NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Daisy Briscoe is painting at her French easel off Slips Lane on the wide grassy verge at the corner of Wicket Street. Although the weather has cooled since July and it is no longer in the high nineties, she uses a golfing umbrella to keep the sun off. First she scrapes some thick wet paint off her small canvas with a palette knife and wipes it onto a paper towel and then wipes that spot precisely with a rag around her forefinger not smudging wet paint anywhere else. Now she mixes more color on her plate glass palette arranged along the top with blobs of assorted blues, browns and yellows and a long extruded snake of white, fresh squeezed from the tube. She picks up a tube of chrome yellow for second and puts it down in favor of cadmium. Squeezes some cadmium yellow out onto the palette and spreads white and a little yellow across the glass with her palette knife. Yellow streaks appear and she keeps blending until it is the pale shade of unsalted butter. She scoops it up into a blob only to spread it again with a little blue from the top of the palette. The streaks of unmixed pigment gradually blend together into a uniform pale green tone. She positions a few brush-loads on the painting, mixes again, and positions thicker paint next to the first daubs. It is a highlight. She doesn’t look up.
“Where’s Lambert?”
“He isn’t with me Daisy.”
“Oh hi Fred. Thought you were Steve. I was expecting him as we were talking about painting last week and he said he’d stop by.”
“I didn’t know you were a painter Daisy.”
“Welcome to the late nineteenth century!”
“Thanks Daisy, what’s so 19th Century?”
“This folding wooden easel for one thing, and oil paint in tubes was invented at that time and that’s what gave artists the freedom to go outside and paint wherever they liked.”
“So you are enjoying the hard won freedom of the French Impressionists!”
“Well, I haven’t been for years. Doing it now is like a ‘brain-wipe’.”
“Painting clears your brain does it?”
“Well I need a new picture.”
“Oh?”
“DON’T say it!” Her emphatic tone cautions me, and it dawns that she is talking about Boyd Nightingale. It is rumored that their summer affair is over.
“No I won’t, the thought has vanished while watching you work!”
“See what I mean?”
“Oh yes, I watched you change the picture!”
“Yeah! It takes time to build a new picture, a long time!”
“This certainly is a departure from stained glass.”
“Used to spend part of the summer painting in Brittany.”
“Landscapes you mean?”
“Yup, and the rest visiting my aunt Virginia in Sussex.”
“Fall has started early. Look at all those dead leaves blown off the path into a dusty brown heap.”
“The wind has died down now. It blew a whole cloud of them down earlier which gave me problems with the umbrella.”
“Is it the perspective of this avenue of white oaks that got your attention?”
“Steve remarked on that too, but no that’s not what’s getting me. Do you know Hobbema’s Avenue?”
“Whose?”
“Meindert Hobbema, the 17th century Dutch painter.”
“Not sure I do, what about him?”
“Well he moved on to selling wine later in life, but painted the ‘Avenue at Middelharnis’. It is over in London. Love at first sight! Oh that painting! … first set eyes on it when I was a kid visiting my aunt and she bought me the print.”
“So that’s your inspiration.”
“That picture of a huge Dutch sky with tall spindly tree trunks is different from this. But yes inspirational in a way. Holland is so close to the sea and flat. They have ocean light, not land light like ours. That painting was a starting point, and my painting is a new starting point and in that sense this avenue is a change in my perspective.”
“So you are finding a new outlook through these trees.”
“I am not so interested in painting a picture of the avenue. There was interesting light going past the trunks and through the lower branches, but the light soon changed.”
“Yes, it isn’t a raking light any more.”
“No, but that’s okay. The avenue doesn’t matter now.”
“But you are looking right down the avenue! I can see it in your work”
“Oh of course I am, but I am not looking at the perspective now, I am looking at the color … it is just something to hang color on. Like an armature in sculpture.”
“So what are you doing Daisy?”
“I am making the light I saw into thick oily pigments”
“That’s what they call high impasto.”
“There is something fascinating about thick paint becoming light in a painting. I mean that is what got me as a child.”
“The thing is to see paint and light at the same time while knowing that it isn’t light.”
“That is the frisson!” It’s Steve Strether with Lambert covered in leaves and mulch, pulling so hard on his leash toward Daisy’s legs that he chokes.
“Lambert you look a mess!” Daisy is wearing a pair of bib overalls and a man’s button down oxford cloth shirt with the cuffs cut off at mid forearm. A loose thread hangs from the fabric on her left arm drifting in the wake of her movements like as though it were spider’s silk. Lambert trots over nosing the ground at her feet, then looks up. He raises his paws against her legs and tries to sniff the paint rag in her lap. She reaches into her shirt pocket and gives him a treat. “Lambert, honey let me get those azalea leaves off your nose.” She tries to pick them off but he dodges, looking for another treat in her hand. “Honey your mustache is twisted out of alignment and your ears are covered in something. Just look at him Fred.” Lambert quickly backs away and starts crunching on his treat and bits fall out of his mouth at Steve’s feet and Daisy looks up at Steve.
“What is the frisson Steve?”
“What Fred just pointed out about seeing paint as light.”
“Color makes its own light when you mix the tones just right.”
Daisy has started mixing another green. Deeper this time, but she doesn’t use it yet. She looks up.
“I found interesting tones on the tree leaves and trunks and the tones on that grass and dry gravel in the path underneath.”
“Two kinds of grayish browns and grayish greens.”
“Yes all broken up by light coming through the branches here and there. Except it’s getting late. The light has changed again in the last few minutes.”
“Sorry to interrupt, every moment is valuable.”
“In fact I am looking more at the painting now, and less at the view.”
“Why?”
“Fred, once I have got the areas and proportions massed in, the painting is more about the paint than the motif.”
“You mean you are concentrating on relationships within the painting.”
“Now finishing is a matter of balancing and contrasting. Composing the tones and hues.”
“That Fred, is how the work sort of ‘lifts off’ from representation and goes more abstract.”
“Daisy’s inner landscape, Steve.” Daisy discards her deep green mixture and starts again, but pauses.
“That’s where we started Fred.”
“Painting can be a risky business.”
“One line placed on the canvas commits me to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions.”
Lambert has moved under the easel. He is bumping one of the legs with his nose. Steve bends down to pull Lambert back before he upsets the easel. “These white oaks got you I see.”
“They did Steve. This Avenue is my escape route.”
“Yeah arborists call white oaks ‘grey ghosts’.”
“A ghost, yes, that is what I am dealing with now.”
“Look down there Fred. There are 11 trunks on the left and only nine on the right, and see that cherry growing two trunks along, filling a gap on the right?”
“Got it Steve.”
“Now look at her painting.”
I can see the cherry foliage is painted in strokes of deep orange.
“Guys, that is Fall. Also the color of a dying fire, these oaks are forgetting summer. Summer is just a dusty heap that you pointed out Fred.”
