Bulge

Bulge, hand-dyed wool on linen, 9 x 16 inches

Like the ruglet diptych Roundabout, the design for Bulge was inspired by ancient pottery at the Brooklyn Museum; you can see a series of sketches I did based on the pots here). The main ocher shape is very stretched,based on a Chinese vase (the second image here), so more comic? odd or weird? I suppose I think of it as a tongue reaching out, tasting the other shapes, with the color variations heightening the organic effect.

It's definitely strange, as you can see when it's hung with a group of my small paintings and a ruglet from 2009 called Tall Geometry. Most of my work alludes to the geometric in some form; my paintings have moved more in that direction from the free forms of the landscape. So perhaps I should push a bit more against my natural tendency and try more organic forms in my ruglets.....or maybe not. That can start a discussion about who we are as artists, and how we get to our own essential being. Over 40 years ago, when I was an art student, my professor, Philip Pearlstein told me that I had an "architectonic sensibility". It seems that he was right.

A Walk in the Woods: Baby Bird Update & Tiny Mushrooms

I've been checking on the thrush nestlings since they were hatched 9 days ago (which you can see here). They now have feathers, soft brown patterned with a greenish yellow in elongated spots and teardrop shapes. Their beaks and open mouths (I dangled my finger in front of them so they thought they were getting food) echo the yellow of the feathers. As they were very quiet, not at all excitable, I started to worry: was mom still feeding them? I didn't see her today. Looking at the beautiful dark eye, catching the light, of this small creature, I began to think of the desire to communicate across species, with the wild.




One of the things I love about mushrooms is their seemingly––poof!––magical appearance and disappearance. There is an old pile of cut logs alongside my path, covered with mosses and small ferns. Today, after just a few days absence, I saw masses of teeny warm-tan-colored mushrooms, each with a dark spot at its center, carpeting the logs. How is it possible that this eruption of fungi happened so fast?!




These vivid little mushrooms are popping up here and there throughout the woods. With their intense red-orange color, they stand out amid the muted detritus of the woodland floor, even though very small. I can't help but be cheered by their tiny brilliant presence.

A New Painting: "Dots"

Dots, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 5 1/4 x 6 1/2 inches

Although most of my paintings have volumetric forms and some illusion of depth, I enjoy working on images that are fairly flat; they begin to feel close to the minimalist painting that I love. The large flat planes play nicely with the details, in this painting a wacky series of round holes, opening: where? I painted the surfaces with subtle evidence of the brush, to give them more physical presence.

Here is the new painting hanging in the studio, along with another flat image and two with rounded volumes. It fleetingly passes my mind at times that I should focus on one sort of image and push that relentlessly, like the signature styles of abstract expressionist painters, but that would ultimately be boring for me; the wandering and exploring and trying things out keep me engaged and having fun.

A Walk in the Woods: From Flowers to Fruit

On my recent walks in the woods, I've been noticing that spring flowers have become fruits, of different colors and shapes, reminding me of the purpose of the blooms. This cheerful grouping of red berries are bunchberry (the middle photo at the link), Cornus canadensis; the clump of berries gave me an ah-hah moment: that's why the plant got its name! They look rather Christmas-like, don't they?




I was pleased to discover this elegant dark red fruit of the trillium, one of the most beautiful flowers of the spring woods. Shaped like a Hershey's kiss, the orderly maroon fruit is divided into 6 pie-like pieces.




Here are 3 remaining berries on a stalk of wild lily-of-the-valley. The delicate white flowers become round berries speckled with red.




I didn't photograph the tall white clusters of bloom of the White Baneberry this spring, but the berries are so striking and distinctive that I wanted to show them. Because of the berries, the plant is also known as Doll's Eyes. You can certainly see why, as the little black dots on the ends of the berries seem animated, little cartoon eyeballs. They look like aliens in a science fiction film, with eyes carried on the ends of the red stalks.




This rose-like flower is blooming now; I've admired it for years, wondered about it, but never bothered before to look it up. Of course, now I must know the names of things; a large flower with maple shapes leaves, it is the Purple-Flowering Raspberry. Another discovery: the fruit of this "rose" is a red berry, looking like a larger flattened pincushion version of the domesticated raspberry, and has a velvet quality to the look of the surface. How is it possible that I've never noticed these before?! unfortunately, they are supposed to be unpleasant to eat, both bitter and seedy. But no matter, blackberries are now ripening in their shiny dark masses.
UPDATE, August 8: Susan pointed out in comments that these berries certainly are good to eat, and I can confirm that, having tasted a few today.

