Hundreds and Thousands (19 page)

Oh, I’m a lazy woman. To
paint
one must make the
supreme
effort. I mean the effort of emptying oneself, the effort of abandonment. But one goes out and dreams and
drifts
instead of absorbing. Heavens! What a lot of stuff these people pour into my ears! It doesn’t harm me any, for the simple reason that I don’t think they
know.
If I did think they did I might get chesty. Nobody knows any other body’s struggles. Oh, that great, big, huge, enormous something supreme that my stuff lacks so
entirely, that oneness and unity, the thing that lifts one above paint, above rot, that completeness! I think if one could find that they would stand face to face with God. How could one ever hope to be holy enough to paint that way?

Out on the cliffs sketching for the first time this year. It was unbelievably good, sunny and warm. Protected by the bank from the north wind, I put my “whole” into it — sky and sea. Came home and built a big paper sketch from the small, got quite a sweep and swirl to the thing and lost it again. Will whack again tomorrow. Very happy all day.

Dear Mother Earth! I think I have always specially belonged to you. I have loved from babyhood to roll upon you, to lie with my face pressed right down on to you in my sorrows. I love the look of you and the smell of you and the feel of you. When I die I should like to be in you uncoffined, unshrouded, the petals of flowers against my flesh and you covering me up. As a baby it seems I loved to roll and grovel on you. My mother told a story. A small boy and she were comparing babies. My mother seemed to be coming out on top; her baby was a girl, his a boy; hers was fat, his lean; hers sweet-tempered and healthy, his lean and fretful. Then he found wherein his beat Mother’s baby all hollow. “Anyhow, Mrs. Carr,” he said, “my baby’s the
cleanest.
” I, toddling and tumbling in the garden, was earth-coated, his baby was spotless in his pram.

Another time I remember my brother-in-law trying to pay me a compliment on my return, grown-up, from the Art School.
“Quite a young lady,” he said. “Not such a smell and flavour of Mother Earth about you.” Oh, Mother Earth, may I never outgrow the wholesomeness of your dear smell and flavour!

I HAVE BEEN
entertaining a woman who has been giving a course of lectures on the history of art. Oh, what a dull woman! It was like trying to make merry with a stone crusher. She is not an artist, only a book-learnt lecturer on art. She drones on nearly two hours. As soon as the lights go out for the slides you hear a gulp of relief go round and the chairs creak gently as relaxed bodies settle to sleep. I don’t know one soul there who doesn’t sleep through the latter half, and such a blinking when the lights come on! Well, she got even with me by the corpse gaze she gave my pictures. I have never showed to a dumber. It was awful! If she’d only said, “Damn! They’re awful!” I’d have been so thankful. She evidently hated them. Wonder what she’d have said to today’s and yesterday’s sea sketches. They’re pretty wild and I hope lived a little before I loaded on paint and strangled the life out. Will I ever learn the art of developing the vision without killing it? Oh, the things waiting down there to be expressed and brought forth in gloriousness!

Ah, little book, I owe you an apology. I’ve got to like you despite how silly you seemed to me when Lawren suggested I start you. You help me to sort and formulate thoughts and you amuse me, which is more than housecleaning does, and that is what I have been doing for the week. Well, it’s all in the day’s march, but the housecleaning march is bad, uphill going, stony, grim, and grimy, and nothing so unflinchingly and brutally tells you your exact age.

Three women from the Business and Professional Women’s Club came out to select the picture I told them they could have to hang in their clubroom. Two stiff-backs came, just. I could feel them bristle as they entered the studio. I asked what space they had and what sort they wanted. One of them said, “I like your Indian” (an old, old man). Well, I brought out some. Nothing suited. They sniffed and stared and stared and sniffed while I felt helpless, irritated. A third dame of selection was to come later. Well, I fumbled round the canvases trying to see things with their eyes, and couldn’t. My stature simply isn’t business profession. However, No. 3 came duly and pretty quickly sorted out her likes and the others’ dislikes. They took the despised “Mountain” which the Easterners saw nothing in. Gee! I wrestled with that mountain and I’m not through with “it” (the subject) yet.

