| Home

"Mah Stick Floats T'har…"

Watercolor      Original to Iron Pony
Cartouched

ABOUT THIS PICTURE ...

     Two beaver trappers - Mountain Men - of the fur-trapping era (strictly: 1820-1840) exchange pleasantries on a damp, boggy beaver flat.  The central figure - modeled after my old camping and Rendezvous buddy, “Iron Pony” LaJeunesse - in fur cap and“skins”, points, and says to the other trapper - in white blanket coat.... ‘Mah stick floats t'har.”  The expression is correct to the time and place: the “stick” refers to the overhanging branch or twiglet that the trapper contrived on the bank just above his submerged trap.  Smeared with castorum (beaver- gland scent) from his “medicine bottle”(hung on a thong around his neck), this twig caused the curious beaver swimming by to rise up and sniff the twig - thus putting his foot in the submerged trap...In effect, the trapper is telling his associate that this stretch along the river is “his” territory.  

     The newcomer, with No. 4 traps in hand, will move along up-creek before “setting his stick”.  
The stick simile came to mean, among the trappers, a greeting and a general query as to how the world was going:.  ‘Hows your stick float, pilgrim?”  This is the first picture I have done working from just a photograph - and I feel it came out fine.  This pleases me, because I plan to photograph more extensively, review existing photos (now in storage!) and crop, and cut-and-paste photos, etc. just as soon as I can get to my camera (also in storage!).  Thus, I can create my own “tableau” and scenes just like a Paul Calle does - or countless real (!) artists everywhere: working from photos and photo-montages. (I’ve been cutting my teeth on copying pictures from artbooks - as training, and some seem critical of this..(?). But in a book on Jos.  Turner - the famous 19th Cent.  English painter (genius painter), I note he did precisely this to learn his craft, and so did his colleagues.  And they copied one another all the time - with the accreditization of their own names plus the notation “after so-and-so”.  This is what I stumbled on in my self-instructional approach to watercoloring - this and nothing more: only to learn and not to plagerize. ( And also to obtain for oneself desired copies of admired prints where none are now available ... ). 

     I am glad to see this has wide and historic support.  Critiquing my own painting: one thing that pleases me is that I feel I have captured an ineffable “feel” of the southern New England woods - here some lonely stretches along the Westfield River in Massachusetts where “Iron Pony” and I and others of our fellow “Mountain Men” (NEMM or Northeast Mountain Men)) used to gather twice yearly for “Rendezvous”. It is a grey day, cool, vaporous air and cool, grey light - typical of the Northeast in most seasons.  Mixed deciduous and conifer forests, standing dead trees (at least leafless - Fall, maybe?).  The river in the background has the feel of the New England riverbanks.  In the foreground are beaver-chewed saplings and whitened sticks, probably alders.  The distant hills are rounded, low, “New England” hills and skyline... The landscape could not be mistaken for a western, or Far Western environment - or southeastern or anywhere else: it says “Northeast”. True, the fur trade started in the Northeast - but that was late 1600’s and the clothing of the then-trappers differed substantially from those shown here.

     These figures are in the “western pattern” of the more-familiar Mountain Men of the 1840’s, though they are shown in a Northeastern-feeling environment.  This is just the consequence of how the photograph came to be taken and who was in it, and what clothing and gear they possessed, because as noted, these models are current guys with “Western Pattern” gear who live in the Northeast and recreate the general lifestyle here in “living history” capers along the Westfield...I did a lot of micro-painting on this picture: a magnifier shows it best: the tacksheath in Iron Pony’s belt, his beaded “possibles” pouch (turquoise blue) - even suggestive of rows of beads (look at it under the glass!); the gunmetal grey and brown streaked effect of his gunlock, the brass rifle furniture, the front sight, the rod guides, etc.  The feather detail in his fur cap, the suggested animal face-and-head of his associates’s cap, etc. 

     I guess artists tend to like certain portions of pictures and so on... I like the beaver traps of black and rusted iron held in the one trapper’s hands, and reflected in the small puddle. Which detail was not even visible in the photo - and brings forth a few comments on same.  This is not a good photo: composition kind of goofy - the tree behind Iron Pony in one way (in photo) looks like it’s growing out of his head!  The photo I worked from is very dark and obscure in many details.  The soft focus too, was bad for sharp rendered detail but likely promoted the overall effect of fog, mist and vapor in the air..(Iron Pony notes it was taken by a “professional” but having bought photography for many years as part of my career in PR, I know good photography and this is not it!). However, it is all I had to work with (others IP submitted were really too low grade).  Thepoint?  In future, and always where possible, work from the best, clearest and most detailed photos only: this is bound to affect the eventual outcome.  

     An advantage here, of course, is that I (and IP) know many of the details of the painting: the look and feel of traps (have forged them), the authentic clothing (have made own skins), made and fired own flint- and percussion-lock guns, etc.. Thus this knowledge helps verify the correctness of depicted details. So the picture is a memento of the times he and I and the others knew along the Westfield up in the Knightville Dam area of the Berkshires.  I still see the 20 or so tipis, with smoke curling up past their smoke flaps (if you’ve never slept or lived a few days in a Plains Indian tipi - even these replicas - you haven’t lived yet!) spread out along the Westfield at sunset - the night fog rising around them, the faint glowing candle lanterns in the mist, the faint haloos of our fellows returning from the hills... I hear the “crack” of black powder “Hawkins” and the modem repro “Thompsons” etc. close at hand - and smell the sulfurous powder and the bragging over whose shot went home bestest, etc.

     The nightime yarns around the fires, “lodge hopping”, and sharing the jug.  Early sunrises and bacon frying in the lodge, or rain at night and the scurry to close the smoke flaps. Noon day heat and the flies and the crickets that lived in that meadow.  All of it.  It was great fun and to some limited extent, perhaps, it must have reflected the “atmosphere” of our forebears. For Iron Pony counts among his predecessors no less than old Basil LaJeunesse himself - a Mountain Man of record who “went under” long ago to Yuroc, or maybe Modoc, or was it Basin Shoshone arrows in the early days when the trappers first came down into the California valleys.  

     And I number old Uncle Henry Williams among my predecessors - a shadowy figure on my mother’s side, who - family legend has it - one day dropped the plow reins on the farm back in Salem Center, Ohio and walked west into the woods - eventually reaching that same golden Californy himself - then having “seen the elephant “- walked back to Ohio into the bargain, along the way pulling a bit of duty as a “hiverino” (hibernator) up in the Bayou Salade of the Colorado Rockies (today’s trendy South Park and skiers’ paradise) where his two travelling companions froze solid on either side of him one night under a "blowdown", and he (later) ate his companion dog and the better part of a mule who were travelling on eastward with him!  To cap it all he froze his toes, and when he got back to the farm, it’s said the first thing he did was put his foot upon a stump down in the orchard and with an axe “whop” off a couple of offending members.. And thereafter as he recounted his great adventure’round the hearth of a night, when the weather changed, why old Uncle Henry would just step outside and whittle away on his tingling  toes...Yes - they were truly “Men with the bark on”.  Our multicultural, liberated society will not see their like again.
 

| Home