Eggplant Salad

My bounteous midsummer garden basket filled early this year because of the weeks of warmer than normal weather. I grow eggplants and peppers on black plastic to warm the soil, and under row covers to keep the plants warm. Above you see the ingredients for a middle eastern eggplant salad, another recipe from my mother, and now a summer favorite for me. The smaller eggplants are from a variety called Diamond and the larger one is a Galine, both suitable for northern climates.




The special smoky flavor of the salad comes from cooking the eggplant over an open flame, which I am doing here directly on the burner of my stove. If you have an outdoor grill going, I imagine that would work really well. Cook the eggplant, whole, turning it so that it cooks all over, until it is blackened and very soft. I poke a two-tined fork into it in places to be sure that it is done.




Split open the cooked eggplants and scrape out the masses of seeds and discard them. Then scoop out the flesh, chop it and place it in a bowl. Small pieces of skin may stick to some of the flesh, but that just adds flavor, so don't try to remove every last bit.

This salad is good with some finely chopped green pepper, some chopped tomatoes, finely chopped onion (I forgot to put an onion in the basket photo), and chopped parsley. These ingredients are very fluid; more or less of any of them won't ruin the salad. Or you can add cucumbers. To give some idea of amounts, I had about 1 1/2 lbs of eggplant. With that I used: 1/2 green pepper, 1/2 medium onion, 8 cherry tomatoes, about 1/2 cup parsley.

Dress with olive oil and lemon juice, and season to taste with salt. Amounts? I used about 3 Tbs olive oil and the juice of 1/2 lemon. It should have a bit of a lemony flavor. I made this for friends a few days ago and it was a big hit. We ate it as an appetizer on my homemade sourdough bread; delicious!

Reality/Realism

Gustave Courbet, The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, 1850-55, oil on canvas, 81 1/2 x 109 1/2 inches

I just finished reading an intensely thought provoking book by David Shields called Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. It consists of hundreds of numbered paragraphs, most of them unsourced quotes, which build an argument against traditional narrative fiction––the novel––as the right genre for getting at reality today. One of the many ideas the book got stirring in my brain was the issue of "Realism" in visual art. Currently, the label of Realism is attached to paintings that are precisely rendered images of the 'objective' visual world. I find this very annoying, as I'm sure other artists do, because of the wholesale dumping of artwork into neat pigeonholes based solely on surface, on style. Realism as a movement began in mid-nineteenth century France (see an excellent book on the subject by Linda Nochlin, Realism) as a reaction against romanticism and the rigidity of the academy. Courbet painted ordinary peasants and townspeople in a manner usually reserved for history painting; see also his Burial at Ornans, a huge painting of a country funeral, depicted with monumental solemnity.

Wilhelm Heise, Self Portrait, 1926, oil on wood, 33 x 35 1/2 inches

In 1980, the Pompidou in Paris mounted a show called Les Realismes: 1919-1939; I am lucky enough to have the catalog, which covers representational painting, plus architecture, photography and design from Europe and the United States. The styles are wide ranging; tying everything together is the attempt to get at "reality" between the world wars. I am very interested in the self portrait by Heise, which, while obsessively describing the jumbled mass of objects on his work table, seems to imply a similar confusion in the artist, a questioning of self, so on a boundary of "expressionism" and "realism".

Jacques Mahede de Villeglé, Les Jazzmen, 1961, torn posters mounted on canvas,
85 x 70 inches

As I was thinking about this post over the past few days, I came to realize that the 1960s was a time of artists trying to figure out how to get at the new fast pace of the modern world, how to portray in images a world full of them. In France, the "Nouveau Realistes" sought to bring art back to reality by using actual objects, as in the posters above, assemblages by artists such as Arman, or actual bodies as in the paintings of Yves Klein.

James Rosenquist, Nomad, 1963, oil on canvas, plastic and wood, 90 x 141 inches

In the United States, the movement similar to the Nouveau Realistes was Pop Art, (another poorly named movement, in my eyes) which used images from the everyday commercial world around us and re-presented it. Rosenquist's enormous paintings use a collage technique to bombard us with disconnected pictures, as we are assaulted by information in daily life. This method of odd juxtapositions continues to be a much used artistic device.