Yesterday Phil took me on a van location hunt. We found one I like greatly, the Esquimalt Lagoon. Wide sweeps of sea and sky, drift galore, and hillside and trees, and great veteran pines. It will be some time yet before I can go. We looked in
en route
to see the Elephant and jacked her up higher. The dear beast looked O.K. It was the lovely time of day and the Lagoon and woods were at their best — mysterious, the material dormant, the spiritual awake. I
think
I could paint there.

I sailed up the church aisle Sunday late, so as to avoid the obnoxious soloist, and got there just in time for her solo. Then we had a hymn and as I looked down at my book I discovered great splotches of whitewash on the sleeves of my coat. Then I further discovered I had gone to church in my
very worst
yard coat — whitewash and paint all over and two holes in the back as big as oranges
and the lining hanging out. I laughed right out — I couldn’t help it — and caught Mr. W.’s eye. He was holding forth and I suppose he thought I was laughing at him. Nothing for it but to sit it out. I got out during the last hymn, fuming. It’s too bad to wear even to the beach. A big worsted loop keeps it shut at the neck. I’m fed up with that church somehow since they amalgamated — too much repetition, too much music (or noise rather). The pianist bangs and the soloists shriek, too many flowers stuck all over the platform in all sorts of vases on footstools, jazzy lace curtains with horrible zigzag patterns, and Mr. W. so tickled and smug — at getting the job and a salary, I suppose. He tells the same old stories by the yard. His voice is like the gramophone needle scraping blank. I guess it’s time I moved on. But where? I’d “sit under” the Dean but I can’t hear one word in the Cathedral. Most of the parsons just chew words.
If
there is any juice to their performance they swallow it. It’s me that’s wrong, I guess. I want Christ’s teaching and living, not church dogma and doctrine. I wonder why Raja Singh did not answer my letter. Somehow I’m afraid he’s in trouble or sickness because he’s very polite and it needed answering.

They came and got the “Mountain” today. I was ungracious and did not ask them in, said I was housecleaning and hauled the Mountain to the door. Goodbye, old Mountain. How will you like the “Business and Professional” eye? Will they be kinder to you than the “Grange” eye, or even worse?

Heavy today. Such a weight upon me. Weather grand — several hours’ good rain, and the earth, flowers, birds whooping it up and rejoicing in mellow deliciousness. I did a fair sketch this morning, too. Am working intensively this week. I make a sketch
one quarter size, loose-knit and superficial but
observed,
bring it home and make a full-sheet one (oil on paper). I try to take it further than the small one and express all I know of that particular theme and the purpose of the sketch to wake and enter the place of it. What I am struggling most for is movement and expanse — liveness. By George, it’s
living
out there on the Beacon Hill cliffs. I’m a lucky devil to live near that wideness because it gets increasingly difficult to urge myself to the effort of setting forth on longer journeys for material. Weariness and rheumatic joints try to down me and I have to flog my spirit to rise and fly over them.

I got a letter today that pleased me greatly. It was from Smith’s Falls, about a picture exhibit, that one of mine was in. She says, “We have had a glimpse of British Columbia through your eyes and want to thank you. We know the B.C. woods and it made us homesick. Undoubtedly many did not understand your picture, not knowing the almost tropical growth of B.C. We, my husband and I, have lived in it, climbed in it, camped in it and found it just right. Accept our sincere gratitude.” That’s worth a lot of struggles, the kind of praise that thrills and makes you tingle to go on, to think you’d made someone feel. How different to those beastly empty write-ups, varnishing the “you” and ignoring (or worse) the thing you’re struggling for.

