February Arrives

Art journal page (full page scan: low res) (watercolour)
Artist: Cindi Moynahan-Foreman

Detail: February 1 (watercolour)
(taken on iPhone)

Detail: January 31 (watercolour)
(Taken on iPhone)

Detail: January 30 (watercolour)
(Taken on iPhone)
Thumbnail sketch: of picture on
 Chtisarrrr instagram

As January ends, Ottawa's Winterlude has just begun, a wonderful new pizza place has been found (ZaZaZa) and snuggling and snoozing with Lexie brings much needed warmth whilst a Canadian deep freeze descends.

 Edith Sitwell wrote, "Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire:  it is the time for home."  I am sure Edith would agree that a friendly paw is equally wonderful!

February also brings groundhog day, Valentine's day, Family Day (Ontario), Chinese New Year and my birthday. That's why I love February so much. It's my birth month....where I started and restart my trips around the sun each year.

February, at one time was the last month of the Roman calendar and a time of ritual purification by washing.

A Calendar of Sonnet's: February

Helen Hunt Jackson

"Still lie the sheltering snows, undimmed and white; 

And reigns the winter's pregnant silence still; 

No sign of spring, save that the catkins fill, 

And willow stems grow daily red and bright. 

These are days when ancients held a rite 

Of expiation for the old year's ill, 

And prayer to purify the new year's will." 

In Ireland, by way of contrast, February is officially the first month of spring, and the first day of the month known as  Imbolc, a Celtic fire festival.

Celtic wheel of the year

Some more February poems:

• Margaret Atwood,  "February"
• Sara Teasdale, "February Twilight"
• Eric Lies, "28 Word Poem for February"
• Sadayo Takizawa, "Winter"

Leap Year Poem 

BY MOTHER GOOSE 

Thirty days hath September, 

April, June and November.
February has twenty-eight alone,
All the rest have thirty-one;
Excepting leap year, that 's the time
When February's days are twenty-nine."

The Peace of Wild Things

Plein air underpainting and sketch.

My notes: the "Why?"
(Gesture and value sketches)

"Blessed" (11x14 acrylic on hardboard)
Artist: Cindi Moynahan-Foreman

"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free."

 "The Peace of Wild Things," by Wendell Berry.

Live a Three-dimensioned Life

i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

© Wendell Berry. This poem is excerpted from "The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry" and was reprinted with permission of the author and Counterpoint Press for the website/podcast offerings found on OnBeing.

Artist Statements

"In every picture

There's a poem

In every poem

A picture."

~A Chinese proverb~

P.K. Page's Creative Space

I confess. I love reading artist's statements. 

When I discovered the artist statement of P.K. Page , I was delighted.

P.K. (Patricia Kathleen) Page is regarded as one of Canada’s most beloved creative voices. Both a poet and artist, Page crafted beautiful images through her words and art in her home office in Victoria, British Columbia (pictured above with thanks to LAC).

Here are some highlights from P.K. Page's artist statement:

"I began drawing in Brazil in the late 50's. Immersed in a language I could not understand and surrounded by a baroque world of great and tropical beauty, I was wordless. My writing, except for a journal which I didn't count, stopped. Then the pen that had written, miraculously began to draw. It drew everything around me-each blade of grass, each tree, each chair and table.

 It was not long before the 'gear and tackle and trim' of art began to intrigue me: the tooth of the paper I worked on, the colour of the ink, the thickness of the nib, the sound of the nib on the paper-one might even say, 'its song' -and then the different ways of applying colour: oil pastel, gouache, oil, egg tempera. Each required something new of me. I went to a teacher who told me to throw away the pen. But it would be an amputation! I moaned. Use colour, he advised........"

Flowers in a pot (1); Brazil (Rio); 1957-58

Brazillian Dolls; Brazil (Rio); 1958-59

More:

• National Film Board (NFB) : Still Water's: The Poetry of P.K. Page (1990; 38 min 2 s; Donald Winkler)