Posted on October 31, 2026 by admin
NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
I find Daisy Brisco has set up her French easel off the road overlooking the river. Yet she has her back to the river.
“Hi Daisy, is it really October, or am I sweating because it’s August?”
She is shaded by an overhanging dogwood limb, and her cardigan is tied around her waist by the sleeves. I can smell turpentine rising from an old paint-stained vase with used brush handles sticking up from the top, like topped flower stems.
“We are in October, Fred, and it is almost too humid to be out here.”
I look at the work on her easel.
“Are you not painting a river view?”
“Look further down the street.”
“A riverscape?”
“No, I am looking at the Halloween graveyard with skeletons.”
“Oh! Way over there. Are those bones climbing out of the earth or falling into it?”
“Well,”
She adjusts her white baseball cap.
“All Hallow’s eve is coming up.”
“So, they are releasing their spirits or something.”
“Maybe their spirits have animated them and they have broken out!”
“Whatever they are doing, it has been going on for about two thousand years.”
“Not around here.”
“No, I looked it up on Google the other day, after noticing this area.”
“Oh! did you?”
“Yes, it is spelled Samhain and celebrated on October 31st through November 1. The end of the harvest season and the beginning winter.”
“Sorry, what is ‘Samhain’?”
“It is one of the four Celtic fire festivals, at the beginning of February, May, August and October 31.”
“So, Samhain is a quarterly event.
“The Celts would call it sow in.”
“Sow-in, that’s news to me. I thought it was, Halloween!”
“Halloween is our modern commercial entertainment version, for kids!”
“I get it. Colder weather and shorter days, where the spirits can haunt children’s imaginations in the dark.”
“Samhain was, at the time, symbolically tied to death.”
“The death of leaves!”
“More than that. The Celts believed the veil between our world and the “Other World” was lifted and fairies, or as they called them, aos sí, crossed over into our lives.”
“The scary season.”
“It was a festival for all, among the Celts, when this started. They lit bonfires to guide friendly spirits and wore disguises to hide from evil ones.”
Daisy is using her palette knife to scrape off, everything she has put on her canvas, wiping the knife on a rag that looks like it was cut from the sleeve of a sweatshirt.
“Aos sí, means, “summer’s end” beginning at sunset on October 31 and lasting through November 1.”
“Why are you scraping the picture off?”
“That’s the beauty of oil paint. You can do this, even after hours of work.”
“You just scraped off hours of work on to that rag! Seems rather drastic.”
“The paint is scraped off, but I have the experience.”
“I mean, what was the problem?”
“It just didn’t feel right. Too literal. It’s like I was painting nouns.”
“Oh! Rendering what you see.”
“Yeah, well, things with names, that leads to putting a line around objects.”
She stopped scraping after covering the whole surface.
“See! That looks much more interesting, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I guess. The colors are all smudged. Hard to tell what’s there.”
“Painting tells us we can see so much more than we can name. The thing was too literal.”
“It was?”
“Yeah, the representation must come out of the paint, not hide it.”
“Like Monet, rather than Ingres, you mean.”
“Right, Ingres painted textures and flesh. Monet painted patterns of light.”
“He has been called a retinal painter.”
“Cezanne supposedly said, “Monet n’est qu’un oeil, mais bon Dieu, quel oeil!”
“I have heard. That too, “an eye, but what an eye!’”
“Fred! You, know some art history!”
“I have wandered through the National Gallery with Steve Strether.”
“Steve is big on Duch painting.”
“I know, we spent a long time looking at Modrian’s squares.”
“I always take a look at Ingre’s Madame Moitessier, in the National Gallery. That is rendering of a very high order!”
“His paint is nearly invisible.”
“That’s the idea, as opposed to the British painter Ivon Hitchens.” (https://www.artnet.com/artists/ivon-hitchens/)
“I have seen reproductions of his work. Sometimes it takes a while to see the representation.”
“So it should. The idea was to paint something ambiguous, that you might read this way or that.”
“Takes some getting used to.”
“Yes, that is the meaning of looking. It is an inquiry.”
Daisy picks up a hand full of clean brushes from her Snaz tote bag, and uses the brush in her right hand to put down some dark umbers and then brushes in some deep greens. Spread with a few sweeping strokes. She looks intently down the street toward the emerging skeletons.
“What are you looking at?”
She doesn’t respond, so I wait. After a while, when I was watching a crow watch me from a dead white oak limb she responds.
“I am looking. It is all about looking and finding general relationships.”
The peak of her white baseball cap has some blue and brown finger smudges on it. She adds some green with her latest adjustment.
“Can you say more?”
She keeps quiet for a few more minutes, looking.
Daisy drops her used brush into the vase full of turpentine, and grabs another brush from the bunch in her left hand. Mixes some yellow and a bit of something else. It looks yellowy bronze, put on the painting in a vertical brushy spread. Then another brush and some pale blue in a few small strokes, carefully placed at the top, up to the edge of the canvas.
“I guess you were looking at that yellow hickory down there.”
“Yeah, it is a strong contrast with all those grey white oak trunks, in the shade.”
She mixes a mid gray, out of burnt umber, and a dab of cobalt blue, and adds a touch of fresh squeezed lamp black to her palette, then a touch of viridian green, squeezed out earlier, and a lot of titanium white. The gray goes on among the shady umbers at the bottom of the painting.
“Would you say you are doing an abstract painting?”
“You might say all painting is abstract.”
“What about representational work?”
“It is still an abstraction constructed by eye, not an actual object.”
“True enough, you can’t eat a painted lettuce leaf, no matter how skillfully it is rendered.”
“No, I am working the in betweens.”
“What is that?”
“Well, color relationships and mass, in a composition.”
“So that bright hickory color isn’t representing a tree.”
“The color can function that way, and other ways.”
“Okay.”
“You might say the spirits are at work, you know.”
“You might, but how?”
“They come out of the paint and say, to your eye, “deep green.” Then they say,” light bright blue”. Then they say “tree’s fall leaves against the sky,” and then they disappear into the paint.”
“Sensational!”
