Bonnard Week - Seven

Toward the end of his life Bonnard said "Speaking, when you have something to say, is like looking.  But who looks?  If people could see properly, and see whole, they would all be painters.  And it's because people have no idea how to look that they hardly ever understand."

image:  Pierre Bonnard, The Terrace, The Phillips Collection

Bonnard Week - Six

And this dove—which I've gazed at rapturously at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and at an exhibition in Paris.  The world travels of Bonnards have fascinated me no end.

The artist says of his incandescent colors:  "It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values."

image:  Pierre Bonnard, The Palm

Bonnard Week - Five

I do love this parrot!

"Our God is the sun," Bonnard said to a young artist.

image:  Pierre Bonnard, Girl with Parrot

 

Bonnard Week - Four

The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world... the picture... which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.

—Pierre Bonnard

image:  Pierre Bonnard, Linen

Bonnard Week - Three

This is one of my posters—a window on the Mediterranean from my writing room.

Bonnard said late in life "I am just beginning to understand what it is to paint. A painter should have two lives, one in which to learn, and one in which to practice his art."

True, too, for writers.

image:  Pierre Bonnard, Mediterraneo

Bonnard Week - Two

The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.

—Pierre Bonnard 

image:  Pierre Bonnard, Girl with Cat

Bonnard Week - One

What I need right now is a whole week of Bonnards.  And I suspect that others may too.

As the artist said:  "Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly."

What great pleasure for us that he did so!

image:  Pierre Bonnard, Dining Room in the Country

Places I Would Rather Be

At Tassajara, waking to the sound of running bells calling guests to the zendo; having the bathhouse to myself and watching the moon set; then drinking coffee sitting on a rock and writing before dressing for breakfast with my own napkin ring.  During the day taking pictures of the extremely Zen-like bocce balls in quiet patterns against the sand and wood.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Red Ball

Thought for the Day

I am informed by Thesaurus.com: 

     “Middle age is always a great word to know.  

       So is bezoar.”

One has to wonder why they think so.

image:  Wordle

Pelicans

I’ve been ruminating on pelicans, for literary reasons, and have been reminded how much I like them.

And of course the poem comes to mind:

A wonderful bird is a pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week;
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.

— Dixon Lanier Merritt (often misattributed to Ogden Nash)

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Pelicans, Half Moon Bay

Summer Table

I am trying for simplicity.  

A page of haiku on my writing table that I'm working on, plus the jelly jar of flowers we were given by our neighbor's daughter from her wedding bouquet.  

And on the wooden table in the patio, my wabi sabi blue Japanese cloth, and a simple meal of fish and vegetables and rice.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Table, Sand Rock Farm

More Plums

Plums, o plums.

My favorite summer salad is of mixed greens, grated carrots, feta with herbs, avocado, sliced plums, and pistachios.

(I also like the title of Carrying a Zither while Searching for Plum Blossoms.)

image:   Pierre Bonnard, Still Life with Plum Pits, 1932

Joies de Vivre

Plums, clouded and sweet.  The taste of each, again, reminds me of the famous poem.

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten 

the plums

that were in

the icebox 

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast 

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

—William Carlos Williams

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Plums

Tea Chez les Steins

I adore this Matisse, which I'd never seen before, having seen it now at the good exhibit at SF MOMA— The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde.

I think of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in their French garden with their poodle, Basket, and offer some pithy quotes from Gertrude to liven the drowsy, tree-shaded afternoon.

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

Do not forget birthdays. This is in no way a propaganda for a larger population.

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

image:  Henri Matisse, Tea 

Bastille Day

An assortment of French tidbits or amuse-bouches to celebrate the day.

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

—Gertrude Stein

Boy, those French. They have a different word for everything.

— Steve Martin

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait.  The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.  

 

Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night.  Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.  That was where we could go.

—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.  Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea.  When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provençal France.

—Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Cooks, Paris

Thought for the Day

 

Is Lesser Burdock offended at being considered lesser?

image:  Lesser Burdock

Bonnard Summer

More idyllic summer days with Bonnard at one of his houses in France—the table set for lunch or tea or something long and drawn out with ripe fruit.