Did Good Friday penance — went to see Harold at the insane asylum. He is writing an autobiography and spent the hour and a half of my visit reading it to me. It is wonderful, quite good in
spots and wild romance in others — things he has got from stories he’s read or heard but that never happened to him. Still, it keeps him busy. He kneels and writes at a chair. The other patients laugh at him and steal his papers away. However, the attendants seem quite interested and keep his book for him. I took him a fresh supply of scribblers and pencils. He is intensely occupied with his story, just as thrilled as I was with the “Cow Yard.” “The trouble is, I don’t get enough time,” he says. “You see there is my work [the polishing of the brass spittoons] in the morning, and I help set the tables.” Then he kneels to the chair, with his white face and damaged forehead bending low over the seat and his misshapen feet thrust out behind and his poor dull brain rummaging among his confusing memories of happenings and readings. “You see,” he told me half a dozen times, “I want to do this thing thoroughly and put down the whole truth — only the truth.” When he read, his whole being went into the thing. When he described the cattle round-up in the Nicola he made the calls of the cattlemen with terrific gusto. New paragraphs were frequently started, “I Harold Cook, author of this book.” It is all written in a fine, neat hand. Sometimes it takes him very long to find his words and spelling in his dictionary. Sometimes the patients help him.

He wouldn’t let me go, asking me about its publication, clinging on to my hand, the keepers waiting. “Look here,” I said, “I’ll get shut in and you’ll miss your supper,” and finally got out. He has been writing it for several months now. Well, at least it means that the poor, muddled brain fretting over captivity has been released for spells into the freedom of memory and imagining. No bars of asylums or jails or poverty and sickness or any devilishness whatever can arrest the flight of our imaginings nor hide
from us what is stored in our memories. This bit of rummaging in my own memory, probing and clothing the ideas that come to me about the creatures I have had and known and loved — what a joy and unfolding of many things it has brought to me! What matter if they are never printed or heard of or seen? Maybe they’ve helped to develop some unexplainable thing. Anything worth while is bound to burst out, but we don’t know how or when or where. Hidden away in a drawer they may have done something, even if it’s only developing me so that I may help others by
understanding
them better. I certainly can enter Harold’s joy in his biography far deeper than if I had never tried writing myself. Funny world.

I went to Early Celebration at the Cathedral. It was full — men and women all “remembering.” It was cold and wet and early and the flowers through the park were trying to bear their burdens of rain and hold themselves up from the mud. The church was full of lilies and daffodils. I took communion in the side chapel. The little Chinese curate passed the cup. I liked being served from his hands. There is something specially spiritual about the Orientals. Their slender hands touch beautiful things so reverently. Our British hands are large, practical, useful appendages, but they are ugly, clumsy, uncouth. They are not reverent and tender of the touch of loveliness.

One feels aged in the Cathedral. It is impossible to hear and hard to see. I don’t try to any more. I just sit and “feel” God, just try to get close and let the words go. The Cathedral is very new and, because it is, it tries to pretend age. The decrepit, old, and lame attend, decent and uninteresting spinsters, and “h”-less. Old
Country families that stick like limpets to the rock of the “Church.” And, oh the headgear! — postscripts tagging on to the tail of Queen Mary.

I woke this morning with “unity of movement” in a picture strong in my mind. I believe Van Gogh had that idea. I did not realize he had striven for that till quite recently so I did not come by the idea through him. It seems to me that clears up a lot. I see it very strongly out on the beach and cliffs. I felt it in the woods but did not quite realize what I was feeling. Now it seems to me the first thing to seize on in your layout is the direction of your main movement, the sweep of the whole thing as a unit. One must be very careful about the transition of one curve of direction into the next, vary the length of the wave of space but
keep it going,
a pathway for the eye and the mind to travel through and into the thought. For long I have been trying to get these movements of the parts. Now I see there is only
one
movement. It sways and ripples. It may be slow or fast but it is only one movement sweeping out into space but always keeping going — rocks, sea, sky, one continuous movement.

Lawren asked if he could see the “Cow Yard” so I posted it today. He will pass it on to Fred.

I AM TRYING CHALKS
. Hang! Why don’t they invent a good sketching material? My oil and paper are fine but the oil paints are such a nuisance to carry. But it’s a dandy method for five finger exercises in the studio. I’ve learned heaps in the paper
oils — freedom and
direction.
You are so unafraid to slash away because material scarcely counts. You use just can paint and there’s no loss with failures. I try to do one almost every day. I make a sketch in the evening and a large paper sketch the following morning — or vice versa.