves soon fell, the pods opened, red berries remained. “The bittersweet!” my wife exclaimed. She had planted one in an outdoor urn four years ago, and uprooted it when it did not take. Perhaps the urn was too confining. She tossed it down the hillside, to return it to the earth.

It’s thriving now.

William Morris—writer, designer, craftsman, printer, painter, visionary in Victorian times—once told a client he would paint her room the blue of a starling’s egg. How often do we consider the source of a color, a natural representation of it, rather than a commercial version or swatch? You must study nature to do so.

Here then, is bittersweet-berry red, and its companion color, bittersweet-berry-leaf orange.