The writer who yearned to paint

If only I could paint, I’d crouch in the rocky field, close enough to replicate the natural red of bog cranberries and the indigo color of lowbush blueberries blanketing large patches of ground. The chokeberries are shiny black, contrasted by the brassy color of goldenrod in the background.

If only I could paint, I’d mix dabs on the palette until I came up with the vibrant colors of phlox or fireweed. I’d paint seascapes for hours: calm waters lapping ledges, rough seas spewing spindrift onto wild Rugosa rosebushes. I’d paint sagging barns, sunsets, a meadow of Queen Anne’s lace, and naked birch trees in the wintertime.

It was Browning who wrote:

“Does he paint? he fain would write a poem, Does he write? he fain would paint a picture.”

So, I want to paint a picture of a tidepool: the pinks and purples, rusts and greens of plants and animals in pockets of seawater trapped in the intertidal zone on our rocky shore at low tide. I’d paint layers of periwinkles and barnacles and rockweed. I’d paint eider ducks and loons, bright lobster buoys, gulls and ravens.

Not that there is a growing market for paintings of crows, but should I be able to capture on canvas a flight of the large black birds against a blue and white sky, I’d feel accomplished.

Then, I’d tackle more complex subjects: the colorful map lichen that grows attached to rocks, often with other gray and black crust-like lichens. The shades of fungi and algae – their shapes and textures – I’d try to reproduce. I would enlarge the lichen as if with a magnifying glass, showing every hue, every line, all the circles growing on decaying wood or rocks or soil.

If only I could paint, I’d give proper depth and dimension to the two-foot-across artist’s conk growing on the dead tree out back. “Bear’s bread,” it is called, this strange appendage from the trunk of the tree, which darkens on its underside like a mushroom when scratched.

I’d paint all varieties of mosses, using silver and white shades of paint for reindeer moss, pale-greens for sphagnum and haircap mosses, darker greens for the cushy liverworts growing in the moist shady forest.

If only I could paint, I would transpose on paper everything from ladyslippers to cinnamon ferns, from red foxes to purple finches. There would be nothing in this picturesque place called Maine that I did not portray.

Realistically, though, I glance with great envy at the sign at an artist’s studio and gallery in town called “Whopaints.”

Not I, said the Little Red Hen.