August Breaks My Heart
2009
(featuring Huckelberry, my trusty studio companion)
I always feel melancholy
in August. For a northerner like me August signals the impending end of summer's carefree joy and indicates a panic that not enough pleasure has been harvested from the brief
therapy of the season. But this year feels worse for me with all the shit happening in the world, the climate disaster, and my
little cat Opal is so sick. My wandering lifestyle does not afford me the comforts a
place to nurse her and for the first time in two years I miss having a home. (The tenants who rent my house are very kindly looking after
both Opal and Huckleberry but I have not lived with my cats for two years)
Crazy World
2011
I am looking back to some paintings I made almost ten years ago that dealt with the melancholy I feel this time of year. It was a time when I painted images of vulnerability and grief.
Absence 2010
(Painted after a romantic heart break, it depicts the apparent emptiness of the gravel alley outside my studio and includes the flowers gathered by Ophelia. Perhaps my most vulnerable painting Boy was I feeling sorry for myself! ).
I had planned to stage my
own private artist retreat in Maritime Canada this autumn to paint my introspection, but Opal being sick with cancer, I may need to nurse her. And I may well stay in my Seattle studio, near the house where she
lives. She didn't have surgery last week as planned since the surgeon found the cancer to have grown too fast and become inoperable. Obviously I was grief stricken. But now a specialist is suggesting that it may, in fact, be operable with no loss of quality of life to my lively and mischievous kitty. So we will probably go ahead.
I am surprised how sad I feel. After all I haven’t lived with the little
cat much during these past two years of freedom and travel. But it occurs to me
that she is a significant part of my family and the life I created over the past
15 years in Seattle. I made a home, raised two children, cared for two cats,
nurtured friendships and built a garden. I feel all of that ending as I contemplate a move away from Seattle and Opal’s
illness is perhaps symbolic of that in my heart. I understand all the happiness some
of these changes will bring. But for now I feel the sadness of the end of these
things. And perhaps the impending end of much of the natural world. And the impending
end of summer. I will allow August, as always, to beak my heart.
