Peasant Women Planting Poles Into The Ground ~ 1891

Pissarro painted this work during the few years he experimented with Pointillism - a rather scientific method of placing spots of pure color next to each other side by side to create light or shadow. Our eyes mix the color dots instead of the artist mixing colors on a palette. If we were to look closely we'd see what looks like a digital photograph. Talk about being ahead of your time!

This is a Springtime scene in which women are pushing wooden poles into the ground to support peas. Completed rows of poles can be seen between and behind the workers. We can feel the movement of their work - even the dresses, the air, the ground and the leaves of the tree seem charged. Look closely and we can see the orange skirt is made of orange, dark blue, yellow and white dots. The blue skirt is purple and white dots. The red dress is made of deep blue, purple, red and yellow dots. This side-by-side placement of paint dots gives the painting an intensity and brightness that isn't possible with mixed colors.

But Pissarro grew tired of this labor intensive technique and soon abandoned it, returning to his quicker (in one sitting) outdoor method - though for the rest of his life, he did retain some pointillism elements.

While these women are workers, they also seem to be dancers. We don't see it much today, except perhaps in country dancing, but circles form the basis of traditional dances. A priest moving around a free standing altar with a thurible - that's a kind of dance. I lived in a mountain monastery for two weeks some years ago, and on Sundays, there was an offertory procession with the bread and wine carried around the chapel. The monks stood in a circle around the outside of the space, and as the procession progressed, with candles and incense, each monk took a step forward, reaching out to touch the covered bread and wine, then stepping backward to his place. All of this while a memorized litany or psalm was chanted in Aramaic (the language of Jesus). A wonderful liturgical dance.

Pissarro has done a remarkable thing here. He seems to have borrowed the idea of silk-gowned women dancing in great crystal ballrooms and handed it over to rural women who combine leisure and work in a garden dance. Does Pissarro expect the women are consciously dancing? No. He sees it himself, watching how they move while they go about their work. And as we have seen in other places, that work has value and dignity.

The View From My Window, Eragny ~ 1886-1888

It took Pissarro two years to complete this painting, largely because he was experimenting with a a new time consuming technique called Pointillism - the image created with thousands of little dots and dabs of paint. The experiment seems to have been short-lived, and that's just fine. When we were in high school we performed science experiments. W.S. Merwin said, "Every garden is an experiment." Bakers and cooks experiment in the kitchen. On the other hand, experimenting with street drugs can be serious and dangerous.

Pissarro is looking out the window from the house his family rented in Eragny in 1884. Reading the numerous letters he wrote to his son, Lucien, we learn that Pissarro struggled with money problems, and often destitution, for much of his career. At this time he is selling his paintings for very low prices. Perhaps the family moved often, always looking for a more affordable place, and he painted the views from his windows of wherever he was living, because foreign travel would have been prohibitively expensive. 

This painting is divided into, by my count, at least five or six horizontal planes. There is the tree right up front and center. Then there are the orderly vegetable beds and the wall with bushes opposite the courtyard with the woman feeding the chickens. The orange, clay tiled roof divides these two spaces. There is another plane of orchard trees, then another dividing line with a pasture of grazing cows. Then another row of flowering fruit trees beyond which is forest. Beyond that is the plane of the muted, colored sky. How wonderful!

I want to continually go deeper and beyond my understanding of what it means to live by faith, what it means to be a really alive and evolved human person, what it means to be spiritually awake and perceiving, what it means to love God and others. 

Notice too that Pissarro has juxtaposed what are called warm and cool colors that evoke different emotions in the viewer. The red/brown and orange of the house eliciting feelings of warmth and comfort, while the cooler receding colors, blue/green/gray/violet, might evoke or invite an interior, pensive, even melancholic feeling.

Study of a Rural Peasant Farmer ~ 1882

The French title of this work is: Etude de Paysanne en plein air.  The word etude interested me as I thought only of a musical exercise. But here is the dictionary definition of etude in art. 

A drawing or sketch done in preparation for a finished piece. Studies are often used to understand the problems involved in rendering subjects and to plan the elements to be used in finished works, such as light, color, form, perspective, composition.

In other words, this is not Pissarro's finished product - he's just setting things up. Why? Because there's a lot going on in this scene and he needs to plan or prepare well: how the woman holds the shovel, how she's using her foot for leverage, the background plants, what time of day is it, the four horizontal layers of ground against her vertical stance. And who is that way off in the distance watching: is it an admire-r, a family member, the boss? If it's the boss, he might not be too happy that the young lady seems to be lost in her own thoughts.

It's said that the real work of gardening, or the principal concern of the gardener, is not the plants, but the soil. If you've got good soil,  you've got your plants off to a good start. To be sure, insects, light, precipitation, pests, all play a part in whether the garden is a success or not - but improving one's soil is the real deal. It's called laying the ground.

Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, said: "The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance."

So what might the inner significance be for us here? Perhaps it is the digging into, or the working of our own inner ground with self-reflection, so to open the closed heart.