Blog - Sukie Curtis

Homecoming Bouquet

Claude Monet, the great French Impressionist painter who created and painted among his magnificent garden at Giverny, once said, “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”

I’m not sure I would say it is only flowers that moved me to start painting, but flowers and…clouds, flowers and…vegetables and fruits, flowers and…the shapes of their stems and leaves and seedpods, or the vases they inhabit inside the house.

Here’s a bunch of flowers that I brought home from the farmers market in September. I was inspired to paint them in celebration of the news that a dear friend and former neighbor would be returning to the neighborhood, just down the street from us!

Here they are in one of my favorites vases. Some of you will recognize the hand-painted ceramic pattern from Quimper, France. Somehow it always seems to work well with whatever flowers I put in it.

Speaking of always and flowers, Monet also once said, “I must have flowers, always, and always.”

ReDress: Where Shall I Start?

Lenten stitch meditation no. 1, Feb. 14, 2018

Everything starts somewhere in time and place. And sometimes it’s hard to say just when and where.

So we get to decide: I’ll start the story here.

That’s what I’m doing with this post and what I’m calling my “ReDress project,” although it’s fuller title in my mind is “Redress-reDress.” It’s a multi-sided, multi-media’ed exploration of the process of redressing a wrong, an old wound, while also sewing myself new clothes. (Get it? Redress a wrong; re-dress a wound; reDress myself…)

What can I say to get this launched? I love making things (knitting, painting, writing, sewing), and I love playing with words, looking up words in dictionaries, finding intriguing connections and double-meanings and overlapping sounds, rhythms, rhymes.

This past winter I found myself drawn to some Instagram posts featuring fabric and sewing, some of it the machine sewing of garments and “improvisational quilts,” some hand-stitching of small pieces of fabric in what fiber artist Liz Kettle calls “Stitch Meditations.” I decided during the season of Lent, I would try doing one “stitch meditation” each day, more or less. I posted them on Instagram and fully intended to, but never quite did, post them here. Better late than never.

The process of putting together small bits of fabric and hand-sewing them with colored threads makes a good visual beginning of my ReDress project, even if it started before that in my thinking. So I’m starting with Lenten stitch meditation number one, sewn on February 14, 2018, which was both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday.

More to come.

What’s New? One or Two Haiku for You

Self-portrait sketch, ©Sukie Curtis, ink on paper

One or two haiku–
some days that’s all I can muster–
a moment compressed.

Man standing knee deep,
Fishing rod flashes sunlight–
Not one fish nibbles.

I often think I will try to write at least one haiku every day, but I’m not that good at those “one something a day” things, although I did once commit to a whole year of at least one small drawing a day, and it was a wonderful experience. I stuck with it for a full year. And my drawing skills improved in the process!

I was inspired in my one drawing a day by someone else’s daily blog of drawings and paintings–Elizabeth Perry’s woolgathering. She is still doing daily drawings, from what I can tell, but now on Instagram and Twitter. Elizabeth dates her drawings and includes a number, now well into the four thousands, to indicate how many consecutive daily drawings she has posted. That’s a lot of daily drawings in the midst of a very busy, creative life!

Most days a small drawing is part of my morning routine. I like the way drawing grounds me and quiets my mind. Even if I draw many of the same things over and over–my hand, my hand holding my mug of tea, an old ceramic mug on my desk full of pens and pencils and a wooden spoon.

I often think of haiku as being very like simple drawings–a way of closely observing a moment in time, a glimpsed view, a sensory experience. Perhaps I will pair an occasional drawing with an occasional haiku, and see what happens.

View from Islesford, Maine painting

“View from Islesford,” ©Sukie Curtis, oil on canvas, 9×12

Painted last year after David and I enjoyed a long weekend in a beloved spot on Little Cranberry Island, Maine, this view is a slightly fanciful version of the real thing–looking from Islesford across the Eastern Way toward Mt. Desert Island and Acadia National Park. The rounded profiles of the Bubbles, perhaps slightly exaggerated (who can resist?!), occupy the center of the painting.

Given the slow drying time of oils and the challenges of transporting wet oil paintings, I often do small sketches of landscapes “on location” and later paint from the sketch, or at least with the sketch and my remembered experience as inspiration. Among my favorite sketching tools are a very fine felt-tip drawing pen and watercolor pencils (colored pencils that blend easily when wet). They are extremely easy to transport!

Rowboat Song

Brass oarlocks on wax-print fabric

Rowboat Song

My song is for the rowboat hauled out for winter,
listing in a sea of leaves. I love her lines,
the graceful beauty of her usefulness. But even more
I love the way she carries the music
of my father, his summertime humming
and the ringing of brass oarlocks dangling from his hand
as we walked the tangled path pungent with huckleberry
and sweet fern in August heat.

Our syncopated footsteps
on the wooden runway, the slight lift and sway of the float
beneath us, slap-slap of running line on water
bringing the dinghy in. My father’s slender fingers
worked the line, hand over hand, removing strands of eelgrass
and slimy mermaid’s hair, green, and matted.

And then
his easy rowing, skilled feathering of oars, their rhythmic turning
in the locks, a two-part pulse of leather and wood against brass:
back and forward, back and forward. Between strokes,
from the oar tips a whispered staccato drips in tiny
running steps across the water’s surface.

Did we speak? Maybe a little. Mostly in silence we’d do
what was needed—unstop the sails and hoist them,
let go the mooring line, back the jib to bring the bow
around, and with sails filling slip gently out the harbor.