Chuck Close, Self Portrait, 1967-68, acrylic on canvas, 107 1/2 x 83 1/2 inches

Looking at Chuck Close's self portrait, we might think that it fits into the commonly used term of Realism, with its tight edges and detailed verisimilitude. But its enormous scale and painting method set it apart from traditional portraiture. Close takes a large polaroid photo and puts a small-squared grid over it, which he uses to transfer the image to the canvas, applying paint with an airbrush square by square. His very real portraits come about through process and concept, not through perception.

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1978, cadmium red oil on American Douglas Fir plywood,
19.8 x 39 x 19.8 inches

Minimalist sculpture aims to be a fact, a thing in the world denoting nothing but itself; it is reality. However, humans are metaphor machines; we can't help but read into things, even something as seemingly blank as Donald Judd's boxes.

I believe that the notion of realism in art is a complicated one; I would prefer thinking of it as a philosophical stance rather than a stylistic one. The word "Precisionism", that was used for some American paintings of the mid 20th century, such as those of Charles Sheeler, seems a better choice for paintings now called realist; it describes a way of working more accurately because more narrowly. My "reality hunger" is to be moved––emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically––by the work of art, no matter the form or genre.

One Year

A year ago today I launched "Studio and Garden". At the time, I thought of blogging as a way of having a presence on the web for my artwork––paintings and textiles––that was easy and free; I envisaged, from the beginning, the inclusion of posts on gardening (hence the title), but did not foresee how it would expand to: thoughts on art, literature, film; walks in the woods, where I discovered plants, mosses and lichens; recipes. Doing the writing and the photography for the blog have been revelatory: I find that I love the process of sifting and clarifying my thoughts in order to write them down, with, I hope, some hint of the lyrical; looking at things closely through the camera lens has enabled me to truly see many things I had never before noticed, deepening my daily pleasures. I have come to think of the blog as part of my art practice.

And this is wrapped in a generous package of communication, where I can, from my small hilltop farmhouse, talk with readers around the world. What a marvel is the internet! I so appreciate my readers: following my posts, commenting on them, teaching me so much on the way. Thank you all.

A New Painting: "Tangle"

Tangle, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 4 7/8 x 3 1/2 inches

This painting, because of the details of the tangled chain, was tough going at times. I think of the chain as a mass of texture in the painting, which contrasts with the flat red and green planes, but unless it is painted with clarity and conviction, it doesn't work with the whole. It points out the odd nature of my paintings: they aim for an abstract expression of color, shape and form, but they also must have precision of execution to create the tension I find most interesting between the thing and the representation of it, or, to put it other ways, illusion and flatness, reality and abstraction.

(keep in mind that this detail is way over the actual size)

'Kousa b'Jibn': Zucchini, Cheese and Egg Pie

I love zucchini, cooked in many ways: sauteed with butter and onions, or olive oil and garlic, via Marcella Hazan; in pasta; grilled, fried or added to pizza. I'm not one of those people who leave bags of zucchini on their neighbor's porches in the dead of night. Granted, I have only one hill with three plants, but this produces lots of fruits for fresh eating and freezing.

One of my favorite zucchini dishes is a family middle eastern recipe which my mother often prepares for non-meat dinners; I look forward to making it each summer. The squash is first cooked with onions and then mixed with cheese and eggs and baked. It is good hot or cold (mmm, leftovers).




1 large onion, chopped
3 Tbs vegetable oil
2 lbs zucchini, cut into 1/2 inch slices
3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups grated cheese. My mother uses muenster, I use cheddar.
salt to taste

1. Fry the onion in a wide pot oil till golden.
2. Add the zucchini and cook until very soft, stirring often.
3. Mix the eggs and cheese in a bowl, then add the zucchini-onion mixture and mix well, adding salt to taste.
4. Pour into a baking dish (I used a 9 inch square for this amount) and bake in a 350˚oven until golden brown, about 45 minutes.
5. Serve with yogurt.

