Views of the Common Man

The hardest part about drawing trees is seeing them properly, and finally I decided to do something about it.

I had made a few failed attempts at the red maple by the driveway before I concluded it was too mixed up with the other trees. So I went over to Hadley and did the big, solitary Boundary Oak, and that went a good deal better.

In two weeks I felt ready for landscapes, and when I kept the trees distant—and small in my drawings—they came out pretty well.

Last Saturday I believed myself ready to draw a breath-taking vista. My home is in the Connecticut River valley; the Pelham Hills are to the east and the Holyoke Range to the south. The vistas are there: all you need is a little height to see them from. So I set out in my car to find one of them.

Getting the height I wanted was easy: I just took Station Road over to the Pelham Hills. Getting a view was not: you have to buy property on the hillside and build a million-dollar house on it.

At any rate, that is what people have done, and they do have a magnificent view—Long Mountain, Mount Norwottock, Bare Mountain, Mount Holyoke by the river, farms and pasture-fields. You can see parts of it every now and then from the road. But you can’t see enough to draw it.

My first thought was to go along until I saw someone on their front porch shelling peas and holler from the car, “Can I use your view for a while?”

No one was shelling peas.

I did see a man walking from his car back to the house. He looked at me carefully as he went. And I saw two women walking their dogs and having a conversation. They stood still and stopped talking until I had passed.

So I didn’t get my big view. I went back downhill and found a small view. There is a place on Mad Woman Farm where you can see Mount Norwottock through the trees.

I have thought about it, and I think the small views are better in a way. Of course if a large view shows up, I will look at it for all I’m worth. But most of us, most of the time, live among the small and close-up vistas. These are the things that summon us to become artists: Queen Anne’s Lace (my mother’s wedding flower!), white beeches against gray clouds, Mount Norwottock through the trees.