Artists reflect on water

Hello friends

This last month or so, it’s been all bikes and lakes. I can’t think of anything better than riding a bike to wild water, smelling the greenish smell of it on the wind, and slipping in. The ducks bobbing past at eye-level, the reedy fingers of weed and grass that flow along by my legs. The treeline all the way around keeping it like a secret.

So, let’s not wait, let’s dive into the water, and float in its magic for a moment…

The Lake

Sophie Cabot Black (2004)

Day and night, the lake dreams of sky.

A privacy as old as the mountains

And her up there, stuck among peaks. The whole eye

Fastened on hawk, gatherings of cloud or stars,

So little trespass. An airplane once

Crossed her brow; she searched but could not find

A face. Having lived with such strict beauty

She comes to know how the sun is nothing

But itself and the path it throws; the moon

A riddled stone. If only a hand

Would tremble along her cheek, would disturb. Even the elk

Pass by, drawn to the spill of creeks below—

How she cannot help abundance, even as it leaves

Her, as it sings all the way down the mountain.

This rich yet sparse poem by Sophie Cabot Black has the feeling of tumbling down to the deep waters, like a pebble rolling down the bank of a shore and falling in slow motion. The run-on lines do this, especially those line-breaks between stanzas that pull the sentence along thickly – like wading through the water itself.

The Lake reveals the water’s benevolent, maternal personality, like a kind of Holy Mary, gazing upwards with her glassy eyes and watching the slow unfolding of the seasons. Moving on this glacial calendar, the lake finds a kind of privacy. She sees how the complete inter-being of the moon, sun, elk, aeroplane – all gather to create a vast landscape of presence.

Perhaps this expansive, all-inclusive “abundance” (as Cabot Black calls it) is what we get a taste of when we walk into the lake, and why bodies of water are so mesmerising.

*Kalkbrottet (“The Lime Quarry”) by Elin Boberg (oil on canvas, 2023)*

Seeing landscapes as colour

When we look at landscapes, how much do we really see? The fluttering leaves, the rippling pond, the shades of green. It’s difficult to see them without thinking of the words: leaf, water, green colour, and what those words and concepts mean to us.

I recently read the wonderful, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In it, the protagonist Francie looks around her old home as her family is moving out, and is overwhelmed by a flood of awareness. She thinks:

“Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day. What had Granma Mary Rommely said? ‘To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.’”

It’s not always easy to conjure that kind of awareness. With the eye of an artist, it’s possible to see things as if for the first or last time. Monet said to:

“Try to forget what objects you have before you – a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, ‘Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,’ and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.”

Most people have seen Monet’s Nyphéas (or “Water Lilies”) cycle, the series whose creation consumed the last 30 years of his life. Some will have stood in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris surrounded by the swirling, horizon-less immersion of the paintings. And keen eyes will have noticed the slashes of lavender, deep purple, hot pink and sharp lime green that combine to make the serene scenes.

Monet’s new style of painting “en plein air” went against the predetermined style of classical painting. His ability to react to what he saw rather than paint what was expected captured something of the dynamic soul of nature, and spoke to our intrinsic understanding of what we see in front of us – a wordless description of awe, as touching and sentimental as the last time we would see it.

Singing the water people

Multi-instrumentalist, poet and jazz/Carnatic singer Ganavya vocalises a poem by Idom Shah (1924-1972), a Bengali Bhatiyali folk song about arriving at the shore of a river, unsure how to cross it. Ganavya plays the bass on this track as well as singing, and her classical Indian-Jazz fusion breathes new life over the song. About it, she wrote:

“A song is like a gift for me. A painting that you love, once you hand it to me, I will carefully trace it, and return the original back to you, forever carrying the traced image in my heart. In Tamil, the song cries the same cry:
What do you do when those who were meant to take care of you have forsaken you?

I sing “elo, elelo” which means “push, pull”— it is the sound of riverpeople rowing. In this way, I connect both languages through the sound of movement in water. When Nithya asked me to sing a song, I wanted to sing the sound of a movement— political reform, of balance between the push and the pull, of floating together, of moving together. I hope the sound of my voice will help you float on a day when you need help.”