A New Hooked Rug: "Purple Points"

Purple Points, hand-dyed wool on linen, 9 1/2 x 15 inches

I've completed the second in a series of ruglets, after Pointed, in which one form moves out from another, entering the plane of the wall. The first two are of triangles, a third will be a circle. I had a little technical trouble while working on this because of the acute inner angle between triangle and rectangle: the narrow space required that I cut the linen backing close to the inside point; if I didn't do so, the backing would show on the finished piece. My mistake was not to stitch the backing around the loops before cutting so it wouldn't start to unravel. I stitched afterwards, so have a bit of a messy edge, as you can see below. I won't make this mistake again.




Here are the two completed pieces, hanging together. I like the way the jutting forms engage the wall space, becoming almost sculptural. It makes me want to explore more ideas similar to this in future.

What Remains in the Garden

It was such a beautiful mid fall day yesterday that even the insects were busy in the garden. There are very few blooms left so late in the season, but a monarch butterfly, which I would have thought would be long gone to the south by now, found some asters to feed on. They are a low growing fall aster called Purple Dome, and are the only flowers still blooming in the border.




I was busy in the vegetable garden the past few days, lifting finished plants, tilling, cleaning up edges. I dug the potato crop, which was more prolific than I expected, and stored the 4 varieties of tubers in the cellar. Still adding a decorative note to the garden, even after a couple of frosts, is the pretty pink lavatera, an annual that I grow each year at the end of vegetable rows.




The third plant still in bloom is the spirea Neon Flash, growing in front of my small porch. I cut off its first large blooms and a second flowering of smaller ones is now coming to its end, but is still attractive to honeybees.




Now that we've had some frosts, I can start picking and eating brussels sprouts and kale, whose flavor improves enormously after freezing. What was bland becomes rich and sweet and tender. The plants, tall and dramatic, with the kale looking like a frothy grande dame dressed for the ball, and the brussels sprouts a swirl of leaves around the growing spheres, produce food that make me grateful for the coming cold nights.

Charles Burchfield

Burchfield, The Insect Chorus, 1917. Opaque and transparent watercolor with ink, graphite, and crayon on off-white paper, 20 × 15 7⁄8 in.

Sometimes I see an exhibition that completely changes the way I see an artist's work; this happened at the large retrospective of Henri Rousseau in 1985 at the Museum of Modern Art. I had thought of him as a naive painter of no great consequence, but seeing his grand, ambitious, beautiful paintings, of startling originality, made me realize he was an important modern painter. The reassessment can go in the other way, too, as it did for me with Jasper Johns after seeing the 1996 retrospective, also at the Museum of Modern Art. I found his paint quality inert, clumsy, and lacking in feeling or grace, and was sadly disappointed; it turned out that for me, his paintings worked better as ideas and reproductions than actual physical objects. (I know that some of you will be horrified by my appraisal.)

The show "Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield" now at The Whitney Museum of American Art until Sunday (!) was a revelation; the painter I'd believed was a modest expressive watercolorist who saw the world of nature as a positive, vivid force, was actually much more complex, interesting, and ambitious. In the first room of paintings, dating from around 1917, small works evidenced an ambivalent view of nature, with some showing feelings of darkness and dread. Burchfield's commentary on some of the paintings made it clear that a full range of emotions motivated him, including painful memories. Another thing I loved was his attempt to paint sound, as in the painting above; his use of shape and line calls up the intense buzzing of insects above and through wildly vigorous greenery.

Burchfield, Black Iron, 1935. Watercolor on paper, 28 1⁄8 x 40 in.

The biggest surprise were the paintings from the Depression and war years, powerful dark images of working life; they are an interesting interlude in Burchfield's output, but turn out to be far from what painting finally meant to him.

Burchfield, Two Ravines, 1934–43. Watercolor on paper, 361⁄2 x 61 1⁄8 in.

During the war, when art wasn't selling very well, Burchfield felt that he could go back to some ideas that were more personal, and that might not have a market. He finished two remarkable large watercolors of the same subject: two streams flowing down two ravines, a promise of spring on one side, winter remaining on the other. Though they are closer to naturalism than his later works, there is a pulsing energy in these paintings, a sense of nature as a living force in both its light and dark moods. I don't know if Burchfield was a pantheist, seeing God in nature, but it seems that he might have been, and his God was both bounteous and bleak.

Burchfield, An April Mood, 1946–55. Watercolor and charcoal on joined paper, 40 × 54 in.

Could Burchfield have been thinking of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland"––

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

––when working on this painting? It seems to show a prickly place of gloom, far from the coming days of spring. This is a monumental work that rivals the grandest of American landscapes, such as the works of Frederic Church or Albert Bierstadt.

Burchfield, Dandelion Seed Heads and the Moon, 1961–65. Watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and graffito on lightly textured white wove paper faced on ¼-inch thick laminated gray cardboard, 56 × 39 5⁄8 in.

Dandelions are glowing in fantastical moonlight, as expressive and full of movement as the insects floating above them. In this late work, Burchfield looks at the small plant and sees a large world, one that was supremely inventive and deeply personal. He kept journals and completed many volumes; on May 21, 1945 he wrote

It is as difficult to take in all the glory of the dandelion, as it is t0 take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.

He certainly succeeded.

A New Painting: "Simple Shapes"

Simple Shapes, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 4 1/2 x 6 inches

This painting, with its very plain composition, sidles up to my beloved minimalism; after working on more complex images, I find it refreshing to paint broad flat shapes, though it is not at all easy. I don't know if this happens to any of you artist-readers, but sometimes the struggle to render a form, to achieve a color, seems out of reach, as though I've forgotten how to do it. Some of the problem comes from certain pigments, which are transparent, so make it hard to get an even surface; some problems come from my putting too much egg in the paint, which makes it dry slowly and lift off as I apply the brush. Very frustrating. Perseverance does eventually pay off, though. I like this painting, and its severe design, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.

