Alma Vogels had superb eyes. She could id birds by subtle marks in plumage when we could not see the bird. She painted too and produced hundreds of works.
Patti, my wife and her daughter, thought she spent 10 or 15 minutes on each of these pictures. That’s all. They were an exercise for her.
In Tuscany, Alma sat and looked out and up and her brushstrokes delivered all of the editing her eyes chose from the billion details before her.
All three, 2 paintings and a pencil drawing, show a landscape that rises into a sky filled with clouds and shifting light. – a vineyard rising in olive green rows, Lombardy poplars, a white road climbing a hill, scratched-in trees silhouetted on the top of a hill, the simple geometries of houses, a white wall catching light.
I find myself returning to them because they remind me again how to see. Alma is teaching me ways to see, even now, when she has been gone more than a year. I look at them and understand that she is showing me how to write.
Find the lines, follow the lines, strip shapes down to their fundamental frames, light and shadow show form, clouds show wind, edges create drama, the viewers’ eyes and imagination can fill in what the painter leaves out.
We never know how what we leave behind will matter. These 3 pictures fell out of her ‘Tuscany’ sketchpad. Patti did not remember them. They could easily have been tossed out, but she kept them, and in such haphazard ways do we deliver ourselves into the life after this one.
