SKETCHINC RECOLLECTIONS & REVERIES

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 1 June 1901, Page 675

SKETCHINC RECOLLECTIONS & REVERIES

By Forrest Ross

Illustrated by E. B. Vauqhan

W SKETCH a little. Not"very much and fij not very well, but just well enough to f cause a man, who was once gazing at <=j^ an attempt of mine, to say dreamily, "Dear me, I seem to recognise that place !" He had been living near it for twenty years! I remember well how depressed I felt, for I had nobly resisted in that sketch the many temptations that beset the artist. It would have improved my picture immensely to have raised my hills a thousand feet or so, and to have planted a few willows in the middle distance. But I was faithful — as far as in me lay — to Nature. Some people have an idea they can improve Nature. Years ago I was strolling along a woodland path at sunset. Over the sea lay a band of translucent green. Beyond were fantastic purple capes and islands, and above great rose-petals of cloud Becked the pale blue of the sky. The song of the birds, the pleasant odours of the forest, the solitude aud loveliness impelled me to exclaim on the beauty o£ the sunset to an artistic friend. I can still recall her pitying look as she said, " Bid you think so, really ? Crude, I called it. So painfully inartistic !" Since childhood's happy hour I have had

yearnings after art. I began with a slate, a squeaky pencil —my pencils always squeaked, perhaps rebelliously — and a fertile imagination as regards anatomy. As I grew older I used to illustrate — under the desk, alas for the weakness of schoolgirl nature — imaginary scenes for -my friends' benefit. T have a painful recollection of being brought "to the front," and obliged to hold my wretched drawing up for half-an-houi in the full view of the giggling class. Thus early I began to suffer in the cause of Art. In these youthful drawings of mine there always figured a young man with a fierce moustache and an aquiline nose. I used to meet the original as F went to school, and I admired him hopelessly and frantically. Now, as far as my dim memory of him serves me, I imagine he must have been an emptyheaded barber's block. Then, though I never got beyond furtively gazing at him, he was Achilles, Rochester, Mr. Fairfax, all in one masculine epitome. The hapless heroine in ray pictures was generally represented in some attitude that hid her hands. I was not strong in hands. She varied according to the particular story we were reading at the time. We always put a

descriptive phrase at the foot of the illustration, such as " With a shriek of horror, Maud flung herself into Guy's outstretched arras." I can remember how hopelessly 1 tried to depict the shriek, and how difficult it was to make Guy's arms look like anything but jointed sticks. As I grew older, and my frocks longer, I drew no more sentimental pictures. I still pursued the fleeting muse though, and at times I fancied I almost touched the hem of her garment. But ever she put on an extra spurt, looking with smiliug contempt over her dainty shoulder at the feeble dabbler. It occurred to me that Art, like Charity, should begin at home, and my relations suffered. Some were rebellious, and refused to act as models, others fell placidly asleep with mouth wide open as I tried to draw them, and none of them ever kept still for more than a minute at a time. The results

when I had accomplished a sketch more than usually hideous, I hugged to my heart the dictum of a former President of our Art Society, " Likeness is of no consequence compared with artistic feeling and technique." It is difficult to say whether pleasure or pain preponderates in one's art struggles. True, when the student gets — too often, alas, by a fluke — the cool toansparency of a leaf or the shimmer of a sunlit wave, there is elation. For myself, when I experience that feeling, which is, unfortunately, too seldom, the spirit moves me to walk off my excitement. But, to counterbalance this, there is the deep depression of an ill-spent day, when colours are muddy, canvas greasy, brushes drop suddenly from their handles, the world is askew, and life scarce worth living. Even as you open your eyes in the morning, a gloom overcasts your spirits

relation such criticism is dangerous — to the relation. While listening to impossible suggestions as to improvements, I have often felt like the artist who painted the picture of " George Washington cutting down the Cherry Tree with his Hatchet." His critic asked why he had put a guinea pig up the tree and given it horns, and the painter had to explain that it was not a guinea pig but a cow, and that it was not up the tree but in the background. Then the visitor suggested the picture would be much improved if the artist were to change it into the " Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots." He could put George in black for the headsman, bend the tree over, and put a frock on it for Mary, let the hatchet stand, and work in the guinea pig and the cows as mourners. I can fully acquiesce in the action thatresulted in the critic's sudden and disorderly exit. I recall many pleasant recollections of sketching places. I have painted in all sorts of society, animal, mineral, and vegetable, and, though the results were often failures, I am rich in delightful memories of the beauty, I failed to reproduce. Years ago, I was sojourning in Australia, far up one of those broad rivers which flow so lazily between their flat grassy banks, but which, when roused to flo>)d, wreak destruction all around, and cause ruin and poverty. I have sketched it when it looked as peaceful as a sleeping child, and lay silent and smooth in the amber and rosy twilight of the sunset. Across its broad expanse the low banks rose strangely level, and far away to the distant purple of the table-topped hills, stretched the great plains. Here and there, spectral- white trunked gums or leafy banana groves were dark against the flushed sky, and picturesque pelicans stood in onelegged Japanese attitudes in the satin-smooth water. Overhead, against the pale clear sky, flew a wedge-shaped flock of black swans, wailing like lost spirits as they hied towards the sunset. It was almost impossible to believe that this placid stream could rise, in one night, sixty feet, transforming pleasant farms into shingle flats,

