orchards in space

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,

as if orchards were dying high in space.

Those lines, from Rilke's poem, Autumn,

 kept running through my head this weekend in the Catskills.

I posted it last year too, when I was cleaning out the store
and we still had world's ugliest kitchen.

Four seasons ago. 

It feels like another life.

Autumn

     

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,

     

as if orchards were dying high in space.

    

 Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no".

And tonight the heavy earth is falling,

     

away from all the other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.

     

And look at the other one ... It's in them all.

     

And yet there is Someone, whose hands

    

 infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.

                               

                        -Rainier Marie Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)

yellow flowers

Forget red. Let's talk about yellow. Yellow flowers. These beauties from Bow Street Flowers are making me crazy (in a good way). Yellow flowers have been my new love this summer. (And don't they look nice with the pink flowers?)

Roses, ranunculus, dahlias that look like honeycombs, dahlias that look like a lions mane, mimosas that smell like Provence.  Where are the words to express how happy they make me?

It is barely autumn, but I am already dreading the shorter days, early darkness. I am a night owl, and must work on keeping farmer's hours, especially now that I am painting and need all the light I can get.

However a touch of crispness in the air, bins filled with apples, and the leaves turning from green to rust, burgundy, orange, and yellow signal my favorite season, autumn. (Although in April my favorite season might be spring.)

I'm taking my flowers to the country.
Enjoy your weekend!

Jen

country red, seaside red

Red is low on my list of favorite colors. I have no red clothes. The only red in my Massachusetts house is an enamel table that used to be my kitchen table, and now serves as a desk/place to stack books. I'm partial to blues and greens. Touches of pink and orange. White and brown. Not red.

But as soon as we started planning the country kitchen, I had to have red cabinets. I thought it was a desire to pay homage to the many barns in the area. But I think it's more than that.

Our country house is deep in a hollow, surrounded by trees, water, slate--cool things.

 Winters are long and cold.

Red cabinets, like red flannel shirts, warms things up. So maybe it's all about context.

I don't think of red as being a seaside color, but this tomato red house in Provincetown is charming.

As is this painting by Provincetown artist Chet Jones (you're seeing a postcard here on the aforementioned red enamel table).

I love the red in the above three pictures, all taken in Provincetown.

So maybe I do like red.

Is there a color you think you don't like but secretly or subliminally you do?

the gorgeous nothings

Solo retreat in Provincetown--long walks, good art, crazy sunset, interesting conversations.

"Provincetown is, always has been, an eccentrics sanctuary."

                                                  -Michael Cunningham

Green. I can't stay away.

Each little square is an exploration.

Also,

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shaccochis. Great book. Read it if the description makes it sound like your kind of thing.

New Directions is publishing reproductions of Emily Dickinson's writings on envelopes. The Gorgeous Nothings.

Jellyfish are taking over. And, Inside the mind of an Octopus. 

sunset anarchy

Provincetown.

Wild sunset--so many things going on in the sky that I was giddy.

The scenes in my last post, part of the same sunset, were like outer space, deserts, volcanos. 

In a span of an hour I saw clouds like mountains, mesas, tornados, Turner landscapes, Constable clouds. There were soft pinks and blacks, luminous orange, a palette of blues, whites, and grays, even a rainbow. 

These and the pictures in my last post were taken at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts between 5:37 and 6:37 p.m. 

It was exhilarating.

sunset, somewhere

(next week I'll tell you where, but feel free to guess)

flowers in the late summer house

facing forward, looking back

crisp days and apples

 sweet peas and lemonade

visit small but charming
for more flowers in the house

moss, olive, khaki, etc.

I'm working on changing my online habits--thinking about how I use the internet, and how it uses me. What I dislike the most about the world wide web, and what scares me, is how rapidly it has consumed so many aspects of my life. Rebecca Solnit articulates my feelings in  this wonderful essay. 

"That bygone time had rhythm, and it had room for you to do one thing at a time; it had different parts; mornings included this, and evenings that, and a great many of us had these schedules in common." 

But I've missed this place, this web log--and it feels like an actual place, and not just words and pictures on a screen. I picture a spiderweb with tiny dots on it--I'm one of the dots, and you are one too.                        

And Seamus Heaney died. I felt such a connection to him, through his poetry, his love of language and nature, of mournful beauty. Last spring  I wrote about the frog pond and how it brought to mind his great poem Death of a Naturalist. 

Recently, when I realized the raspberries were blackberries I thought of Blackberry Picking. 

"...red ones inked up and that hunger
sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots."

The last time I posted paintings, Steve commented, "I'm really motived artistically by seeing these. I suddenly want to see how much red I can add to the greens before they're no longer green. Moss, olive, khaki, etc." 

Despite my passion for the color green, I didn't see that I'd been painting mostly brighter tones, that I'd missed an entire family of shades. I thought about that the next time I painted. (Thanks, Steve.)

I keep looking, and there's always something more to see.