The Island

It's been incredibly snowy this winter. I made one drawing of the island a week ago but otherwise I haven't been drawing from life at all. I've only been drawing and painting things out of my imagination. I miss the river. Here are a few additional images of the island drawn from about the same spot.

The island
2/7/2015
charcoal

3/27/2013

5/6/2013

12/12/2014

Kind of mind-numbing. Why do I do this??

More images:

10-3-2014

The bridge and the island with traffic. Reflections
pastel, charcoal 

Swan
charcoal

Water World

June 2, 2013

At the head of the island which is just below the dam, there is a small quiet space, a pool where the reflections of the grasses settle and shimmer. But the river races along on either side as if the right and left banks worry that they will be separated forever. Where they join at the downstream end of the island, you may spot mallards resting and dabbling in the calm eddies.
Does water have a memory? Eventually, the rivers and seas are the depositories of all our innocent and murderous launderings. They are the library and witness to the wine spilled, the blood dabbed from a child's knee, and the runoff of our too-green lawns, the hair and soap and waste and rainbow flecks from the sky. Does it also contain the frozen footprints that the ducks left in the ice last winter? Can it contain, like a paper envelope, my clandestine cat-like thoughts and ship them around the wet world? And that object, bobbing down the river… is that a letter for me? From, you? Marvelous!

Verdure

The Island
May 16, 2013
charcoal

There is an artificial island below the dam. I've watched it all winter get covered with water or snow and ice. Occasionally, taking shelter, mallards would curl up on the ice that formed around it. But now with summer so near, the island is a lush green oasis amid the rushing current. Grackles, starlings, robins and sparrows perch in the undergrowth and up in the branches.

The green color this time of year is stunning. "Verdure" and "verdant" are words that begin to capture this quality of bright rampant botany. All the leaves are new. Grasses grow 3-4 inches every few days and some trees are just getting their perfect, tender leaves. I suppose, when the temperature rises and the world gets used to summer, this green manic rush will slow down. Already, I can hear the caterpillars chewing and the lawnmowers growling. I sat under the trees this morning, drawing the dam and there was a steady sound of inchworm frass hitting my sketchbook paper. Eat and be eaten; the world is one big feast.

The Dam
May 18, 2013
colored pencil

To The Sun!

The Island Before The Bridge
March 27, 2013
graphite

The cars on the bridge are being driven to work and to school and to shops. But where is the island going without a drawbridge near? To the sun! To the sun!
The early morning sun shines on them all.

Imperial Greenery

05-31-12
charcoal pencil

I'm blinded and enchanted by all the color green that I see. Where was it four months ago? Where does it hide: all folded, origami-like within the seeds in the soil and as packets of genetic information in the woody integument of so many bare and clattering branches? But here we are, inheritors of a vast green world that simply takes over everything. Every substrate is vulnerable.

This is a study of the tip of the island below the dam. It's mostly weeds and poison ivy. I wouldn't recommend exploring there when the water gets low enough to cross over. No sir. Not unless you're too young to know better then I applaud your imagination and adventurous spirit!

As I drew this greenery I would sneak a look over at the dam and occasionally spy a fish trying to leap up over the dam. Talk about adventurous! It's the same spirit that flows through all this lush growth!

05-23-12
(charcoal)

Out of Control

The Pleasant Street Bridge and the island below the dam
Nov. 4, 2011

At some point, in days gone by, someone determined that an island below the dam was a good thing. I think this is true because at the upstream end of the island, just a few meters from the cascade, there are large granite boulders acting like the bow of a ship. These protect the vulnerable side of the island from being eroded by the powerful onrushing currents. And so, we have an island.

It is quite small. The only large animals I've seen there are fishermen and the occasional tribe of muddy-sneakered children who will be itching their poison ivy the day after their explorations. The Great Blue heron (who I haven't seen in weeks and don't expect back until 2012) hunts from the pool formed by the rocks. There are flocks of sparrows that infest the tangle of branches and families of ducks have rested in the lee of the island and dabbled in the July and August shallows that form in low-water. I did see a Black Crowned Night Heron once up in the trees there one summer.

Humans have this knowledge, or a set of assumptions that we are responsible for changing the environment. We are polluting the earth and have been for centuries. Now, more than ever before we live with the existential assumption that we are not quite in control of the arc of the Earth's environmental health. Every freak October blizzard or torrid April day is another argument that reinforces theories of climate change due to human activity. I accept these facts and the theories that proceed from them. Always have. Yet, another part of me, the messy cantankerous part that wants to fidget and daydream is drawn to thinking about the trash and the changes I see. I do pick up litter. But some I do not and here's why: that abandoned styrofoam cup is now the home of a slug or a family of millipedes perhaps. The cranky part of me steadfastly asserts that among many things I am not in control of are the emotions and motivations of other life forms. I may feel guilty and angry about that litter but the slug and the millipedes see it is an acceptable place to fulfill part of their genetic imperative to survive.

Some people made an island and my imagination finds rest and inspiration there. From the island, a heron once surveyed the scene and calculated it's next expenditure of precious energy. A riot of sparrow-friendly weedy non-native plants grows there. Humans will need to make many more islands in order to prolong our time of assumed dominion of the Earth. There's something present between the assumption of our power to affect things and our unsettling knowledge that we are placed within something much bigger that we can't ever fully see.

Are we ever outside of Nature: No.
Are we deluded? I think we are… by biological and ecological reality. Is this an argument in favor of a deity? Oh! No! I won't go there!!