and smiling garde us into wastes of sand. Far up the river, whore it Hows from among the hills, a little hall had been a-building, and the settlers from far around were inaugurating its opening with a combination entertainment, soiree, concert,

and ball, ill! compressed into out 1 short, night. We townsfolk had driven thirty miles to help with song, music, or recitation. Our audience was the h (.rankest medley of humanity, scions of British aristocracy in flannel shirts and dungaree trousers, small settlers in the broad-cloth clothes they kept for funerals, and women iv wonderful and archaic costumes. They filled the forms, they crowded the passages, they overflowed onto the little stage, and a silent and attentive half-dozen blocked up the open door. Outside, our audience was more weirdly fascinating. The dark hillside was strewn with tiny camp fires. A tribe of black fellows, hearing of the festivities, and scenting perquisites, had struck camp five miles off. and trudged here. They sat like misshapen demons and dusky witches round their fires that gleamed on white eyeballs and whiter teeth. The stentorian choruses

were too awful to describe, and the unhappy models used to beg of me not to divulge the identity of my studies. I called them "studies," because the term gave greater latitude as regards likeness. But always.

and with idiotic persistence, you lie and ponder why, till you discover the reason. In such a mood as this you are driven mad by friendly criticism, that is, if it in any way reflects on yonr ability. From a near

or some lusty soug reached them from the little hall, and they were content to listen. In the afternoon I had sat down, with many misgivings on the subject of snakes,

coming storm in its white waves, the grey river rushed on below us. A great baldheaded hill, curiously rounded, rose against the neutral sky. The dark bush that clad

upon the bank of the river. A turbulent torrent, grey-green and foam-crested, it dashed through the narrow gorge. Down near that spectral gum tree, on those boulders, two white men had been murdered by natives in years gone by. I was pondering over the tragedy when a stealthy movement behind me made me turn quickly. I was all alone, for every other human being had gone to the races that formed part of the programme of this festal day. But I saw only a little native girl in the rudiments of a scarlet pinafore. She had crept, on hands and knees through the grass to see what the stranger was doing. She was a friendly little soul, and we struck up an acquaintance, though there was no third person to introduce us, and we had no common language but smiles. Her gleaming grin of delight when I gave her a half-empty paint tube to squeeze made me feel envious of such easy bliss.

My queer little woolly-headed comrade and I sat on that river bank all the afternoon. Fretful and tempestuous, with a threat of

its sides looked comically like black hair. Far off, I could hear the distance-mellowed cries from the racecourse. Louder by far was the chant of the river. Ever and again my companioD, lying flat on her stomach, her bare black toes kicking at the eaith and stones, would give vent to a guttural exclamation of admiration as she watched me. I wonder often what has become of that picauinny. Maybe her taste for Art was inherited. Centuries ago, an ancestor may have been a President of the Royal Academy of Australian Rock Painters. One can imagine the " maker of pictures " exhibiting his magnum opus to an appreciative though scantily-clad audience : " Pleased was his tribe with that image — cauie in. their hundreds r to sean — Handled it, smelt it, and grunted : ' Verily this is a man ! Thus do we carry our lances — thus is a war-belt slung. Lo ! It is even as we are. Glory and honour to Ung!' J>

