Howler Monkey Belize Trip Nov./Dec. 2022

 

"Then the Earth grew old, its landscapes mellowing and showing signs of age, its ways becoming whimsical and strange in the manner of a man in his last years..." 

The High History of the Runestaff

Ivan Kenneth Eyre (15 April 1935 – 5 November 2022)

  I finished school and moved to Calgary to join Helen in the summer of 1988. We were both at the U of C that summer just in time to see Personal Mythologies/Images of the Milieu a solo show by the Canadian artist Ivan Eyre at The Nickle Gallery. One day a week admission was free (we had little money) and I was there every lunch hour. Later the library I worked in in Calgary  held Eyre's large painting Floodwood, a strange merger of still life and landscape typical of the artist. Another library and I shared my office with a print of his landscape Red Hill. Since my first viewing of his work Eyre has not just shared my personal space through his works but also my imaginative space through his oft repeated images of wheeled horse, giants shapes in the sky and hornblowers. I have collected show catalogues, books and a few works. He has influenced how I view the cityscapes and the landscapes of the prairies in which I have spent most of my life. As Helen once said after seeing his cityscapes one learns to look up at the tops of the tall buildings to catch a glimpse of the Eyre hornblowers silhouetted against the prairie sky.

Obituary

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/winnipeg-mb/ivan-eyre-11003438

Wikipedia entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Eyre

A lovely youtube clip of Eyre in his studio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4URm0196QjM

When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it.

Ivan Eyre

Thank you Ivan.

I'm back

"And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
    And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
    And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
            Shall be lifted—nevermore!"
The Raven, Poe

Spring back/Winter Wonderland

 

  "Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, 

     its white flag waving over everything,

      the landscape vanished,

      not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,   

      and beyond these windows"

      from Snow Day

       by Billy Collins  

And let's remember.

White-tailed jackrabbit

Taken from the front window this morning. Despite the cars, dogs, coyotes and bobcats they share the city with we still have some white-tailed jackrabbits (Lepus townsendii).

"Cocked in that land tactile as leaves

wild things wait crouched in those valleys

west of your city outside your lives

in the ultimate wind, the whole land's wave. 

Come west and see; touch these leaves." 

from Midwest

by William Stafford

Today

 

"I think, that if I touched the earth, 

It would crumble; It is so sad and beautiful, 

So tremulously like a dream"

Dylan Thomas

TODAY

“We kill so much! Not only in our stupid battles, the stupid street fighting of our revolution, our stupid executions - no, we kill at every step. We kill when circumstances force us to drive gifted young people into occupations for which they are not suited. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction, or infamy.”

from  If The War Goes on: Reflections On War and Politics by Hermann Hesse

photo taken at Highgate Cemetery