Terrill Welch by herself - issue #17 The Act of Instilling Peace Through Nature
Everyday luxuries are riches for our souls and offer vitality and resilience. We know these through many experiences such as fresh sheets that have been dried on the clothesline during a summer morning and the unexpected visit from a family member or friend that leads to a belly laugh of pure enjoyment. It could be rising just before sunrise to hear the robins waking each other up in the tall for trees. Maybe it is the freedom to turn the alarm off or curl up in bed earlier than usual with a good book. Possibly this luxury is foraging a rare edible morel mushroom or wild miner’s lettuce growing in our yard and then picking up handmade fresh pasta for a delicious homespun meal with the addition of far away spices. Our luxuries could extend to slow mornings or leaving the house extra early for sunrise. It might be a luxury to be able to help someone else out instead of being the person in need of assistance. Or it could be the luxury of sharing our bed and cuddling with that special someone or a much loved cat or dog or then again, our luxury might be to have a bed all to ourself. At different times, our experiences offer different luxuries most treasured by each of us. I am sure you have more than these experiences of your own you could share. In fact, many more. The specifics are not as important as the noticing and being grateful for these simple abundances that are within our sphere of influence and lived adventures. This brings me to my painting intention for the year. I have been wondering how I will ever fulfill my wish to focus on peace through the landscape this year in my painting practice. This past month I believe I have found a way and it comes about by noticing everyday luxuries and it adds up to peace and contentment while humanity goes slightly mad by destroying its own ability to exist through its lack of environmental responsibility and stewardship that is further compounded by greed and ego-driven ambitions for power and control.
A slightly mad and power hungry humanity is not something I can do a lot about on a grand scale. However, I can spend my time in the coming weeks and months with the sea and summer flowers and other aspects of the landscape as I settle into capturing the bounties of nature. I shall pick up my brushes and notice the smallest movement of light or a brilliant freshly seen colour that has been waiting for me all along. I will bring it to you on my canvas or board, an offering for peace from nature. This I can do. This I shall do. It may not look new or any different than how I usually engage with my day in my painting practice. However, it will be wider, deeper, richer and even more giving because I will ask the universe to help. This is my best gift and therefore my best contribution to world peace… in noticing and drawing attention towards everyday luxuries. In this way we shall still the madness around us with beauty and love - even if only momentarily. Together. Me, in the act of painting. You, in the act of viewing these paintings. It is not denial but rather a conscious deliberate counterpoint to world unrest and wars. By painting and viewing these paintings, we are preforming an act of peace through nature. That we have a chance to do this is the greatest luxury and embraces all of life itself. What a summer, what a year we are going to have!
Now let me tell you a little about those luxuries I found in our yard before I share anything else…
A YARD FULL OF SURPRISES
In order to paint well, it is important to keep the mind and body as fully functioning as possible. For me this is a series of stretches, long walks and the best quality and most interesting foods I can find. Sometimes, these best and most interesting foods simply show up in my yard growing on top of the new septic field with its fresh topsoils and grasses.
The first discovery a couple of weeks ago was the indigenous Miner’s Lettuce which is so good and high in vitamin C with good levels of vitamin A and iron. This plant got its name during the gold rush because it was an early available wild green to the miners.
I sometimes just pinch it off and eat it by the handful without leaving the yard. Other times, it goes in a bowl alongside garlic chives, mint and parsley which are also ready at the same time.
Then this light salad is the star compliment alongside an infrequent steak dinner…
or also a more regular breakfast of regionally cured bacon and local farm fresh eggs and sourdough toast.
The bacon is rather rare as well on our home plate but not these local organic eggs or the locally made sourdough bread! These eggs are regularly prepared basted, poached or scrambled and served for breakfast, lunch or dinner depending on the day. The arugula, tomatoes and cucumber are mostly regionally sourced again. But in deep winter they come from very far away along with the sweet peppers which we only have growing in this area during the summer.
My second foraging extravaganza really caught me by surprise. Morel mushrooms!
What a find! I am not an expert or even a novice mushroom picker so I took a photo above on site. Then another photo of it on my hand for scale.
Then I cut it in half lengthwise to show see what it looked like.
I did an internet investigation and then being fairly certain it was a true and not false morel, I showed my photographs to someone I know on island that really knows her wild mushrooms. She confirmed - you have a true morel! I think she was more excited than I was.
We were heading into Victoria so I picked up enough handmade fresh pasta for her and for us. The place we get the pasta from is called the Fickle Fig over by the airport in Sidney and is our new favourite place to get a late lunch before catching the 4:20 pm ferry home.
It even comes with house sparrows to pick up the crumbs…
That evening, I picked the first morel mushrooms so that we were able to give them to our friend with the fresh pasta the next morning.
