Menagerie - My recently completed watercolor painting.

 

 Menagerie  by Susan Slocum Dyer 2024 ©

It has been a long while since I had the time to write a blog post. I am so glad to have found the time to do so now. I thought about going back and posting all that I have painted and written since September, 2024, but thought I would run out of available time before I got to the present, which is where I have decided to sit down and start. 

I will begin with my most recently finished watercolor painting, hand drawn with pencil and pastel chalk. I titled it Menagerie as the word means both a "collection of wild animals kept in captivity for exhibition, and a strange or diverse collection of people or things" Examples noted with the definition included a menagerie of flowers (from Oxford Languages). One of the synonyms for menagerie is a zoological garden. 

Zoological garden has a strong visual element for me, yet I don't believe that element is specific to what the coupling of those two words intends. A repeated component of my recent work, especially when fish and flora are included, is based on the widely made comment in the Arctic by neighbors, relatives and those presenting cultural awareness forums. That culturally specific statement is, "The ocean is my [our] garden." Most food in the Arctic comes from the sea, or tutu (caribou) grazing nearby if the weather permits, and only in certain areas of the Alaska Arctic like the village of Wainwright, Point Hope or Point Lay. Yet, it is still a leap from zoological garden to the ocean as a garden, but art is for leaping. 

I have written about the ocean as one's garden in earlier posts. I have also written about my step-father, Barney Jimerson, a member of the wolf clan of the Iroquois Seneca tribe in Upstate New York. He, too, spoke of the ocean as one's place to feed yourself and your family. 

My mother, Carol, who lived part-time on the Seneca territory (also called reservation) was a dedicated gardener. She rode her bike across the territory at age 80 stopping to dig up sassafras root so as to make root beer later when she returned to her and Barney's place there, where she kept both a flower and vegetable garden.

She also kept both a front and back yard garden at her house off the territory. She worked in her garden for hours every day the weather permitted. She took ikebana flower arranging lessons when I was just a child. Every week, she created uniquely beautiful arrangement for our various kitchen tables in the different houses we called home over the years. 

She often used just a few flowers, or even one, and a leaf, maybe two, or a branch in her arrangements. I really didn't fully understand the design and color impact her arrangements had on my own art until I recently researched ikebana and pulled up the image below. I was awakened to the similarities between its design and of my painting, Adrift. I was quietly surprised; a new awareness of how I am my mother's daughter. 

Shōka arrangement by the 40th headmaster Ikenobō Senjō, drawing from the Sōka Hyakki by the Shijō school, 1820

                    Adrift (2022) by Susan Slocum Dyer ©

When I initially thought of painting work that included fish and flora, like my painting with yellow-eyed rock fish swimming in a sea where delphiniums grew, it was after a thought or a question came into my mind. It was something my mother would have asked me. That is, "If the ocean is your garden, Susan, where are the flowers?"

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I followed the rockfish painting with other works that included fish. I stepped away from painting flowers under the sea and instead overlaid self-pressed seaweed above the artwork. I will write about those in future posts. Then I woke up one day remembering how when I first started to teach myself to paint while living in the coastal Arctic village of Wainwright that I had sketched and painted seals. But, I had this longing to paint flowers again, but not underwater. 

I had been teaching my classroom students about globes and defining its difference from a map. As with my painting Puzzle,  which was strongly influenced by my teaching lessons on math arrays in my classroom, my lessons about globes impacted the design of my next work. I thought how could I make a vase that was shaped like a globe, or a fishbowl, and have the seals swim within it; a menagerie of animals on exhibition?

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(Just a note, the word Puzzle is digitally added and not part of the painting)

The seals would be those animals. Yet, I have looked into the eyes of Arctic spotted seals and they have a powerful gaze that draws you in just like their blackened eyes draw in sunlight. I wanted to paint this reciprocal scene where the seals and the viewer both gazed out and at each other, each asking their own questions. 

My thoughts doubled and then tripled. I didn't want to paint a glass bowl or globe with seals and kelp within. I wanted to painted a round, ceramic vase that was painted in such a way as to give the illusion or hint of being a water filled bowl. I don't make things easy for myself.  I have strong, visual imagery when I first start a work and for the most part I sustain fidelity to that original image. 

So what about the flowers I wanted to paint? After I pencil sketched the entire work, I started painting the flowers first. They have this sway to them that echoes the implied movement of the seals decorating the vase they are held in. The flowers are painted bright pastels and are joined by leaves and two long reeds for design, like the twigs my mother added to her ikebana arrangements. The finished image was of a menagerie of animals on display, the seals, and a menagerie of flowers. A zoological garden in a very artistic sense. 

Below are photos of my initial pencil sketch and painting for the artwork Menagerie. 

It was all going so well. I really favored how the bright, yellow-whitish flowers turned out. But then ... I sneezed with a full paintbrush in my hand and all was lost as the brush swept over the flowers splattering them with paint. The work couldn't be saved. I tore off the upper half of the work, the flower sketch. Although paint smeared, I knew I needed it to sketch anew and start over, which I did. 

After a few hours of sketching the flowers and vase again, I took a short nap. I suddenly woke up from a dream in which seals were swimming all around me. I looked closely at their faces and knew my earlier sketches were wrong. I needed to re-draw them and then add those to the vase. First, I needed to study photographs of them and make sketches. 

When I painted seals at my desk in one of the bedrooms of my solo-occupied teacher housing in  Wainright, it was a profound experience. I remember that when I painted their eyes it was like the seals woke up, there was this dialog between myself, the artist, and them. 

It reminded me of a story I had read years ago by Balzac called, Unknown Masterpiece. The artist repeatedly attempts to bring his painted figure, a woman, into the frame. It such a great read and it came back to me that night as I pulled seals up out of the artistic ozone and onto the page. It also felt like a great responsibility - to get them right. I remember once I was so close and then just somehow messed up and lost the image. I apologized solemnly to the seal that sunk below the wet-washed paint. 

For my current work, I needed to draw realistic seals that could swim the surface of my painted, ceramic vase. I web searched images of spotted seals so that my spots weren't random dots here and there, but similar to how they actually looked, which was misshaped and irregular. Some even looked like the spots were oozing or leaking. 

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The revamped sketched seals on the vase below:

Below are photos of the artwork as it progressed.

First, the flowers:

It is the small details of artworks that are so significant to the artist, like these brown reeds:

Now the seals:

I truly thought the work was done and posted pictures of it on social media.

Yet, a couple weeks after painting it and enjoying the Christmas holiday away, I walked by it hanging above my art desk and heard me asking myself, "So, when are you going to finish it?" I knew somethings were missing. I felt like it was top heavy, even though the seals were so significant. 

I realized I needed to add more, but different, kelp to balance the image. Also, I reminded myself that it wasn't a fishbowl that I had painted the seals swimming across, it was a ceramic vase. I decided to paint coral like kelp along the base and to paint the coral a white that would look like ceramic glazing. I also added in the far lower left corner of the vase an artist's stamp like the stamps on some of my own collected ceramic ware. See the photos below:

Now, it is finished. Menagerie (2024) ©

So much to write and I have only written about this one piece, although details about other works of mine were added. My next post will be about my recently written and published prose poem, Wake. Yet, I just finished another one called, Dipper. Hmmm ... which to write about first. We will see.