B-Sides

It was only after months of passing by the image, which was matted to a sheet of cardboard between the studio door and storage cabinets, that she would notice there was an Icarus at all. Two tiny flailing legs in the lower right corner behind a ship behind a shepherd looking up at the sky, behind a cliff lined with intricate foliage, behind a man pushing a cart horse down a hill, away from the tragedy, his bright red blouse singing with the salty pale green-blue of Bruegel’s sea. In another of the studio’s reproductions, the painting was cropped to just that - to the man in the red blouse against the salty pale green-blue, his round black head at the center and maybe an inch of the shepherd behind him. A color study. Facing the whole picture with paint brush in hand, one might see those two tiny tragic flailing legs as denoting recession in space; a device in distinguishing the distance of land to sea, of sea to distant sky. A lively dash of beige. Any painting student could neglect those two strokes and still find themselves with a convincing semblance of Bruegel’s whole.

But the more times she encountered it, the more she noticed in fact this tiny, flailing Icarus was decisive in the composition, providing each averted glance, each shift in scale with its reason. The ballooning of the ship’s sails, for one. Call it the wind, but such a spherical seaward surge could be incited by nothing less than an actual kick, that diagonal shift of the legs, a burst of energy issued from a skyward palunk down to water. Additionally, how the shepherd’s aversion of his gaze, away from the tragedy (instead toward his sheep and up to the sky) alerted us to the tragedy’s existence. And the man in the red blouse in the foreground, pushing his cart horse down the steps that snaked away from the ocean? The cropped version of the picture emphasized how his round black head united the ground and sky, steadying the composition’s recessions in space onto the flat plane of the canvas. But his eyes, indeed any hint of a facial expression was suppressed under that head - what of that? What was the point of all this? The answer, whatever it was, was in the tiny, hidden legs of Icarus. Without them the painting was only angles in space, no more than colors on a flat canvas. 

 The air was thick and warm in the studio that day, to the detriment of the week-old fruit slumped across the tables and benches. No one else was around and so Elsa had turned 16th-century Hungarian Lute music on the speakers, readying herself for the breakthrough which as of this morning felt imminently possible. But now it was past 3pm and she had scrubbed her canvas twice over with turpentine, only to begin again on that same curvature of cantaloup that faded into the trio of glass bottles. She could see herself coloring in forms, putting strokes down mechanically. She was holding up her paint brush to measure the objects’ proportions, proceeding with no other reason, it increasingly seemed, than to finish her thought.   

While walking out of town toward Marchutz, a woman in a bright red dress and wild gray hair stopped me - excusez-moi Madamoiselle. She pointed behind me, to a straw hat with a pink flower on it that was sitting in the window of a trunk of the car and said that as she saw me walking up this sidewalk she remarked how nice this hat would look on me with its pink flower (matching my pink top). The man beside her, slightly younger, laughed but didn’t say much. She then asked where I’m from and I said j’habite a New York mais je viens de “Caroline de Nord.” Ah, North Ca-ro-lina, she voiced, as if this were the name of a resort town.  

In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action. No memory of the past, no looking back, no doubts, no questions.

 -- Anais Nin  

I had been painting a chair, a chair in my white-walled flourescent-lit MFA studio. A chair on a little rug with a big scarf hanging behind it and two glass bottles to the side. I was trying out a new technique of layering paint , which worked out ok considering my indifference to my subject matter.

Eventually I exit the studio and enter Brooklyn. It is night. When I arrived the sun had been hard on my skin, the air bright and loud. Now it is dark and steamy after the rainstorm that had hit while I was inside my cubicle. I’m too new to the city to say what it is, but what I can tell you now is Brooklyn is not a chair against a white flourescent lit wall. As the sidewalk blocks accumulate, I near the conclusion that I cannot be paintings chairs in rooms. Maybe I cannot even be painting any sort of still life. I cannot paint flowers in a vase. I need to be on the streets. To be doing more drawings. To paint New York. Anybody have a roof I could borrow?

Under the succession of streetlamps, a dapperly dressed black man muttering on his stoop; there are two boys chasing each other across the street; there are neighbors greeting each other outside brightly-lit bodegas, there are a small hub of twenty-somethings outside a bar, there is that old guy saying “hey girl,” there are many many little windows stacked on a grid between brownstones and brick buildings. I look for little hints of inner lives - windows open, music playing, friends talking, silhouettes in the windows. Between everything, the buzz of cars, the hum of the subway beneath my feat, the planes cresting the sky above the roofs.  