Another scene rises before me. A sapphire sea meets a sky of tropic blue. The whispering waves steal up golden sand that is bounded by a slope of greenest gi'ass. The brilliant colouring dazzles unaccustomed eyes, fcitranger than all, where the grass is clear, or the road winds through the quaint old town, the soil is crimson, as if it bore witness still to the past tragedies that, to those who remember, mar the loveliness of Port Macquarrie. Here, in the old convict days, lived and died desperate men, outlawed from home and friends. I wonder if any of them grew to hate the vivid beauty of their prison place. There stands the huge wooden gaol, turning its grim, un windowed front seawards. Its occupation, thank Heaven, is all but gone. Only one prisoner — a "drunk and disorderly" — is within its tumble down walls, and I

iron doors, the dark colls, dark with a palpable and horrible blackness, the cat, tho triaugle, tho gag, and the straight- jacket. And, in the midst of all those decaying relics of a pitiful past, tho keeper's yellow-haired laddie frisked and laughed, while the cheery, plump house-mother hung out her snowy clothes among her flowers with a strain ni" a modern music hall ditty on her pleasant lips. Port Macquarrio has not yet got beyond the " Daisy, Daisy" epoch, and knows not the "Tin Gee-gee." Outside on the grassy hillside that curves to the beach, the men, whi.so home that prison was, sleep soundly, and the soft green turf grows over guilty and guiltless with the same tender luxuriance. Where we are treading the grass is thick with nameless convicts' graves. Hard by is the queer little church. We are adventurous, and up broken steps and

strikes into brilliance a brass plate set into the church floor. Under this lies the body of a past governor of the gaol. So hated was he by the convicts that no other place than the sanctuary was safe for his dead body from the r;i<je of the men he had misruled and ill-used. On those discoloured worn benches used to sit the rows of manacled men, forbidden

to rise because the clank of their fetters disturbed the devotions of the rest of the congregation. From where we are standing to the little low door by which the convicts entered the church, the flagstones are worn into hollows by the passing of many feet. The suushine ontside was dazzling after the dimness, dark, with tragic memories of the

for the dusk used to come upon us while we still worked away hopelessly. One evening the western sky was primrose, deepening to a tender green above the low blue hills, fifty miles away across the tussock plains. Islands of purplegrey swam in the primrose sea, changing shape every minute. Above our heads the sky was strewn with rosy flakes and flecks

old church. I perched myself on a high wooden post, a relic of the decaying guardhouse, and made a hasty sketch of the tower. The few passers-by, who were mainly boys and cows, paused in their leisurely career to look curiously at the eccentric female aloft on the big post, but ono dares much in the cnuso of art.

A world of desolation, a wilderness of clay hills and dales, cliffs and ditches, with scarcely one green thing to be seen. " How hideous ! " one feels inclined to exclaim, as one sees for the Hist time the

ruin that man's rapacity for gold has wrought. And yet, when the sunset turns into red gold the clay, makes the dams lakes of liquid amber, gilds the snow - crested Kakanuis, and glorifies the skies, there is much beauty in the landscape of the Otago goldfields. Never have I seen such sunsets, such wealth of colouring and grandeur of cloud-form, as we saw, evening after evening, when sitting on the brink of a tiny rushbordered dam. We attempted — with the utmost impertinence — to find equivalents in our colourboxes for the glorious tints in the sky. It was wont to be a race between us and the sunset, and

the sunset invariably won,

have no doubt he could easily got out if he had the inclination. But there are still to be seen the great spiked archways aiid heavy

over gaps through which we st;e the flagged floor Far below, wo cruup to the top of the lotterintf tower. The nfteruoou sunlight

of cloud. It was utterly hopeless to paint its changing loveliness, hut with silent doggeduess, save for an occasional objurgation at a missing tube, we worked on at. the beauty that had its exquisite reflection in the still water at our feet. When it became too dark to tell chrome from cadmium, we pensively packed up, and tinned toco. Then we found behind us a wonderful sight The commonplace range was transformed. Its cliffs were crimson, its snows were softest rose, and its base lost in a purple mist that, alas, crept higher and higher till it hid all, and left us but the memory. Our goldfields sketches are assnc.-iat.ed with cattle, goats, and Chinamen. Of the three the last were the least obnoxious. The cattle were, at times, too near to be pleasant. One evening three of us were painting beside the

glances at us. A critical volution declared it was no wonder they were cross if they caught sight of our paintings. Whon the last tail disappeared over the hill wo discovered our companion's foot had gone U> sleep, and that for the life of her, she was unable to fly from the approaching danger. We were sitting one sunny afternoon sketching a strange cottage, a long, low building of yellow, sun-dried bricks, with tiny deep-set windows, and walls that seemed too tired to stand straight. From where wo sat, no other dwelling was visible. We had been told that, as regards its infant population, it rivalled the Old Woman's Slme, and, every now and then, one or two children would fall out of the house on to the scanty i_:rass plot in front. Nan and I sat busy, oblivious of anything

