R35 Elijah
5 x 8" ink on paper
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30 October, 1987
10 September, 1987
05 September, 1987
23 August, 1987
22 August, 1987
21 August, 1987
R30 Meri's Idea
R30 Meri's Idea
10x14" designers opaque & watercolour
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08 August, 1987
08 July, 1987
07 July, 1987
07 June, 1987
R26 Raven Creature
R26 Raven Creature
10x14" designers opaque & watercolour
Corporate collection
It's a metaphoric creature, a human face, fishy parts, feathery parts, wing tips, and scaly clouds. There is no raven, as such, but the fishy part does have an odd thick-looking beak.
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02 June, 1987
R25 Rose Writing
R25 Rose Writing
10x14" designers opaque & watercolour
Corporate collection
May 27, 1987
I'm working on a small watercolour, R25, Rose writing/drawing with Raven. It is in the most muted pastels, grey, flesh and blue. It is lighter than air, made of airy spaces with only a darker underside, just showing. Raven, in this picture, is disappearing, making way for something else.
This picture has no meaning, really. It is just part of that blending-edge, brushed over and fanned outward to become other thoughts and concepts. The shapes will alter; the colours will change. But the artistic intent will always be the same. What a quest my brush is on. What a trail my pen makes. What an illusion my shaded colours give. What a story!
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01 June, 1987
R24 Nuclear Creature
R24 Nuclear Creature
36x24" oil on panel
Here the checkerboard becomes three-dimensional, heaving up in irregular thrust faults, the upheaval of a threatening world. The order and pattern of life is broken up, but out of the disorder and threats (missiles, darts, dark birds, like omens) there arises a new creature.
March 24, 1987
New panel on the easel. A new beginning. I have taken my time on the drawing, trying to interpret my mental state, give birth to a little being that is not man or woman, but an artistic spirit. Brave little artist, hissing up through the fissures and angles of a warped set of blocks, erupting in a flare of wings like black fire; sensing something out there, analyzing data. Defiant. This is the little spirit that I am painting.
22 June 1987
Completed the oil painting, R24 , after working on it all day and most of the evening. Most of my recent drawing s and watercolours have the same motif, an ambiguous creature rising up out of chaotic, fragmented surroundings. These are pictures that I may not like in the future, but they are essential products of my thought processes at the moment. It is as though my purpose were to take apart what I have been doing (origin) and examine every piece (fragmentation) and come up out of it with a new vision (eruption). All my creatures are pushing, reaching, climbing, striving. Out of confusion, one vision.
Eve was bent over her new picture, etching lines into the wet oil of the under-painting with a stylus.
“What is that?” Allan asked.
“I am trying to interpret my mental state,” she said without looking up. “I’m making a little being that is not a man or a woman, but an artistic spirit. A brave little artist,” she indicated a creature with the point of her stylus, “hissing up through the fissures and angles of a warped set of blocks, erupting in a mass of wings…they look like black fire, don’t you think?...sensing something out there, out beyond the painting. Defiant.”
I had to ask, Allan thought. Did she rehearse speeches like that?
Mary Weymark Goss (from the novel ‘Raven’)
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28 May, 1987
27 May, 1987
24 April, 1987
R21 Rose and Tapestry
R21 Rose and Tapestry
24x36" oil on panel
Private collection
How did I come about making this image? I was working on the Raven tapestry at the time, and had Rose pose with it. Rose had been ill, and had a fragile look. Her slumped pose is the natural posture she took when she sat down in the rocker.
Rose was curled in a chair on the other side of the room, stitching at a tapestry, a picture of a blue-black raven rising up out of a gold and green foreground of ferns and fireweed. There was no design on the fabric…she wasn’t following a pattern. She just built up her picture, stitch by stitch like a mosaic.
She looked up at Allan. Her smile spread so slowly that Allan found himself almost fully caught up in those lips, peripherally aware of her staring eyes and the pecking movement of the needle in the canvas.
-Mary Weymark Goss (from the novel Raven)
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23 April, 1987
22 April, 1987
18 January, 1987
R18 Nuclear Kitchen
R18 Nuclear Kitchen
10x14" designers opaque and watercolour
Personal collection
I worked on this on my lap in the living room, and kept adding things that I saw around the house. There is a mixer with a raven claw for a blade, a stove knob that looks like a raven’s eye, and a cigarette lighter with a beak and an eye.
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05 January, 1987
04 January, 1987
03 January, 1987
14 October, 1986
R14 A Dream of Rose
R14 A Dream of Rose
9x13" designers opaque watercolour on paper
Private collection
An idea for my novel 'Raven'. One of the Nuclear Sequence, the first watercolour that was meant to be part of the series.
With a painfully quick inhalation he realized that it was Rose. Rose, covered with feathers, or some sort of cloak. Out of a dusky tattered hood her white face with heavy brows drawn down over deep eyes, stared. In a moment he knew she would lean over him with a blunt musical utterance, a throaty monosyllable. Incomprehensible.
