Thinking in Circles

Abstract

“Oh my God,” the man says. He is about 70 and balanced on one foot in our doorway, trying to remove his left shoe while staring across the round room. He teeters a little, leans back against a wall, and smiles. “Will you just look at that?” Releasing his foot, he is oblivious of everything except the view through an arc of south-facing windows, “If I lived here,” he whispers,“I’d never get anything done. I’d just watch the woods.” He is at our house to see and, we hope, to buy Beverly’s art. For two weekends every October, we turn our tiny, cedar-sided yurt into a gallery, hanging about a dozen paintings on the walls, mounting several more on small easels here and there, perching others against boxes on the kitchen counter or against the credenza on the living room floor. She is a painter of landscapes and still lifes, mostly in oil, the work informed as much by her early training in geology as by her later study of Impressionist styles and her spiritual practice. These six days in mid-autumn, during the countywide Art Harvest Open Studio Tour, our home is taken over by the rich colors, forms, and textures of her work. And we open our isolated, normally tranquil place to all comers. That can be a deeply unsettling experience. We have only 615 square feet of circular space to work with, much of it glass, so it feels as crowded as the lobby of a concert hall at intermission. We bake banana bread and muffins, and I sit at the dining room table with an emptied tackle box to collect checks, a receipt book, and a price list. Thinking in Circles