The Slow Collaboration of Time

The Fast Movingness of Summer and Ways in Which I've Tried

In the Beginning aka Rainbow Swan, watercolor on paper

Here I sit after my 4:20am look-to-see if there are any stars and there are (!) plus the planets Jupiter and Venus on the horizon and a very crescent moon on its back, glittering at home in the newish fall sky. I may have blurted an utterance of awe, waking up the sleeping breathing house, husband and dog. Now the ink of the sky, is becoming orangish, still part indigo, now a smart grey, something close to violet but still orange and is, like color itself, hard for me to parse in words.

A sky changing rapidly, sentence to sentence, is now the apricot of rainbow dreams. My garden is a cacophony of greens and sunflower gold and butter-dyed hollyhock and dusty plum grapes in the light of morning .

I have been teaching how to notice color all summer long.
Just yesterday I gathered inspiration inside the deep cone of a night-blooming Sacred Datura, the first seeds given to me by a neighbor, and now they’ve grown wildly, perfuming all over this place with a lilac-tinged night life all its own.

In mid-July, I flew back to New York (without my little dog) to collaborate with Sophie Blackall at Milkwood upstate NY for a workshop/retreat we called Unearthing Pictures. It was glorious. The week before I drove up, I made sure to see as many exhibitions and as many friends in NYC as I could and to sit by the East River and to walk the sidewalks in the heat and to sit on the stoop and talk to my landlady as she tended to her nicotania plants also growing wildly in her tiny patch of NYC.

I drew a rainbow swan in my hot humid little studio while I was there and took the painting back here (which is New Mexico for the wondering) and put it in the show that just opened, I Am Just a Visitor, and it has become my favorite piece.

This summer, I took a break from writing in this space so that I could:
paint
work on a book of strange essays and
steward an opulent colorful pollinator/vegetable/fruit tree garden and
tend to my human relationships, sometimes with care although, I’m sad to say often poorly, room for so little with all the other things. This is
the bane of my existence but also my biggest joy, other people
(which I’m sure is probably the same for them when it comes to me I try to remember).

This summer I have been reveling in the authenticity of this place, the quiet of my relationship with a horizon line and a seed, how hope and survival and ancestry weave rivers through the maps I have been given and the maps I’ve made. Sometimes I think that the ballast of another person is no ballast at all. Maybe the only ballast is this very private language like stones under my own internal river.

Something like life weaves its way into my paintings and something like a question weaves through my writing and each takes so much time which is a precious conversation in the sky of this hard and hardening world of ours.

Along the lines and curves of the letters of collaboration, a two-person show just opened at L’Ecole Des Beaux Arts (where the watercolors are made by hand and where I also teach in New Mexico), in which I am one of the two persons and my collaborator, Sean Hudson is the other. His landscapes evoke a slowed down sort of time, each a lens into the patience of rock and scrub and paths in the high desert. Mine are pictures of swans, a sacred deer, a few geese as well, rock and river and bay—studies of geological time, the natural time of fairytales, reminders of a human animal sleepwalking within the Milky Way.

Together we also collaborated on paintings which became prints which seem to fascinate people the most. How does one even get out of the way of oneself to even collaborate? My only answer is simply: You try and you fail and you humble yourself and you try again. My second only answer is: you try to see the other before you see oneself, hence the name of our show: I Am just a Visitor. Third answer: work with passionate authentic people who care about you as much you care about them, such as Sean and Sophie and Margaux (we’ll be teaching together at the Highlights Foundation in late October!)

Constellation, watercolor and ink on paper, A collaboration between Sean Hudson and myself, available as a limited edition print here.

Island, watercolor and ink on paper

I need a piece of paper to see the world more clearly.

The last thing, in this timeline of summer, mostly in New Mexico, now at the almost end, I’ve been harvesting string beans. Beans, I’ve decided, are my favorite things to grow. I get why they entered into the lexicon of fairytale magic, how fast a bean stalk can become a ladder or a cave into another realm, where a sleeping giant, awake now, holds all the gold. How fast the beans themselves will grow under the right conditions and how they shade themselves and tendril where they proffer and can make them themselves disappear so that when they reappear, the wonder is all ours. I suppose I am just one bean this summer, hoping to hide and also hoping to be found as well.

Things this summer have been quieter on the inside and slower on the outside.
As if it takes time to even exist.

Now for some pictures:

With Sara Moffat owner of L’Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Santa Fe and brilliant human.