And I'm thrilled to see that there's finally a Bonnard museum in Le Cannet!

image:  Pierre Bonnard, Terasse a Vernon

Toast

My latest passion is Safeway’s fresh baked Multi-grain with Sunflower Seed Bread, sliced thick and toasted.  Best then is to spread a little hummus on it, and eat it off my painted Mexican plate, with some good French roast coffee (sitting looking out at just-washed white sheets hung on the line underneath the pines).  The texture is perfect, and it feels like such a treat.

image:  Mexican pottery 

Joies de Vivre

Salvia.

images: 

Salvia Austriaca, Norbert Holstein
Salvia Caymanensis, Scott Zona

Salvia Sagittata, Scott Zona

Salvia Buchanani, Scott Zona

Thought for the Day

Russian sage . . .

and Russian sage.



images: 

Purple Sagebrush, Billy Hathorn

Saint Ioannikios, Eastern Orthodox icon from Russia

 

Lazy Summer Days

Our landlord in a straw hat walking the green hose around the yard.
And me indoors, laying seeded croissants out on parchment paper ready to bake before it gets too hot.

Putting wild rice to soak in the blue glazed French bowl.
Chopping herbs.
Cutting a crenshaw melon.
Washing arugula and chives.

In the spirit of adventure, buying a bottle of Lillett to drink on ice.

Authentic Pimientos de Padron, each sixth one hot.

Reading mysteries set in Cyprus, Scotland, Versailles, the Bosporus.

Getting up late to take the train to the city to see French art.


image:  me writing in hammock at the Writing Mills, Mallorca, by Kate Whitehead

Summer School

The cool light of a disused classroom (this at Mills) makes me long for summer school, and by association for the ruined red clay tennis court across the road from my prep school, the court belonging to a convent there in Santa Fe.  I think of The Magus, John Fowles's mysterious novel about teaching school on the island of Spetses, south of Athens, full of summer sea and sun and lessons on life.

Things I’ve studied in the summer:

typing

handwriting

writing mysteries

ancient writing

painting Zen circles

British archaeology

Alpine archaeology

the Impressionists

tennis

Pilates

horseback riding

book publishing

French

photography

Healing Touch

Mallorcan cooking

 

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Classroom Windows

Today's Wabi Sabi

 

I'm in the mood today for old, beloved, solitary things, with the patina of age on them and the salt of ancient (even vanished) seas.  Burnt lamb yesterday, with the char of a too-hot grill, fit my yearnings for a not belligerently all-American day, and the volcanic ash in the sun-softened Morbier, the coolness of pink roses against a weathered wood fence, good people with lives fully lived, a cat with eyes closed and spine prominent near to hand.

See here for more on wabi sabi.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Lake Como Watering Can

July Celebrations

Let's celebrate July, and holidays, and lazy afternoons fishing or not, or looking at rivers on canvas or computer screen with one of our very favorite American poets.  

Happy Fourth—and to our English friends, from whom we do not choose to be independent.

Fishing on the Susquehanna in July 

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna

or on any river for that matter

to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month

have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found

in a quiet room like this one—

a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table—

trying to manufacture the sensation

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt

that others have been fishing

on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,

sliding the oars under the water

then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to

fishing on the Susquehanna

was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time

in front of a painting

in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,

dense trees along the banks,

and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green

flat-bottom boat

holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely

ever to do, I remember

saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on

to other American scenes

of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare

who seemed so wired with alertness

I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

—Billy Collins

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Boat on the River Wear, Durham, England

Still More Summer Reading

The usual late Saturday malaise—coming home from the library with seven books, and wanting to read all of them at once, besides working on my own writing (ideas for new short short stories, revisions of the Pine Cone saga, a whole series of mystery novels I want to start).  And only an hour of free time left in the day, or possibly weekend!

At least there are leftovers from last night:  French clay pot chicken with black olives, chervil, fennel, and garlic, and herb-scented rice (if not Julia Child’s).  And the heat is not awful.

images:  Claude Monet, Woman Reading 

             Summer Reading, Politics & Prose 
             Summer Reading, SUSS