Serves 4 to 6

I should mention that my mother uses more eggs and cheese, as does my cousin Poopa Dweck in her cookbook Aromas of Aleppo, using twice as many eggs with a pound of cheese. This makes a more dense pie as the softer squash is surrounded by the firmer egg/cheese mixture. Claudia Roden, in her The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, uses the smaller amount above, which I also like. So if you make this more than once, you can experiment with the proportion of ingredients to see which you prefer.

A Walk in the Woods: Hatchlings

The blue thrush's eggs that I found a few days ago, posted here, have hatched. I was thrilled and saddened this morning when I looked into the nest: two tiny naked lives where there had been three eggs. They were quivering and moving about, lifting a head with difficulty. When I saw these creatures, without their mother, who I saw sitting on a branch a few feet away, I felt a nearly excruciating sense of vulnerability: how is it possible that any creature at all survives when it comes into the world with such fragility?

The Garlic Harvest

When I heard the weather report yesterday, I decided to dig my garlic; the several days of sun that were predicted would be ideal for beginning to dry the crop out in the field. I grow a 25 foot row of this essential ingredient, which provides me with enough garlic for this year's planting (one garlic clove planted in fall will form a bulb next summer) and for eating until the new crop is ready. After it dries for a few days in the sun, I hang the garlic up in bunches (the stiff necks can't be braided) in the mud room; the garlic smell wafting in the garden air is transferred to the mud room. You have to love garlic for this! In a few weeks I will clean up the bulbs, cut off the roots and long stalks, and rehang bunches in the mud room. They will finally be stored in a cold bedroom throughout the winter.




I grow two or three different kinds of garlic, but don't know their names. One has a white outer covering, and enormous cloves, the other pink, with smaller cloves. They all look close to bursting out of their tight wrappings, their rounded volumes full of hidden culinary pleasure.

"Bulge" in Progress

I've been working away on Bulge, so thought I'd show a couple of images of it at this point (to see the dyed wool, click here). Hooking the strips of wool in a random pattern is fairly slow going; certainly the fastest process is hooking straight lines, horizontal or vertical. Here you can see that my method is to hook curling lines, going this way and that, then adding another line of wool, but trying not to be too repetitive, instead having the lines follow and then break away from a pattern. With this process I aim to create a surface that is lively and variegated, at the same time as being essentially flat in its visual effect. This could be seen as equivalent to an abstract painting with a painterly surface. Before beginning the project I thought the overall hooking might make the image appear flat, but for me, the piece does have a shallow sense of space; the warm yellow shape overlaps the red, implying depth, and both appear, because of their intense color, in front of the small cool blue.

A Walk in the Woods: New Life

On my daily walk in the woods I pass a high bank covered with gracefully curved grass; today I noticed that it had begun to flower, sending up a fine stalk ending in a delicate spray, almost difficult to see. So, I leaned in close to take a look, which resulted in two startled creatures: me, and a small brown bird that erupted into flight from beneath the foliage.




Looking down, I saw a small rounded nest built into the detritus of the bank, lined with pine needles and edged with green moss. Inside were three perfectly shaped blue eggs. I went home to get my camera and when I returned, the bird was back on her nest and again flew off at my appearance. Speaking with a friend this afternoon, I discovered that I'd found a thrush's nest (I don't know what type, a hermit thrush maybe), which makes sense because both bluebirds and robins, who lay blue eggs, are also thrushes. Seeing such a jeweled color nestled in the dun colors of the woods is a lovely surprise. It also makes me wonder why, in a survival of the fittest inquiry, the eggs are so brilliant.

Raspberry Jam

The raspberries began ripening last week, about a week or two early, and on Monday the yields were large enough to make a batch of jam. When I pick raspberries, and see them dangling in their ruby masses, I feel as though they are a marvelous gift. Even though there's a certain amount of work involved in growing them, when they are ripe they seem to be a wild food, prolific and free. When I moved here, there was a large circular mass of berry canes and weeds which I fought into shape over a couple of years; with rototiller and hand weeding, I created two large rows––2 1/2 by 25 feet each––of raspberries. They provide lots of fresh eating, gallons of frozen fruit, and delicious jam.




Use 4 cups crushed berries, about 2 quarts, using 1/4 underripe and 3/4 ripe so as to have enough pectin to jell. I use my potato masher to crush the berries. The proportion of sugar is 3/4 cup to one cup crushed berries; with 4 cups berries, use 3 cups of sugar.