Here is the feedback -
“Oh my heavens! Such a delicious meal of fresh pasta and morels! Very simple sauteéd mushrooms over the pasta with a nice glass of pinot grigio. Heavenly! Many thanks again and may your morel patch be fruitful for years to come.”
What luxuries to be able to share such abundance with a friend from the bounty growing all on its own in our yard! Even if it required some city driving to get the pasta after coming from downtown Victoria where we went to sign our income tax documents so they could be submitted.
RURAL DRIVER TRAINING SCHOOL
I was thinking about my driver training when driving in the city this past month. I was trying to figure out how to legally do a righthand turn when there is a bus lane on the right. Do I go into the righthand bus lane or do I stay in the car lane and turn right from there? I followed the car in front of me but I wasn’t sure it was right to be in the righthand bus lane to turn right. This wasn’t a situation I came across when I was doing my driver training and I knew I was going to need to look it up. So I did and it seems you do turn into the righthand bus lane close to the intersection to turn right.
But then another part of the document said you don’t ever use the bus lane. It seems that the solid or the dotted white line is the best clue to whether you can move into a righthand bus lane to make a right turn. I share this for all non city drivers in British Columbia.
This got me thinking about when I did my driving training which was offered during our school day due to so many of us living outside of town and needing to catch school buses home…
When I was sixteen years old my parents insisted I take driver training if I wanted to get my driver’s license. I was good with this as I thought it would be great to learn the rules of city and highway driving. As for being able to drive a vehicle? Well, that had happened long before then. I tried to remember when it was that I first pushed in the clutch and started a vehicle. Was I eleven? Or maybe twelve? I know by age thirteen I could drive the truck left behind for me at my aunt and uncle’s place so I could get help if needed while looked after their three young children, all under the age of six, for the weekend. They had neighbours a few miles away but there was no phone, only wood heat and a propane stove that I remember cooking hotdogs on the open flames with a fork for them. I could also driven our truck up to the top of the hill two miles from home to get my siblings and me to the school bus. Driving a vehicle, stick or automatic, when I was sixteen wasn’t really an issue.
By the time I was old enough to go to driving school, I could rock a vehicle out of a mud hole or shift it into second gear and move to the outside of of a one lane road to climb an icy hill without spinning out. But I didn’t know anything about passing on the highway or parallel parking or how to go through a four way stop. I was excited and nervous. My driving instructor was equally as nervous I think but had his methods. He started by saying that one third of us would fail our driving exam and it was up to us to decide if we were going to be part of this one third or not. The focus of the training was on defensive driving skills and practicing situational awareness. I was reasonably good in these areas but worked really hard to learn to parallel park and maintain my speed and then pass on a two lane the highway With oncoming traffic. Neither of these did I get to practice very much on the twenty-six mile, mostly gravel road from home to school or during my driver training which happened during our school hours. The instructor then had an idea for the class and me to get in more “highway” hours driving.
It was late spring and he decided that we should drive from school to our home a few times to make sure we had enough driving practice on the highway before our test.
I looked at him and said, “they just graded the road and the bridge washed out this spring where the beaver dammed the creek so we have to drive over the planks.”
“All the better for practicing” he replied with a flat nonnegotiable tone.
I think he thought I was trying to get out of it but that wasn’t it at all. I just wanted to be clear what he was in for.
School let out on one fine early June day. After a bit, my instructor and I walk to his nice clean town car. The school buses had already left and I made a mental note to self. I went through my safety check and we got in and I then started the car. We stopped at the light of the one lane bridge heading out of town. Then I rolled that beautiful clean town car up the hill, past the hospital, and took the second turn off on the right onto the Sturgeon Point Road.
He looks sideways at me and says “I thought you said this wasn’t paved.” Just then the car leaps off the end of the pavement onto the gravel giving the shocks new found space and, even with his seatbelt on, the top of my driving instructor’s head brushes the ceiling of the car.
I grimace and say nothing. These town cars just don’t have the clearance and I was pretty sure it hadn’t seen a road like this before. But it was his idea. I kept quiet and kept driving.
I had no trouble maintaining my speed on the freshly graded gravel because it was impossible to do anything but drive the conditions, mostly this meant slow. I maneuvered us around, through and over every pot hole, wrongly banked corner and wandering cow. The rocks clipped off the sides of the car and dust rolled up behind us. My instructor was unusually quiet but I started to relax. The fields became sparser and farther apart. Poplar trees shimmered in their new greens far back from the road to leave room for winter snow removal. Strait stretch and corner after corner we made our way home. Eventually, we went past my great grandparents’ homestead on the right. I mentioned it conversationally to the driving instructor.
