Trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting.
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!
Who of us knows just why we do what we do, much less another’s whys, or what we’re after? Art is not like that; cut and dried and hit-at like a bull’s eye and done for a reason and explained away by this or that motive. It’s climbing and striving for something always beyond.
It is hard to remember just when you first became aware of being alive. It is like looking through rain onto a bald, new lawn; as you watch, the brown is all pricked with pale green. You did not see the points pierce, did not hear the stab – there they are!
The forest was almost like a garden – no brambles, no thorns, nothing to stumble over, no rotten stumps, no fallen branches, all mellow to look at, melodious to hear, every kind of bird, all singing, no awed hush, no vast echoes, just beautiful, smiling woods, not solemn, solemn, solemn like our forests. This exquisite, enchanting gentleness was perfect for one day, but not for always – we were Canadians.
More than ever was I convinced that the old way of seeing was inadequate to express this big country of ours, her depth, her height, her unbounded wildness, silences too strong to be broken – nor could ten million cameras, through their mechanical boxes, ever show real Canada. It had to be sensed, passed through live minds, sensed and loved.
Down deep we all hug something. The great forest hugs its silence. The sea and the air hug the spilled cries of sea-birds. The forest hugs only silence; its birds and even its beasts are mute. It must have hurt the Indians dreadfully to have the things they had always believed trampled on and torn from their hugging.