-Mary Weymark Goss (from the novel Raven)
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13 October, 1986
R13 Nuclear Picnic
R13 Nuclear Picnic
24x36" oil on panel
Private collection
Using the watercolour field sketch (R8) I did this summer, I worked up this idea. I had the idea for a ‘raven picnic’, and wanted to put in more blue and white dishes, carrying on the themes of R7 Nuclear Tablecloth. I had a lot of fun with the colours, the green against the red/orange and the bright yellow.
Someone commented that it was impossible to look at the painting as a whole, that the two sides of the background refused to come together. That bothered me for a while, but then I began to enjoy the effect. It’s one of my favourite paintings of the series.
She watches the wing patterns closely, as they jump and fight, dancing around each other with their beaks open.
Sometimes she runs with them, in a single line through the grass, arms spread, with long fingers curled at the end, in the painting with green trees draped over the horizon and the red and white checked cloth on the grass. She has been waiting to have a picnic.
-Mary Weymark Goss (Journals)
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12 October, 1986
11 October, 1986
10 October, 1986
R10 Raven feeding Woman
R10 Raven feeding Woman
5x5" ink on paper
Private collection
Raven feeding Woman: I was interested in the image of the bird giving food (ideas) to the artist, and there is a connection with the prophet Elijah being fed by ravens. However, this image, which is one of my all time favourite ink drawings, has been widely misinterpreted, and so a little spoiled for me.
I had been drifting for some time, quivering on a wingspan, suspended between concept and creation.
I waited.
As soon as her eye was in mine, I fell down upon her, dark vision.
Before I entered, I took her tongue, so that she would have to use her hands…
-Mary Weymark Goss (Journals)
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09 October, 1986
08 August, 1986
R8 Two Ravens (field sketch)
R8 Two Ravens (field sketch)
7x10" designers opaque on paper
Private collection
R8 Two Ravens (field sketch for R13 Nuclear Picnic): Painted outside, at the edge of our lawn. I was doing a lot of small watercolour scenes, very stylized, something I do every summer, as it is easy to carry watercolours with me outside or on holidays.
“Ravens,” she informed him. “In French you would say ‘corbeau’”. She stretched the word out with a throaty hesitation on the ‘r’. “They’re everywhere up here.”
Allan nodded, uninterested. He thought the birds were ugly. He made a mental frame around a few of them, trying to see a painting.
-Mary Weymark Goss (from the novel Raven)
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07 July, 1986
R7 Nuclear Tablecloth
R7 Nuclear Tablecloth
48x48" oil on panel
Corporate collection
The day I was etching in this large panel coated with red oil paint, it was announced over the radio that the nuclear power station at Chernobyl had exploded, and a cloud of fallout was spreading over Europe.
The image of a mushroom cloud, which of course has nothing to do with a reactor explosion, is symbolic of the word and idea of nuclear. The idea is that nuclear physics has a continuous influence over our lives, and the shadow of abuse of power and its sudden disruption of our quiet existence (the domestic checked tablecloth and the blue and white cup). A flurry of ravens (persistent ideas) is sent swirling away by the force of the explosion.
I was greatly affected by the notion that an event on the other side of the world could change our lives here. Although this is not an ‘anti-nuclear’ painting, it is meant to draw attention to the precarious stability of our lives.
Flame and ash,
Ash and cold,
The end of days.
None remains to save,
Is He then also dead?
Without me, can You exist?
Despair exists, despair
That grins from faceless
shadows
Burned and fused in the
concrete sphinx.
Aeons ago
The fiery gaseous cloud
Blossomed into earthly
Splendour.
Will the promise of glory be
Shattered by the sons of Cain?
-George I. Bernstein (from Winter Apocalypse)
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04 April, 1986
R6 Rose in Kitchen
R6 Rose in Kitchen
24x36" oil on panel
Private Collection
The first painting in the series to employ the checkerboard motif that became part of the Nuclear series. Rose and I were fascinated with the light patterns on the kitchen floor, and she posed there for the drawing. She spent several days sitting in her leotard on the cold floor and feeling, as she put it, “a little strange about anyone walking in.” This is a good likeness, and Rose’s husband approved. The raven shape appears in her hair, and the raven himself is supposed to be hopping across the floor, just out of the picture (his shadow appears in the floor).
Although it took me days to do the checkerboard in the curtains, and I swore never to do it again, I went on to use the motif in several more paintings in the Nuclear sequence. As in the other Nuclear pictures, the red checks represent order and peaceful domesticity, the chaotic shadows in the floor reflecting the turmoil outside the window (the world outside).
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03 March, 1986
R5 Trail and Raven
R5 Trail and Raven
24x24" oil on panel
Private Collection
My neighbour across the lake always kept this trail cut. It led from the back of his yard, through the bush to a beaver dam at the end of the lake. The trail was really nothing more than a tunnel cut through the dense growth, and this painting catches the effect of emerging from the ‘tunnel’ and looking into the open field with its island of evergreens.