“Keep your focus on your driving.” he replied. This is when I realized that he wasn’t really feeling that early-summer-beautiful-day-driving vibe.
A head us there was a lot of water in the road from where it had flooded. I wasn’t concerned because it had a gravel bottom and we also went through it twice a day with the school bus and then twice again on Saturday to go to town for groceries. At this point though we were twenty miles from town with not even landline phones or electricity at the sparsely sprinkled farms. It must have felt like the middle of nowhere to the driving instructor. I didn’t hesitate going through that long stretch of flooded road but slowed down a bit and took the highest part of the road with the least water for that town car. There was a little steam when we came out the other side but car didn’t stall and I kept driving.
We went around some tight turns and I hugged as far over on right side of the road as it got narrower with every turn.
“You don’t need keep quite that far right” the instructor observed.
I didn’t reply. Nor did I move farther towards the centre of the road.
After a few more minutes and up and down and around a few more hills and turns we came to where the bridge had washed out. The car was narrow but I figured if I lined it up carefully, I could keep most of each tire on the planks. I didn’t stop but rolled up slow and square to the planks and drove carefully across.
My instructor said nothing and I didn’t bother to try to catch a sideways glimpse. It was a good plank crossing and I knew it in every cell of my sixteen year old body.
Just ahead of us, we had one more set of “S” curves before the last straight stretch on the main gravel road. I looked as far ahead through the trees as I could see and then again held tight to the right. About in the middle of the first hairpin on the hill an exasperated sigh escaped from the instructor just before he gasped.
Right ahead of us coming out of the top turn on a one and half lane road was a huge yellow bluebird school bus. The bus driver (who we called uncle Frank) was the king of defensive driving. Just the same, it was going to be tight. I stayed steady and so did the bus driver with each of us hugging a little tighter to our respective right side of the road and up the turn I went. At the top is a mile long strait stretch. The instructor pulls his fingers one at a time off of the dash. I keep driving and watch for moose and bear that might come out the willows onto the road unexpectedly.
After the next corner, I turn the left signal on and head down a narrow one lane road to go the last two miles to the farm. We could now drive all the way in again after the spring mud but it was rough. I ramble around as many potholes as I can and slowly through rest only scraping the bottom of that town car a few times on the way in. I get out and take a few of the bigger rocks off the road on the steep sandhill so we didn’t put a hole in anything or get hung up. As we come to the open fields, I can see our weathered house and the dog running and barking.
Pulling up and parking, I turn the car off and wait for my instructor’s usual comments, assessment and advice on what I needed to practice. I was braced because I knew it had been a tough trip in that fancy car. But he surprised me.
“You are going to be a good driver no matter how you do on your test. You drive the road conditions and think ahead and can keep your cool. Most experienced drivers would have been unnerved meeting that big school bus on those curves.”
Pheewww! What a relief!
I invited him in for coffee which is standard etiquette when someone makes it all the way out to the farm. He declined and said he needed to get back to town.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the instructor never mentioned me driving home with him to get more practice again. I passed my driving test first try and took another ten years to feel comfortable passing oncoming traffic on the highway and still avoid parallel parking unless I have to do it. But I still know how to stay on my side of a narrow road or any road for that matter. You never know when you will meet a big old school bus, a logging truck, freight truck or a fuel truck coming the other way. This is particularly true driving “the hill” into and out of Bella Coola which I have done several times when it was part of the area I covered as a Regional Program Coordinator for the Ministry of Women’s Equality back in the mid 90’s.
Now, let’s see what is just off the easel…
WHAT IS NEW OFF THE EASEL
Yes, I have still been painting. I was getting to this. 😉
The first two are plein air paintings from my trip to the southwest coast of Vancouver Island. I did a couple of edits back in the studio to smooth out horizon lines and a bit of light adjustment but they still have the flavours of standing with the sea.
Artist notes: I had been up early to catch the ferry from Mayne Island to Swartz Bay and then driving along the southwest coast of Vancouver Island until I reach French Beach. It was just noon and the sun and wind dried the acrylic paint as fast as it came off my brush. Still, it was a great hour to briskly whisk a seascape onto the gessobord.
I cannot really imagine a better way to spend part of a day. So I did it again a couple of mornings later…
And here is the finished work for you to consider…
Artist notes: The light and sun were warm as I shouldered my plein air backpack along the trail and out to the beach. The small break water rocks seemed futile against the size of the sea. But as I stood there watching and painting I witnessed how they did their job as intended. Though I later finished this work in the studio, the softness of the morning stays.
My final new painting fits into my intention to take my practice deeper with closer observation and noticing. It is a place where the land and the sea meet.