My mind is ringing with my professors’ old dictate: paint what you see. I was painting what I saw back there, there with the chair and bottles. But now that out of synch with the broader scope of my experience. How far does the human sight extend? Will what’s out in the streets infuse how I see inside the studio or does it demand a confrontation? Can I close gaps of vision with thought? I look, I walk, my thoughts all questions. Shadows on the sidewalk and rows of windows lit up against the night. Artificial lights bleeding into artificial lights; concrete into concrete; lives into lives.

No books in the the shops are meant to be read in Obenia, only savored with the eyes and brushed through with the fingers. Pages only contain the beginnings of paragraphs, enough to just taste before moving on to yet another well-designed cover, the last forgotten. Beautiful facades with doors engraved with cherubs and lions open to empty concrete lots. Smells arise independently, without any reference to something which could be consumed. Stores are empty of produce save for in the windows, wherein cheeses, meats and pears are replaced and disposed weekly to the dogs who have been known to disfigure each other for just a bite, being that they are not fed anything else.

It is a wonder how anyone is born in Obenia because no one has sex there except with their eyes. And since the people of Obenia are constantly in motion, stopping only to sleep, arousals and orgasms will occur as they are passing each other on the street to and from the city’s various gardens, historic Piazzas and display cases filled with glass miniatures of local architecture. It is not uncommon for shrieks of pleasure to sound from practically anywhere; thus these are usually ignored. I have heard of a woman who, having climaxed by the 3-second glance of a man standing by the produce window, collapsed sobbing and then fell asleep, only to wake up confused as to where she was, and the appearance of he who provoked her.

This time last January I was far away from Boston but a similar place – looking out at the snow, wondering what futures hid latent in the soil beneath.

I was at a writing retreat in the Scottish Highlands – it was a Christmas gift – and had awoken before dawn so as not to miss anything. A single yellow lamp lit the empty pages of my notebook on a wooden desk, facing a window. Outside the morning was black as ink, lights floating like stars on the invisible hills. Simmering pinks peeled the horizon into earth and sky. Birds imprinted their silhouettes across the horizon and on my page, where I was trying to construct some resemblance of their poetry. I scrawled down a few more sentences. From my second floor room of the cottage I could hear the footsteps and silverware clatter of the other writers taking their breakfast downstairs.

If only I did this every morning, I thought, by next year I’d…

Before lunch I pledged to myself that I would do yoga, draw, and write a story every day (the sketch I had written of my witness of dawn was later corrupted into a narrative). And then a year passed.

I returned to Aix-en-Provence a week later. In the months that followed, in between my duties as an alumni fellow at the Marchutz School of Fine Arts, I painted a ton. I did do a lot of yoga. I never managed to finish (or successfully start) a piece of fiction, but I did write pages in my sketchbook about my three dates with a French guitar player and about a yellow bird I watched fly into one of the studio’s windows and die (I had the idea to put him on a platter to paint as a still-life and save a day under plastic wrap, much to the dismay of anyone with basic hygiene standards). Come April, I pulled my Livre de Brouillon out of a paint-soaked backpack and bemoaned my inability to capture the essence of a narrow canal bridge at mid-day in Venice. Then, in the heat of summer toward the end of my fellowship, I took to its pages like a starry eyed teenager after one fortuitous night at the Bar Sextius and went back to it periodically, between long mornings and bed and afternoons at the bar tabac, until that one morning when I watched him watch my bus pull out of the Gare Routiere. I never completed anything. But as I sat on the TGV headed toward the Paris Airport, a light-soaked curtain of trees and green landscapes and rivers blurring past me in reverse, I wasn’t so sad as much as I was…grateful. If I was blue it was only at the wonder and loneliness of approaching so many frontiers.

As time nudged on into August and September, the fact that I hadn’t finished any pieces of writing that I was proud of, or that the progress I had made in painting had reached a stalemate (or so it seemed), became a problem. I had half a year left, but what of it? The most important months of 2015 (or so it seemed) had ended. But from them I could retrieve no narrative arc. No words to aptly describe the overlaps of art and poetry and life, no words to describe the extremely personal frustrations of laboring to capture light and color and love and loss in paint from a little house over a wheat field of Provence, France. Not yet.

