Nothing Bespoke Consequences

When I set out to create from photos the drawing below, in pencil, with a thin dusting of pastel, the tranquility of a summer cottage under a radiant Placentia Bay, NL fog, seemed to be the essential focus of the exercise. Nothing overtly bespoke of earth moving consequences.

Here is that little point of land almost in its entirety, left to right, base to tip. This is the merest of peninsulas, but one with two secluded harbours either side of it within a larger enclosed harbour. It is a short and narrow strip of land consisting of small undulating land forms, filled, according to season, with excessive dandelions, irises, buttercups, wild reeds and grasses, heather and lichens; and its low bushes, buildings, and out-buildings, are blissful and bucolic: surely I must admit that it is all too appealing, worthy of a sweet souvenir photo, yes, but not basis for an art piece. Where is the stress? The anxiety and awkwardness are missing. And missing also the contemporary challenge to beauty—an inclusive quantity or measure of ugliness!

In fact so benign did it all seem during the first hour or two of drawing, (the piece is 21” x 29” so there are several days of drawing at stake), that in no time at all I thought I would have to quit from such a deficit of the engine that usually drives articles, essays, poems, musical compositions, plays, paintings, drawings: dramatic tensions / divisive oppositions / and in abstractions, the tonal and colour confrontations, all always in such need of aesthetic, artistic reconciliation.

And so, soon, a different truth, one of those divisive oppositions, asserted itself. The more I drew the more it became manifestly clear that this is not all about some current, summer driven, local, personal idyll of democratic freedoms and anarchic abandon of someone on Flat Island (aka Port Elizabeth), Placentia Bay, NL—an island on which permanent residents no longer live—but an oceanside residence that should only provoke a symphonic pastoral response if it is also a suitably brooding and reflective one.

I surely did, at first glance, swallow the illusion of Eden hook, line, and sinker. For some hours I couldn’t see past the waist-high grasses, the sly seduction of smooth waters, and the wispy, fog-filled ocean sky, whispering of exotic island locales like Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Cuba, all with due south ports of call from this once busy cod-fishing town. And then the implacable, the irreconcilible adversarial force, the bigger picture presented itself: the subject should be, could only be a definitive conclusive pencil portrait—water versus rock, how more plain and simple, and with water ultimately declared winner.

Goals: confront and acknowledge, and upgrade with appropriate and suitable weight of line and tone all that beaten-and-battered, broken-and-foundering rock; clarify the depth of that tidal low-water undercut which runs the entire length of the rock ledge; needed also, a reveal of that huge section of broken, segmented rocks many feet deep reaching back toward the line of buildings as the rock frontage is prepared by the ocean for launch in the not too distant future as a new local reef.

A mysterious and particularly purposeful universe? Not in my backyard. Here “nature” accomplishes without intent, unconsciously, and by simple mechanism: twice daily, more or less silently, tides rise and fall, press underneath the rock, suck outward with equal or even stronger force, pulling, and carrying out and away in its undertow the rock often already ground to rubble. In winter water as ice and frost assist. And all is accomplished unannounced, achieved so economically, so brilliantly without an approved business plan, and with such luxuriating timeless ease.