imaginable of kerosene tins, old sacks, and adobe bricks. We gloated over the gorgeous red-brown tones the tin patches pat on with the weather. As nothing was at right angles with anything else, and the roof, which formed a convenient shelf for tools and other articles, sagged in all directions, there was no occasion for the one who drew best to put on airs. One Chinaman, whose house we sketched, had just hung out his washing. The garments were none of your crude, staring white colour such as you see in laundry productions. They were of a charming grey-yellow that harmonised excellently with their clay setting. Once I was startled by a small girl falling from a bridge above my head right down into a shingle hole filled with bones and old tins. She was picked up by me unhurt, though howling lustily, and the not much larger child, allegedly in charge of her, informed me, in a shrill shout from the bridge, that this was the " second time wot Marianner 'as gone an' done it." I have tried to paint in the awful loneliness of the gi'eat mountains, with no sign of life near save the kea, circling, with the flash of its scarlet under-wings, above my head, and no sound save the roar of an avalanche, or the rattle of stones down the huge slope of the moraine. Always I fancied this sounded like footsteps, and the sense of aloneness grew so intense that I could not paint nor read, nor do aught except sit and watch the gleaming icefields and the splendid snowpeaks against the blue. And when the blue turned grey, and the mist crept over the summits, and crawled down the winding glaciers, and veiled the precipices, while a little whining wind began to shake the tentflap impatiently, I must own I felt afraid. I had heard what wild cantrips the elements could play in these regions, and of what avail against an Alpine storm was one lone lorn female ? The veriest bore I had shunned in the whirl of the city, the meanest male I should have fled from in happier times, I should now have greeted with embarassing enthusiasm. I packed away my colours and

my canvas, not without a passing pathetic picture of their discovery by my tardy rescuers, and their preservation as relics by my relations. Then, for hours and hoars it seemed, I sat and meditated, and watched the V shaped opening between the range and the moraine, towards which the storm was fast hastening, and through which my companions would come back — that is, if they turned back. They had started with the idea of being away two days ! Long ago my fire had been blown to the four quarters of the moraine. I had but ten precious matches left, and had not the heart to struggle with the fire again. Never shall I forget, as I was meditating retreating into the wildly flapping tent that tore at its restraining ropes like some mad creature, how exquisite — far up the moraine — sounded a jodel — a very poor attempt at a jodel, but the sweetest of music to my ears. My companions came back, and the storm followed close at their heels. But the latter was a mere detail when we were all together. Since that long autumn day on the glacier, I have never quite agi'eed with the utter independence of women. At times men are absolutely necessary. In course of time, if science and prophecy come true, there will be less to paint. The glaciers will have shrunk to pigmy size, the mountains will have bowed their stately heads, and the earth will have become bald and flat and uninteresting. And the beings who inhabit it will be also bald, and spectacled and toothless into the bargain, if one can trust the signs of the times. Those who, in distant yeai's, feel the craving to paint will find a lack of the beauty which we now-a-days appreciate too feebly. They will have to look forward to the golden age of which Kipling sings when — " Those that were good shall be happy : they shall sit in a golden chair ; They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair; They shall find real saints to draw from — Magdalene, Peter, and Paul ; * They shall work for an age at a sitting, and never be tired at all."

road just where a stream crossed it. It was almost dusk wheu the crack of a stock-whip roused us from our more or less artistic labours. Most women are scared of cows, and we scorned to be superior to our sex. So we turned to fly. True to our colours, we clutched our wet sketches and paint-boxes, but I also grabbed a scarlet cushion we had brought with us. Holding it behind me, I backed precipitately up a clay bank. T was proud of remembering at a crisis that cattle objected to red, though, indeed, it was almost too dark for them to see it. To my horror, while one of my companions was far up the ridge, shouting " Come on ! Come on !" the other did not budge. She simply stood on one leg, waved her sketch above her head, and said " 0-oh ! O-oh ! " at intervals. It was not till afterwards we discovered tho reason. The cattle went by with many an»ry

save getting the .sharp lights on 1.1k; nidged cream walls, or the exact .shade of him; for the sky. Suddenly a masculine voice canio from a distance. It cried, nppoalin^ Jy, "Nan! Nan!" and we both started a: d stared about. Again it came with added entreaty, "Nan, come home, come!" and my companion thought of the little lad she had left behind, and turned pale, though we vvero far away from anyone we knew. But she did not obey the summons. A deep sigh behind us made us turn, and there quite close, stood a solemn goat who was being called home ! We drove it in the direction of the unseen voice with much laughter, Nan confessing that vague ideas of a banshee or a spirit-call had flitted across her mind an sho heard the appeal to her namesake.

Chinamen were übiquitous, and their dwellings the most wonderful compounds