The first in a series looking around our home at the paintings and objects we have picked up over the years, not because they are of any particular value other than that we enjoy them.

Snowy Pasture – Ink & wash – Margaret Taussig 1990

For many years, we spent a few weeks of summer in a two-hundred-year-old house beside a small lake in Canaan, New Hampshire where the artist created this image. Margaret lived a few minutes down Canaan Street where she had a studio.

The ‘ink wash’ technique that Margaret used here dates back to the Tang dynasty of China ((618–907). East Asian writing on aesthetics is generally consistent in stating that the goal of ink and wash painting is not simply to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its spirit. The American artist, Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) wrote this about the technique: “The painter… put upon the paper the fewest possible lines and tones; just enough to cause form, texture and effect to be felt. Every brush-touch must be full-charged with meaning, and useless detail eliminated. Put together all the good points in such a method, and you have the qualities of the highest art”.

Notice the distant turkey vulture in the snowy sky and other signs of life: Deer tracks through the opening in the fence. A presence, a living spirit, can be sensed in the cold snow-covered pasture.

This is where Canaan is, a very small village among the hills, mountains, valleys and lakes in New Hampshire

And here is the front porch of the house where, sometimes with Margaret Taussig, we would sit in the evenings looking out at the fields on the other side of Canaan Street.

Here is another painting by Margaret, a watercolor that captures the sensibility of the place in Autumn.

In this image, an unpaved road passes through what might originally have been a family farm dating back to the late 1700’s when the area was first settled. The stone wall on the left is typical of New Hampshire farms when, at the turn of the century, farmers were urged to replace temporary wooden fences with rock walls. A pair of turkey vultures circle in the grey autumn sky, a common feature in Taussig’s paintings and a species of vulture that breeds in New Hampshire.

This oil depicts a scene typical of the view we had from the house on Canaan Street. The scene, priceless for us because of the memories it evokes. The painting for sale on Etsy for $68.

Margaret Taussig died twenty-five years ago.

A memorial gathering was held at the Old North Church on Canaan Street near the old cemetery where her mother is buried.

Margaret’s presence is felt when we look at the two paintings in our home and, in her memory, I manipulated the painting I found on Etsy with an overlay of a Joe Pie weed to evoke a sense of spirit rising from the earth across the road on Canaan Street