Artist notes: I wander the reefs during low tide mesmerized by the shapes and colours of the shells resting as if organized by design.
Finally, a quick reminder that as a paid subscriber to “Terrill Welch by herself” you have early access to an additional 20% savings that is part of the 20% for 20 days that will be offered via email to everyone receiving the quarterly “A Brush with Life” publication in June.
I am always thinking about what more I can offer those that subscribe to “Terrill Welch by herself” and the feedback I am getting is that just the chance to know me better is enough and everything else is an extra bonus. I hope you feel this way as well. I am still slowly growing this membership so any thoughts you have on making it even better, please feel free to let me know.
CAPTURING A SUNRISE FOR A LARGE PAINTING AND OTHER REFERENCE ADVENTURES
I have had a grand few weeks along the shores of the southwest coast and I suppose the easiest way is to start from farthest away and work my way back home.
French Beach after finishing the plein air painting and walking along the shore.
The next morning I was on Sombrio Beach.
I love the different stones and how they are uniquely transformed by the tides.
This is where the hidden waterfall that I recently painted.
Here is one of my four references that I used to help guild my painting process…
As we were leaving the fog rolled in giving us a whole new seascape to enjoy.
Within minutes it was all around us.
The next beach explored was Sandcut Beach with a waterfall right on the beach.
It wasn’t the best light due to our midday arrival but memorable just the same.
I love the play of light in the falling water.
The next morning before heading home, I made one last stop at Muir Creek Beach which is great fossil finding place if you are there during a low tide.
I really didn’t take a lot of photos here as I was focused on getting my plein air painting done before the tide changed too much. I can tell you though that it was mesmerizing to stand there in the morning sun working at catching the shapes and light.
Once home again, a cold northwest wind keeps coming up again and again during the past couple of weeks and it has left me with a few additional seascape references that will likely become small 11 x 14 inch paintings. I will just share just a few that I am considering…
There have been some good ones. Here is another favourite. I am pretty sure I can get an exciting painting out of this moment…
Or this one?
What about this one!?
Or maybe this one?
I will stop there with the waves but do I ever love days like this!
It is so different from a quiet stroll out to Saint John Point and crouching down beside some very old coastal juniper trees.
These too might end up on an 11 x 14 inch gessobord. I have seven to ten new ones that need to be painted for showing at the Mayne Island Resort as part of my artist in residence gig. I have a good solid start with reference I think.
But the bigger project is a 48 x 40 inch sunrise painting of Bennett Bay from the dock. I asked for permission to go get these references as it is on private land and part of the Mayne Island Resort property. Needless to say they were more than pleased to give me permission. Here is the main reference I am considering but I just might get out of bed a 5:30 am a few more times and see if there is something more that this view can offer me at sunrise… which is now well before 6:30 am.
I love the shapes as much as the colours. Such a great place to start the day. I took some extra time and wandered out on the dock to just take in the morning.
By the time I get back and go to leave, the sun is well up between the trees.
UNTIL NEXT TIME
I have several books I am just about finished reading but with sharing my reference gathering adventures I believe we have run out room for this issue. Next time! And if you have made it all the way to the end, congratulation! I am sometimes just way more chatty than others! 🤣
However, I will close with one short video. Carmen Louis Cicero (born August 14, 1926) is an American painter from Newark, New Jersey. He was o3 at the time this video was made and is still alive as near as I can tell and would now be 98 years old. Though his painting subject is different than mine and we occupy a different context, the life of being a painter that he describes is deeply familiar and resonates with my own practice. I thought you might enjoy this 10 minute video glimpse into his life and work….
There is also a new show opening today in the Terrill Welch Gallery Pod with fourteen of my newest paintings now hanging on the walls or are resting on stands.
The latest three that are being kept until next Friday for your consideration are here as well but they have a little not in their description about when they will become publicly available for purchase…
Visitors are starting to trickle by a few at a time serval times a week. In fact, a couple recently came to visit the pod all the way from Australia! A few known art collectors of my work have already let me know they are coming in May. So this next season is off to a solid steady beginning. Just the way I like it!
Also, if you need to update your subscription, billing or email information, this can be done by signing in and going to “account” on the top right of the newsletter home page. Someone asked me how to do this the other day and, after I had it figured out, I thought I might as well share it with all of us.
I hope you enjoy the rest of April as most of the northern hemisphere welcomes spring. This is such a fine time of year and so full of possibilities, excitement and hope. I wish for you the time to soak it all in and enjoy!
All the best until next time!
Terrill 👩🎨🎨❤️
P.s. If you would like to email me directly at anytime, please feel free and reach out to tawelch@shaw.ca as I am always pleased to hear from you.
Terrill Welch
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