The River
No matter how much time flows past me like a mountain river, I don’t seem to feel it rushing by. Steady and maybe stagnant, I sit in stillness wondering if any progress has been made, or if my seemly minor efforts in my studio yield any visible results. The only thing that will lift this settling mist seems to be painstaking, constant documentation.
My journals were my everything as a child, all the same binding, the spacing of the lines perfectly small, the ribbon a specific color for the year, and always a matching Moleskin that I had saved my Christmas money for. Tiny, unreadable handwriting would commemorate and solidify the most unnecessary details of my daily life, and it was as if I would forget them so I had to preserve them. That intuition of being forgotten, whether it be by me or my life entirely to the bottomless grave of generations gone, forced me to document what the snow felt like on my face as I fed the family horses, or all the reasons why my crush at the time couldn’t possibly see how much I adored him. The awkward, ugly, innocent musings of a preteen are now forever tucked away on those tattered pages, and my heart is at rest even now knowing that they’re preserved no matter how embarrassing they are to me.
May that same urgency overtake my forgetful heart when I put a brush to canvas.
Over the summer my lovely friend Patricia has led me through my beloved Smokey Mountains every month, our easels and paints tucked away in the back of the truck , and an open road ahead of us. Attempting to paint plein air, outdoors and in the moment, was something so new to me. I’d always worked from a photo reference in the comfort of my studio, not in nature with an ever moving light source in the sky. But something in me challenged the comfort, like I needed to grow. Listening to that voice is the lifeline that pulls me forward into the beautiful and better.
At first I only accomplished finishing a brown under painting. Muddy and unfinished, enough to make me want to quit. Failure freezes me up, but I told myself that I at least tried as we rolled up our brushes and laughed at the shifting sun above. My perfectionism died that day. I remember it literally leaving my tense hands and I’ve never felt it since. Realizing that I could finally walk away from a landscape that I knew wouldn’t look the same ever again liberated me to just enjoy the process. In art class I would struggle to ever finish a project in time for the deadline, and want to throw it away by the time I had to start another. But over the past year that grip on completion has loosened, and my heart now craves the rough edges and smudged lines.
35mm film I took on one of our trips up into the mountains.
The summer of plein air unlocked ease and bravery in my creative practice.
On one grey September morning we decided to drive into Cades Cove, despite the gloomy forecast and chance of rain. As we rolled around the corner and the mountain valley swallowed us up, the clouds parted and a herd of horses galloped past us on our left as a black bear strolled past us on our right. My heart stopped, in pure bliss and amazement at the blessing that was that moment. A moment of faith and courage, that only came when I placed myself in the discomfort of trying something new. We ate our packed lunches in the long soft grass, and completed not one but two beautiful little studies of the mountain meadow below the foothills. The faint hoofbeats of the herd behind us and the coo of mourning doves were the soundtrack to one of my favorite moments as an artist so far.
On the last warm weekend in October, we hiked down to Elkmont, an abandoned village of log cabins in the national park. It felt like a beautiful ghost town, but silence was not what met us there. The first annual Plein Air In The Smokies event was being held, and the crisp air was full of laughter and excited chatting as artists from all over the country unloaded easels and boxes of paints and brushes, and set up on every sunny corner of the town. Elated, we gently and quietly followed them, listening to their notes on their process as their brushes deftly bounced across the linen. Confidence and accuracy were in their steady hands, but not pressure and perfectionism. A humble hush fell over the crowd whenever one artist would deem a piece complete and move on. They were content. Deep in their bones. Rugged and sun weathered from so many hours in nature, they silently observed and enjoyed the light, instead of attempting to capture it perfectly. I felt like a whole new world was opening up in front of me.
I’m still learning who I am as an artist, and maybe that will take a lifetime. But like the pages of my high school notebooks lined with secrets, I’ll slowly uncover and leave behind a stack of well loved and unfinished canvases to remind me when I’m old and grey that I lived. That I went out and worked, open to mistakes as my teachers. Like a river, moving on through rocky obstacles and smoothing over the edges of adversity.