Strange–I remember always the setting out
rarely the homecoming, always a new beginning,
always another chance.

Remembering My Father’s Slide Rule

My dad, Richard P. Curtis, c. 1964?, Marblehead, MA

My father was an engineer who died before the advent of pocket calculators, personal computers, and smart phones. Often when he came home from work, his slide rule was still nestled in the pocket of his white button-down shirt. I am embarrassed and even a bit ashamed to admit that I have never used a slide rule and wouldn’t know what to do with one. Even though I was quite good at math, I avoided calculus and chemistry and never learned to use a slide rule.

If I held one in my hand, I would treat it with respect and curiosity. Not as playful as an abacus with its sliding beads capable of making music when shaken, a slide rule by its silence and straight edges seems a sober sort of tool. But nonetheless possessing a certain sort of beauty, with its numbers so small I might now need a magnifying glass to read them. And that center panel that slides to line up universes of possibility–imagine holding the secret solution to so many puzzles!

In the old black and white photograph my father sits on a folding summer chair on our generous porch high above the ground that fell away from the ledges on which our house was built. The neighbors’ trees in the background are smaller than I remember them. The house in the far distance at the top of our neighborhood hill was less than a quarter mile from the house where my father was born.

The sleeves of my father’s white Oxford shirt have been neatly rolled to his elbows. His face is turned downward toward his hands. His long slender fingers hold the slide rule gently, gracefully, as he works some calculation that will likely be recorded on the back of an envelope in small, tidy figures.

His handwriting is neat but not fussy. He signs his name with one modest flourish at the end, so that the tail of the “s” on Curtis swoops around counter-clockwise to cross the “t.” Then his hand lifts to dot the “i.”

My father has been dead so many years I nearly clutch my heart when I come upon his handwriting–those unmistakable tracks made by his own hand. Some days I bend down and put my lips to the inked letters to kiss them, or hold the lettered paper against my heart.

*I wrote this piece with this photo in mind but not in front of me. I’m not sure my dad is in fact holding his slide rule in this photo, but it doesn’t really matter.

Meet Gould’s Pandora

Gould’s pandoras in my hand

Most of the shells that wash up on a nearby beach are species familiar to me from my childhood: mussels in shades of blue like Chinese porcelain, clams of various species (surf, razor, Quahogs, among others), slipper shells (a.k.a. boat shells), lots of periwinkles, and the very occasional whole moon snail.

This year I have paid closer attention to–and started to see more and more of–what at first I took to be the pearly interior fragments of some larger shells. When I noticed that all of these supposed fragments were uncannily similar in shape, size, and location of a hinge, it finally dawned on me that they were likely their own species, simply one unknown to me!

So I looked them up in a field guide to seashells.

One of several species of the family Pandoridae and of the genus Pandora, these are known as Gould’s Pandora, Pandora gouldiana. Each shell half (called a valve) is nearly as flat as and not much larger than a guitar pick.

I find them quite lovely in their simplicity, their lightness of being, their iridescence, and the music they make when jingled in hand or pocket. The shell’s pearly layer is revealed only after the tougher outer layers have worn away.

Of course their name, Pandora, set me musing a bit. Yes, there’s the woman from Greek mythology who was entrusted with a box containing every conceivable ill the could plague humanity. And she opened it. (As a young girl, I never considered the implicit misogyny of this–another “blame it all on the woman” story.)

But the name, Pandora. . . . My two years of studying Biblical Greek long ago suggest that pandora in Greek would mean simply “all gifts”–pan (all) + dora (gifts)–the good and the beautiful and the painful and the destructive. All of these gifts, all together.

When I checked my old Greek lexicon to confirm my memory about dora, I found a beautifully musical word nearby: dorophoria, meaning “the bearing of gifts.” In a flash the marvelous treasures of language and sound brought tears to my eyes.

Remembering My Dad on his birthday

Today is my father’s birthday–his 102nd to be precise.

My dad died a long time ago, thirty-eight years ago, when he was only 64 and I was only 25.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about him that I am linking to below. And I hope to add some more posts about my dad in the days ahead. Perhaps he can help me reconnect with my blog!

http://sukiecurtis.com/richard-pelham-curtis-100-years/

Poem: An Old Poppy Bloom, and sketch

The old poppy bloom–
now a whirling dancer’s skirt
twirled up in mid-spin.

Poem: A Snowy Afternoon

The Snowy Afternoon

That snowy afternoon a galaxy
appeared on your dog’s black back
while we talked. Stars took
their places, planets, whole constellations
gathered there, marvelous as a meteor shower,
until with a few friendly, unthinking strokes
I wiped the whole sky clean, and it
began to fill again. It seemed
the kind of tender beauty
too intimate to mention
just there and then, this galaxy
falling gently
onto your dog’s back.

One of the Facebook’s features that I most appreciate is the way it serves up your own “memories” of things posted on a certain day in previous years. It makes for some interesting juxtapositions of past and present, such as a post of a rainbow from a few year’s back on a day when it’s snowing; or a post about snow on a rainy day, or full blazing sun.

That’s how I got reminded of this poem: first, by a gentle snowfall last year, when something about the snow reminded me of this poem I’d written years before (it was published in the Christian Science Monitor) and then posted on Facebook; second, by Facebook reminding me of that post this year.

Some things I am grateful to remember, and to be helped in remembering.