I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.
There was neither horizon, cloud, nor sound; of that pink, spread silence even I had become part, belonging as much to sky as to earth.
What a splendid time Woo must have had.
Oh I do want that thing, that oneness of movement that will catch the thing up into one movement and sing – harmony of life.
I thought my mountain was coming this morning. It was near to speaking when suddenly it shifted, sulked, and returned to smallness. It has eluded me again and sits there, puny and dull. Why?
The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.
Oh, Spring! I want to go out and feel you and get inspiration. My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching.
Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light – sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green – sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches.
The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain.
The foolish square calves pretend to be frightened of our train. Bluffers! Haven’t they seen it every day since they were born? It’s just an excuse to shake the joy out of their heels.
There is a need to go deeper, to let myself go completely, to enter into the surroundings in the real fellowship of oneness, to lift above the outer shell, out into the depth and wideness where God is the recognized centre and everything is in time with everything, and the key-note is God.
If you’re going to lick the icing off somebody else’s cake you won’t be nourished and it won’t do you any good, – or you might find the cake had caraway seeds and you hate them.
I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, seal it from everybody.
I can rise above the humility of my failure with an intense desire to search deeper and a blind faith that some day my sight may pierce through the veils that hide. I know God’s face is there if I keep my gaze steady enough.
Got a new pup. He is half griffon. The other half is mistake.
Art being so much greater than ourselves, it will not give up once it has taken hold.
Sometimes I could quit paint and take to charring. It must be fine to clean perfectly, to shine and polish and know that it could not be done better. In painting that never occurs.
The outstanding event was the doing which I am still at. Don’t pickle me awayas done.
The biggest part of painting perhaps is faith, and waiting receptively, content to go any way, not planning or forcing. The fear, though, is laziness. It is so easy to drift and finally be tossed up on the beach, derelict.
The liveness in me just loves to feel the liveness in growing things, in grass and rain and leaves and flowers and sun and feathers and furs and earth and sand and moss.
My mountain is dead. As soon as she has dried, I’ll bury her under a decent layer of white paint. But I haven’t done with the old lady; far from it!