This is one of the first of the Raven Series, and it was the last painting to make use of real scenery. It was done from a Prisma colour sketch I did one fall. It was also the last picture in which Naples yellow was used, a favourite colour in the scenery series (Sgraffito Series) preceding.
After seeing Roberta's poetry, I had written to her, asking to use her work in the exhibition in North Bay (1988). The poem ‘Lyell Island’ had been printed with an ink drawing of mine (Raven and Lady 151086) in Writer’s Quarterly, but I was more interested in using it with this painting.
If they cut these trees
and the ravens fly away,
the chain will be broken and
It is I who will fall,
rootless.
-Roberta Olenick (from Lyell Island)
originally published in Writers' Magazine, Vol 10, No. 1 1988
Roberta's web site: www.neverspook.com
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01 February, 1986
R4 Rose and Raven
R4 Rose and Raven
24x24" oil on panel
Private Collection
When Rose T. first moved to our road, I said on meeting her, "You look just like I imagined the Rose in my novel." In fact, her rather exotic, Pre-Raphaelite looks made her the perfect Rose, and I asked her to model for me. She was warned ahead of time that ravens would figure prominently in the paintings. When Rose's husband saw this picture, he was mildly horrified at what I had done to his wife, who in reality is quite beautiful.
I am very fond of the viridian green and alizarin crimson combination. The repeated wing shape in the reverse shading of the sleeve, the leaves and the hands is a favourite device of mine.
Rose sat down on the doorstep, the leafy bushes framing her. Poe ruffled up excitedly and hopped right over beside her. For a moment Allan thought the damned ugly thing would jump on her shoulder. He shuddered.
Rose had seemed to be the only normal person living here. No normal person was on friendly terms with overgrown crows.
"Gronk, gronk," said the raven.
-Mary Weymark Goss, from the novel Raven
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05 January, 1986
R3 Three Ravens
R3 Three Ravens
24x24" oil on panel
Private Collection
Actually the first Raven Series painting with ravens. I was not keeping a journal at the time, so how the Raven series got started remains a fuzzy memory. I do know that I had intended to paint Northern birds. I had done a small panel in this style with gesso. I had so much fun with the ravens in this painting, I continued with them, and they became the longest series I have ever done.
Also influencing me were the images evoked during the writing of my novel, Raven, on which I was working intensively at the time.
There were three ravens sat on a tree
They were as black as they might be
With a hey down derry, derry, derry, down, down.
The one of them said to his mate
Where shall we our breakfast take?
Down in yonder green field
There lies a knight slain under his shield.
-traditional
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01 October, 1985
R2 Eden People
R2 Eden People
24x24" oil on panel
Private collection
This peculiar picture was a single idea, a 'between series' painting, I suppose. I painted it in a rather preoccupied mood, for I was thinking about what direction I wanted my painting to take. I had begun to write a novel, and was becoming concerned with the content of my paintings, and thinking even about narrative content.
I often refer to this picture as my 'back to the garden' painting, a sort of beginning over. I felt that the scenery series had been technical practice for a more significant series. This was also one of the last pictures for which I mixed colours on a palette before applying them to the panel.
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01 February, 1985
R1 Ravine
R1 Ravine
36x24" oil on panel
Private Collection
For some time I was making loose, gestural sketches of scenery, full of big, loopy shapes. I coloured them with pencils and watercolours, and was pleased with the effect, but was unsure how to translate them into oils. I began experimenting with sgraffito, using a thick layer of cadmium red oil paint over the primed panel, and drawing freely with a stylus, producing white lines. Thinking of cloisonné, I used the lines as a sort of wire frame to work within. As well, the intense red of the under-painting showed through to great effect.
This sketch was done on one of my walks, a spot along our road that caught my eye, where the wind-tossed undergrowth, full of dark shapes, reminded me of the dark wings. Frequently populated by the local ravens, who hang out in the garbage dump nearby, it is a deep V full of dense grasses, ferns and bushes. It is always dark and cool-looking, and in the fall, full of brilliant red and yellow moose maple and poplar.
This was the last scene I did, and a departure from the entire scenery series of last year. The etched lines and shading technique were already firmly established in the other scenes, but the V shape began appearing in my ink drawings, along with the wing shapes. In fact, in several watercolours and inks recently, the trees and clouds have had distinct wing and finger shapes.
There was quite a lot of joking among family and friends about the faces and shapes supposedly hidden in the foliage, but my favourite spot in the painting, and I think it is quite amusing, is the odd pale green cluster hanging in front of the black area.
Everyone finally stopped trying to figure out what direction my light source comes from; since I don't care, I don't understand why anyone else should. I think a world with such diffuse lighting would be quite pleasant.
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