In my latest attempts, I latch onto writing flat characters, to people I half-knew, yet who manage to communicate some character of that place without much effort on my part. There was the man with flat white hair and a burlap-looking three piece suit and an endearing frog-lipped frown who would sell his delicate mountain paintings in the square by the cathedral. There was Poussy, walking down the bend of road by the Chateau Noir with close-set eyes, tousseled hair possibly with the MOST endearing frown, a rugged southern accent and a tendency to greet one with animal noises rather than the typical Bises and Bonjour. I think about Marek, the Marchutz gardener (did we describe him once as a very large cherub?) with a kind-eyed smile and a Polish inflection to his thick southern French who would bring cakes and champagne after long days working on the architecture project. I write about these people because I can describe them in two sentences and know that matches the extent of my knowledge of them. Then there are the professors, who stood just far enough away, or above, for us to see. John is Socrates, Alan is Aristotle; John is Tintin, Alan is the Ship Captain – although something of their warmth, humor and intellect (and what of those things?) is lost in making such comparisons. It’s the ones I am closest to who are impervious to description. The best friends whose I could list right here but won’t, because names don’t cut it. They are vast, endless; they don’t fit perfectly into adjectives. And so it is was with that year. Maybe I have had trouble writing about it, back then or now, because there is no end to what I learned from living in France and apprenticing at the Marchutz School – its lessons are still unfolding, through every painting that I make, through whatever I see and write and film, forever.

Including right now. I am heavy with neglected beginnings: on my computer desktop are the first pages of stories, research ideas, bad poems, expansions of journal entries, screenplays, enough to scrap together a printed volume that’d weigh as much as War and Peace, only more fictional. In the corner of my room are last year’s paintings; moments frozen at the edge of truths I haven’t yet reached. I want to finish things. But I also don’t want to cease to begin out of some fatalistic desire for clean conclusions. I want to reflect more and to share more, more of the progress I’m making and the things I’m seeing right now. I need to blog.

A blog looks at what gets lost in the grand scheme, in the summary, in the narrative arc. Although I wrote pages and pages of my own back then, sometimes I regret not sharing what was happening in the moment-to-moment (no matter, I was too busy living). Which brings me share something that doesn’t quite fit into the narrative of my year in Aix, and consequently I haven’t shared – that week in the Scottish Highlands. It wasn’t productive in the sense that I finished much worth sharing with anyone, but I did try haggis. I took a long walks through an empty, snowy, hillside, and took pictures of sheep on the snow. I met people I would have never known existed otherwise, with whom I shared dinners and shop talk, and on the last night of the week, our stories. A 60-year old fisherwoman read a poem she’d written in a journal many years ago about an unrequited love (what I remember is she was the sea). A PHD student from Edinburgh read the first pages of a noirish novel which sees a dead girl return to her grave. A Glasgow police officer shared his vision of city violence as hyenas or cougars – I can’t remember which – at a watering hole in the wild. Their stories rang more true to me than most things I had mulled over that week, more true than the essay I’d been trying to write about going to Morrocco with my family, with the exception perhaps being one little prose poem I wrote one morning, about seeing the ground split from the sky.

I was charmed, moved by these former stranger’s inner lives. Sometimes it seems to me that in whatever form it takes, artistic communion is the most we have.

So what have I left to share? The mind set on constructing futures, I’m finding, has a hard time believing that the past is composed of unremarkable moments of presence, and that the meaning each day holds in retrospect was once tenuous, ungraspable. Like right now. Here I am again, not facing a narrative, but a window.

Aix is a heavy, humid hot. Our one-room apartment gets no respite from the open window, just a little levity from the voices down below and the distant chatter, clank of forks and music from the hub of small tables that fill the Place des Cardeurs, to which the far end of our crooked alley, Rue Venel, opens. In the evening, sometime around 9pm, the starlings will start up their chirp and the music will loud, and the laughter will hum, and the aged stucco wall from the apartments twelve feet across from us will glow a silver blue-violet. With the excuse of going to pick up a bottle of water or a baguette, I’ll often walk out in the evenings to catch a drift of its life, looking for a dream to happen – maybe a person to bump into, or to catch a glimpse of lamplight in some corner of old buildings and trees in space.

A view from the Place des Cardeurs just down the road might be my favorite. I turn the corner of narrow Rue Venel and arrive at this big square of open-air restaurants succeeding down an incline like an amphitheater, bordered by narrow, colored apartments that, in an upside-down trapezoid, hug a big sky. Framing the light and clouds as its backdrop, it makes a theater for the buzz of people around the bars and tables and steps. Sit there long enough and something will happen.