Self portrait in raspberry jam

1. Put the berries in a large pot, bring to a boil slowly, then add the sugar. Cook at a rapid boil (it's good to have a deep pot so the jam doesn't splash around the kitchen), stirring very frequently, until the mixture is thick and sheets from a spoon. I use a heavy bottomed stainless pot, which works really well for jam making because it spreads the heat and doesn't stick. Skim off the foam that forms. I find that raspberries take about 1/2 hour to thicken.
2. You can use the refrigerator test to see if the jam is done: put a some jam on a plate and put it in the freezer for 5 minutes. If it is set by then, it is done.
3. When the jam is ready, ladle into clean hot jars and process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes. The recipe makes 3 or 4 half pint jars. For my batch on Monday, I used 5 cups of crushed berries with 3 3/4 cups of sugar, which yielded 5 half pint jars.

I hope there will be a good crop of wild blackberries this year; they too make a wonderful jam. Part of my breakfast each morning is a slice of home made sourdough bread with home made jam; I cycle through the various jams I make each summer––rhubarb, raspberry, blueberry (some years), blackberry (sometimes), green tomato, and apple butter (every other year)––and never tire of them.

A New Painting: "Blue/Green"

Blue/Green, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 2 panels, 4 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches each

The images in this painting, which I finished last week, were 'discovered' in a larger image; I felt that a 2 part piece worked well with the elements at hand. This is one of my flat paintings, where the forms are basically planes; my recent paintings seem to go back and forth between more volumetric and flatter images, each with their own challenges. I like the way the shapes and colors relate and repeat, yet with differences enough so that the two panels have a disjointed conversation; there's a rhythm of color and shape, yet with variations on the theme. The expanded format of the multi-panel painting adds complexity to a work, and I regret that I haven't prepared more of them for this year's work. This must be telling me to go back to my motifs––farm machinery ––and find some images for diptychs.

A Walk in the Woods: King of the Mushrooms?

What a thrill I experienced on my walk today: as I was coming to the end of the wooded section of the path, there in front of me was the largest mushroom I had ever seen. I could hardly believe that I'd found such a thing, and as I looked at its underside, I realized that I'd found a bolete, which I thought was a King Bolete, also known as porcini or cep. I didn't have my camera with me, so photographed it at home.




The cap is nearly 7 inches across, 1 1/2 inches thick, and the mushroom stands 7 inches high. The stem is about 2 inches across at its widest point. A huge mushroom.

Then I tasted a tiny bit of the white flesh, and instead of being pleasant tasting, it was very bitter. I read in the link above that what I'd likely found was the bitter bolete, Tylopilus felleus, rather than the King Bolete, Boletus edulis. How disappointing! And here I'd had thoughts of a mushroom omelette tonight and pizza tomorrow. It'll have to be cultivated food for dinner rather than wild.

From the Shore

When you live in a very cold climate zone, as I do, you know that there are many plants that won't survive, so are happy with the ones that thrive. But my plant envy was in full stride when I saw all the flowering blue and pink hydrangeas, too tender for Vermont, down on the New Jersey shore. They make such a beautiful display, looking grand and generous in their large masses. The lovely specimen above was photographed in my sister's garden, which included may other types of colored hydrangeas.




I was very happy to find some of the old fashioned honeysuckle, remembered from childhood, mentioned before in this post. What I hadn't remembered is the intense sweet scent of the flower; it's delightful to bury your nose in a group of them, and the bees agree: you can see one deep in a flower on the lower right.




I saw many plants on the shore that were unfamiliar. This vine, entwined within a privet hedge, had a spray of flowers with a very interesting growth pattern. The small cream-colored flower (I think it's a flower) has at its center a green 'button', which then enlarges into circular ribbed forms, which I assume are seed pods. I found the structure very engaging, even cheerful, like little dangling candies.




Of course I went to the beach, and what a treat it was to splash in the ocean. The beaches I visited had dark colored sand, which might come from all the mussel shells that cling to the jetties and are then crushed by the action of waves. It's a minor treasure hunt to sift the sand and find small particles of rock and shell that are part of it.

I couldn't resist including the following image, of a surfer's sandals left waiting on a wall, with seagulls watching along the water's edge, a cliched/iconic image of the sea, and summer.