Marriage of Art and Life

One Sunday afternoon my husband and I were looking, through a magnifying glass, at images of work by Bruegel (the elder). "Skaters before the Gates of St. George, Antwerp" is a winter skating scene and so much is going on throughout the whole engraving that it is really a delicious experience to carefully examine it. There are skaters of all classes, one gentleman is clinging to the cape of his man-servant, while other peasant-skaters sit on the edge of the ice to lace up their skates. One man has fallen and onlookers on the edge of the riverbank look on with curious, if somewhat, smirking, expressions. A little boy is in an ice sled that appears to be made from a cow or horse's jawbone. Other skaters pass under one side of the drawbridge where, on the other side, one skater has what looks like a hockey stick and another holds a flag in what appears to be some sort of race or game.

After he made coffee for us, we sat in the front room with an early morning fire going. Paul had a piece of paper on a split log, with which he was combining frottage with drawing. He drew with a fountain pen and walnut ink he made from walnuts that had dropped from the tree in our yard this fall.

Bruegel's drawing was made with pen and brown ink for "transfer on transfer paper with a stylus" as the caption explained. He drew it backwards so that the etching made from it would be right-side up.

"Looking at Bruegel's work," Paul said, "makes me see the world differently." While making coffee he had seen, through the window in our kitchen, a lone turkey under the old apple tree. A few days earlier, we had driven by the Retreat Pond in Brattleboro, now frozen over and covered with brightly painted ice huts or "bobs" and skaters, young and old. We had both agreed how "Bruegel-like" the winter scene looked to us.

When we lived in Provincetown, we referred to particular views of the sea as "de Grootian" after our friend, the painter, Pat de Groot. When, for instance, a winter sea is blue-black and dotted with white caps and seeming to merge with a darkened blue-white sky, we recognize this as exactly the kind of moment de Groot not only captures so well, but also the kind of moment one stops to reconsider precisely because of the way she has captured it.

It seems (immodestly) to me that my husband has become a better, more astute reader because of all the conversations we have had about writing. I can say with certainty that being with him these past fifteen years, and seeing the world and art through his eyes, has absolutely changed the way I see everything.