Thursday night, for example, a week ago. Maureen – who recently filled in Hilary’s empty spot as my roommate – and I installed ourselves on those wide steps below the restaurants with glasses of wine in hand that we brought from the apartment. Just to sit and take in the night. After four stagnant weeks of free time in between the summer and semester sessions I was, in short, in need of an outing. Of course I can’t forget the sweet bites of those weeks – John’s birthday dinner and the visit of Hil’s parents, the dinners, the playing frizbee in the Place, the nighttime pool sneak-in, the visits to Emily’s WWOOF farm in Celony, babysitting in Tholonet the studio-cleaning and semester-planning, the painting sessions. But with enough leisure time, desires for work or life had accumulated more quickly than action could account for, and the best I could do was to get outside where things were happening – as if to mount an amusement-park ride to be tossed around without will.

For a while we strung out our legs and talked about life, as people tend to do, in the meantime tapping our toes to the music of a few happy guitarists from a table behind us. Streetlight cast its static glow on talkers and drinkers and laughers. Inevitably, some mysterious drunk-ish people, hearing English, approached us – one little white-haired guy who wanted so badly to speak English like a southern cali beach bum, and another younger guy who also slurred his words, but in French, and came to show us pictures of the robots he had made. In time we accumulated a pair of happy brothers named Moustafa and King-Sol. King-Sol smiled and laughed and sang a Sengali phrase (boo-yaka boo-yaka) that meant “boiling” for when anything was saucy or funny or good or in any way notable, or when the conversation stalled an ounce. Basically, we all went to a dance club called Bar Sextius, encountered another slew of characters and in short, called it a night.

A week later, last night, I went back to the same bar with the new crop of bright, friendly summer students – who already restore a levity and numinousness to this place which in that interval of unstructured alone time had become something of a palimpset for my circular patterns of thought. We had spent a glorious Saturday looking at architecture in the Luberon Valley and at the Abbey de Cenac – another story – and, though most of us were probably tired we had energy enough to go out and stay out late (one could blame it on the restorative quality of great architecture). I got to share with them a restaurant in town, got to show them the Place des Cardeurs, got to bring us to Bar Sextius. We danced. I saw King-Sol again (boo-yaka boo-yaka) and he told me again that one must laugh (il faut rigoler!) in life, and not to worry, ever.

Through the van window the air in Casablanca was dusty and sour. I let my eyes reflect the passing scene: the half-built concrete structures, the sheep and motorcycles and cars that zoomed close to our truck’s edge amid the traffic, then swerved back out again to meet the road.

Kafa, Shukuran, Insh’Allah. Enough, thank you, God willing. Memorize these words, said Youssef, a Moroccan-American man with laughing eyes and a New Jersey accent. He was taking my family to have lunch with his family because one evening in our North Carolina dining room my mom complemented his sister-in-law Karen’s Morroccan meatballs.

Cinnamon on heavy meat tempered by the sweetness of apricots, my mom remembered. That is why we had gathered here.

Because I was with my family I let the grown-ups do the talking and lapsed into childhood passivity, raising my head for the odd laugh or nod of agreement. Beyond the thrust of the cars and blurred half-buildings, vast stretches of desert expanded into sky fogged with dust and soot. I can’t remember now what I was thinking then, but if a camera were have to followed my eyes it would have showed them looking past the horizon. Past the odd, hijab-wearing mother and son waiting at the bust stop, past the man herding sheep in the distance, into that at closest range. My mom, dad and sister took up enough of the frame without the endlessly passing small glimpses of a life of which I still know very little.

The four of us hadn’t spend more than a few days together every few months for the past few years – what with us going to college and then me going to France – and so because of that, or maybe in spite of that, the old dynamic prevailed. The same old give and takes. “Father is father” so one rug merchant would say to us some days later. Mom wouldn’t have me running off alone with my camera. And in the mornings to come, from our one-room suite at the Riad, I’d mock my sister’s elaborate morning routine, not because it was any different than mine but because she was getting into Ayn Rand, and I kind-of sort-of thought that gave her the right. Of course it didn’t, but she’d take it all the same.

Youssef broke my reverie with guttural Arabic vowels. We were going to the neighborhood butchery to get chickens, he translated, for the meal.  Our van pulled up to an open adobe door in his Casablanca neighborhood and we entered into a dark room of warm meat smell and herbs.

