That I Would Paint if I Could

Among the many abilities I wish I posessed is painting. I have a crude cast of mind to dash an image onto paper but the refined set of hand and the conscious knowledge that gives power over the image are beyond me.

Here are two paintings I would turn out if I could.

1) A Wisconsin summer landscape turned mythical: green hills rising in successive ripples and quilted with soy-bean fields, corn fields, back yards, farm yards, and adorned with various structures and trees; all being shaken out like a blanket by two gods of the earth. I think I would make it in three frames. The central one would contain the landscape only so it could be recognized and considered for itself. The landscape would edge into graspable fringes in the sides of the two auxiliary frames, which would be longer and thinner in dimmension than the landscape frame, and the two gods, one in each side frame, would grip the edge of the blanket/landscape. The gods would stand straight and be bulky in build; their feet would be very solid and their adornment precious metal and gems. The different dimmensions of the frames would show that the two things were happening in different worlds but were the same reality.

2) A painting expositing the maddeningly delicious tussle of gray, black and white in a winter scene. A gray country road scarred by faded skid-marks, trundling down through blackish empty fields where round hay bales cast colorless shadows and snow huddles in dirty white patches. The field is ringed by white-and-black-paper birch trees which stand against gray skies scathed with chalky skitters of cloud and edging into mauve haze at the horizon; in the foreground a gray cat with black eyes dancing around the edge of a water puddle that reflects both white snow and gray sky in duller guise then edges out into a stretch of black mud.