The butcher unloaded six small roasted chickens onto a platter. One for each of us, eh? joked Dad, and Mom took out her camera to take his photo.

“Enough was the first word she learned,” Yousseff said of his American wife, laughing. “You’ll see why.”

We did. At the meal we sat exchanging grins as we watched heaping plate after plate of meats, salads, fruits, couscous, and yes, as all six chickens arrived at our six-person table. I’ve had enough, I finally said, before I piled on a few more thank-you’s for good measure.

We said these words and we’d say them again. But who among us would be saying this was subject to change.

One day in Paris, as we made our way downtown from the Palace Royale metro stop, Andi, Hilary and I came upon a strings ensemble of men and women seated in a round in one of those silvery street squares you find in front of a cafe with streets leading in and out of roads overlooked by the city’s colossal limestone masterbuildings. A cello hum led into rapidly vibrating violins, striking up a magnificent, sublime dance of desire and disquiet. The three of us had already stopped in our tracks, dazzled, and we stood. L’Amour Sorcier it was called, I noticed looking over the shoulder of one player.

The light cast itself across the busy street between walls and onto the players, illuminating the bow of a violinist as he leaned into his instrument, this way and that. It was one of those moments when one revels in the rarity of the circumstances, finding it almost impossible to be alive in this time and place, here where symphonies play on sunny Paris avenues. But then it seemed to flee from my eyes and ears as soon as it began; barely graspable the way birds fly off when you try to chase them. A violinist slid his bow across one final note.

There was was applause. We nodded at each other and began to mosey down the sidewalk. Should we go find lunch? I noticed Hilary still held her sketchbook with paper handouts sticking out, reminding me of the poem that our professor John had read that morning after we’d looked at Monet’s water lillies at the Marmottan. The Ninth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke: Hil had even read a section out loud when we were on the Metro, it so poignantly describing what we’d been experiencing at art school over the past few months, particularly during this five-day museum tour where we’d spent so much time just looking. And how much power there was in that, it had left me without words. Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Cezanne’s mountain and Monet’s Camille still lingered in my consciousness, and though we’d discussed them for hours, the mysteries of their existence always moved me more than I could ever articulate. Behind us the strings ensemble drew their bows in a slower, more measured tune. Wait a minute, would Hilary read Rilke’s poem? I asked. Yes, she answered, absolutely loving the idea. We whipped back around and stood in a kind of reverence as she began. Words, cello and violin, light on the city noise and passing car. This and everything, all at once.

She read from the third verse: “But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once, no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have this once, completely, even if only once: to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing...”

The music kept on and we stood. It was cold out, I could see my breath. We exchanged that look of awe usually reserved for those moments in the museums when a work of art was more than words could calculatedly express. It crossed my mind how I wished I’d had my camera, but I shut the thought out, glad that I gave those glorious five minutes all my attention. We began to walk on toward the cheap cafes and I tried to put some words to qualify the experience. Hilary described it as a spiritual. I thought it was beautiful, sure, it was unbelievable. But what really could be said, after that, but silence? A few months ago I posted a quote of Van Gogh, that “Il s’agit de saisir ce qui ne passe pas dans ce qui passe,” “It comes down to seizing what does not pass away in what passes away,” and I was reminded of those words as we continued down the sidewalk. There’s a magic to what passes minute to minute, in the concrete lives of people and cities and things,  somehow imparted with a spirit that remains through the flood of seconds and hours and days and years and through all the frightening change that occurs in the meantime. This could not be more true in the context of travel, when the novelties of culture come and go like lucky pennies on the sidewalk, disappearing into the pocketbook of memory. But the more I snap at life through the lens of my my digital camera, the more I try to take and own each passing experience, the more I ignore that which lasts, that absolute wonder that one may get a glimpse of in a greek sculpture or in Monet’s Nympheas, or in a cathedral or in the face of a friend or in the song of a Paris orchestra. “Just wait until we go to Paris,” John had said before we left of the museum tour. “You’re going to see things, I mean really see them.”

What had I seen, after all?  I had seen in the museums how Art brings us closer to the deep holy mystery of life and here I could see it outside in Paris, in all the chaos of the city. I learned how one must look, and keep looking: to approach painting, like life, with a spirit of inquiry. I had seen in the museums how an 8-by-11 inch square could become a fully constituted being with the application of oily colored goo, and here I saw how this little earth, sans bellowing voices from the clouds, could bear the inspiration for masterworks.

Rilke refers to “the unsayable” as the only thing we can take with us “into that other realm” which I suspect has something to do with the need to seize “ce qui ne passe pas,” or “that which does not pass.” We find ourselves in the sayable, in words like these or in pictures and music notes. They shape, vivify and emphasize the “unsayable;” the white empty page, the light, the stillness that lasts.

Early on in the semester John said a phrase which I haven’t been able to forget since. We were on a field trip in the Vaucluse mountains studying the “quality with out a name,” and from a wooded path we found our way into an old shepherd’s cottage built of stones circling upward to a center, which filled the room with light like a pin-hole camera.

I saw Monet’s violet in the Giverny sky. It was on a crisp mid-morning in late October and I had my fingers wrapped around a steaming cup and my head tilted upward, transfixed by the color that I’d seen mixed into the green of the grass, in the strokes of light or the trees or on the surface of the water and lilies in the artist’s paintings. No sky had I seen quite like this one; a vibrant bluish-purple glowing with a hint of fog against the golden leaves of autumn. It engulfed the space between our big old cottage and the sculpture studio where we, just a bunch of lucky art students, would attend a four-day workshop with Greg Wyatt.

Inside the studio, our sculptor-in-residence sat at the head of the long table where we’d be molding, bending, playing with plaster and applying wax. Today, day one, we would create some basic three-dimensional forms with clay: sphere, cube, column, pyramid, egg. From there, we would practice conceiving of line, form and color in three dimensions with an emphasis on the study of nature, Monet’s garden in particular, as a source of inspiration for our final sculptures. If it hadn’t been clear to us yet, we would discover in the next few days how Monet’s vision has everything to do with sculpture, with space, it becoming more evident with each lesson and drawing why one need not look at the sky to see the violet. Perhaps the Giverny air, blowing through willow trees and across the little vine-covered cottages in town, wasn’t so different from the clay we were molding in our hands.

It was a few days later when our 13-member Marchutz School family; eight students, one fellow, two professors, one mother and a precocious 6-year-old named James- went to visit to the garden, just down the road and through a brick alleyway. We entered in the company of a few tourists into the quiet where stalks of bamboo, water plants and flower bushes leaned into the ovular pond at the center. Arching over the reflective surface was the Japanese bridge and we followed it to the other side where the path split into patches of trees and across creeks. Here, we were given our task: to draw from four different perspectives from around the pond. With our sketchbooks in hand we set to work observing.

I walked a few yards and began my first drawing by the water. Inspired by Monet’s own paintings of the lilies I looked down and began to make strokes of the circular water plants across the reflective plane, where one could see the sky and willows in the ripples of color, of shadow and light. It was unlike anything I’d drawn before, the surface of water, as it demanded that that I not separate it from the sky above or the tree at the far end of the pond that was reflected in it. I could only draw the different values that I saw refracted in its ripples, with each stroke building into an image of the pond in its living, breathing environment.

Our professors had told us back when we were working out in Tholonet, one must “start with the sky” when painting landscapes, and as I looked at the little clouds overhead in the face of the water in the water I supposed the same could be said for drawing outdoors. To start with the sky meant to respond to one’s sensations of those color relationships that determine the appearance of the land, the trees, the haystacks, the lilies, the water. For Monet, it meant working rapidly in keeping with the changing light, sometimes for only seven or eight minutes at a time. He did more than 250 impressionist paintings of his water lilies alone in the last 30 years of his life.

A look at paintings of his lilies- much like his haystacks or series paintings in Venice- reveal a vision of how the color of the light of the day could envelop nature like a clear vapor, blowing through his garden and reacting with warm greens, the yellows, the oranges, the blues. Monet saw how the hues could change from minute to minute, enabling him to capture a vision of eternal truths in the most vibrant, most fleeting color harmonies in nature’s own temperament. To find the eternal in the ephemeral, the fleeting- a notion held by both the Impressionists and Japanese in the Zen tradition, was something that had a special significance here in the garden where the presence of Monet’s vision lingered on. Here it wasn’t as if I was beholding a monument or relic to A Great Artist, or at least not entirely. In the process of drawing  I could relate to him, in a way. I certainly had often felt in this journey the desire to capture a moment to keep, forever, even as it passed again and again into the next.