A Walk in the Woods: Another World

There are days on my woodland walks when I lean down and gaze closely at the small details of growth on earth and downed trees. A small tableau of mushroom, young tree, and moss loses its sense of scale, and can be imagined as a larger setting for an intimate drama.




The marvelous shapes--cup and waving wand--of lichens can be a strange forest landscape. It's not surprising that the artists devising the world of Pandora in the film Avatar took many images from these demure plants.




With these club mosses come another confusion of scale: they look so much like evergreen trees that seeing a photo like this makes us ask 'are they 6 inches high, or 6 feet?'. And the pale-colored spore carrying capsule looks a bit like the candles of new needles at the end of pine branches in spring. But they are small, as you can see from the wider shot among fallen leaves, below. Two days ago, I lay on the soft ground, warmed by dappled sun, smelling the spicy autumn aroma permeating the woods; down there, I felt like a visitor to another world.

Old Linens

While I was staying with my parents in Brooklyn, my mother brought a large shopping bag full of linens from the basement, so that I could choose some cloth napkins to bring home. Looking at the assortment of old tea towels, placemats, pillow cases, and napkins made me a bit nostalgic, so I am indulging myself with this post. All the linens were made by the company established by my father's father and his sons––Parisian Prints––and are probably 30 to 50 years old. When I was a young girl, my father took me on a trip to their factory in Mount Joy, PA, in Amish country. I remember watching with fascination a marvelous machine that allowed a woman sitting in front of a large pattern to move dozens of needles to "hand embroider" pillow cases. (I wonder how much I misremember.) It seemed magical. I imagine that now all this is digitized.

Above are two tea towels that look as though they could have been made as tourist items for Vermont, one with a leaping deer and the other with a skier. I hope you can see why I couldn't resist sharing them.




This is a set of table runner, placemat and napkin that I think is a lovely design, with applique on transparent fabric. And below are cocktail napkins made for the family, probably 50 years ago. The style of these linens is that of Madeira, a island of Portugal; they may have been made there, or in China. Wherever they were made, it's wonderful to have these vintage items, a bit of family history, to use and enjoy.

At the Met: Medieval Mourners

Pere Oller, Mourner, 1417, Spain, alabaster, 14 x 5 1/2 x 3 inches

Whenever I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I pass through the medieval sculpture court, generally on the way to the cafeteria. I'm grateful that this gallery is always at hand because I love the emotion and simple, yet dramatic form of this period of European art. I took my camera out to photograph some of the work and found that I was drawn that day to depictions of mourning. I wasn't sad; I was moved by the deep feeling in these works, and by the way the artists used the forms of heads, hands and clothing to heighten expression. In the small Pere Oller sculpture above, the very large hands make the figure seem more human rather than caricatured, more vulnerable and full of loss. I don't know if alabaster has this particular quality, but the stone seems full of light, almost soft and yielding. The Pleurants below are also of alabaster. (The titles of the works in this post all link to the museum's page on the sculpture, with additional information.)

Mourning Virgin, France, 1415-1475, walnut with traces of paint, 42 3/4 inches overall

Mourning Virgin, detail

The rich walnut of this sculpture adds warmth to the reserved expression of the figure, the overhanging cloak adding mystery. I especially loved the hands, folded in a very real way with the fingers of one hand tensed against the lush and dramatic folds of the dress. I see the rendering of the cloth as an almost abstract composition.

Mourning Woman, South Netherlandish, ca. 1480, walnut, polychromy and gilding,
19 x 6 1/2 x 4 inches.

This piece has a very different quality, as though the woman is a lithe dancer, choreographing a tale of mourning. Or she could be a singer, voicing a lament. Her high pointed hat adds to the sense of rising lyricism.

Bobillet and Mosselman, Mourners (Pleurants), ca. 1453, France, alabaster with traces of gilding, each ca. 15 x 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches.

I just love these two small sculptures which came from the tomb of Jean, duc de Berry; they are two of the 25 that remain of the original 40. They are so alive, so fluid and graceful. The somber faces, hidden away in the deep shadows of the cloaks, are contemplative, quiet, while the folds of the clothing flow with energy. The whole is amazingly real and human, an expression of a being confronting questions of existence.

*Last spring the Met had a show of small figures from another Burgundian tomb, which I sadly missed; you can see them here on a remarkable website that enables you to view the pieces in a 360 degree rotation, from above or below.

New York City Street Trees

I am back in Vermont from New York City, happy to see that there is still a lot of color in the trees, surprised that we haven't yet had a frost. I saw a few interesting art shows while there and will report on them in coming days; meanwhile, I'd like to talk about the trees growing along the busy streets of New York.

I was on my way to visit a friend in lower Manhattan when I noticed the knobby, light colored protuberances on a tree's roots, held in by the granite blocks of the sidewalk. The solid and linear circles lit up the brown textured bark and made an amusing, almost painterly pattern, which contrasted with the green and yellow marks of fallen leaves. There is so much character expressed in these bumpy roots (which I believe are those of a honey locust tree). I feel admiration for the endurance of the trees that grow here despite pollution, arising from a small square of earth surrounded by pavement. I began to notice the varied boundaries of street trees, hemmed in by concrete, brick or stone; perhaps it'll be a future photographic project.

Below are some seeds from the tree alongside the one above, which I thought was the same species, but this one has festive dangling green berries. I wonder if they are immature versions of the long seed pod that honey locusts produce. Whatever tree this is, the berries add a decorative splash to the gray city sidewalk.

Built: A Bridge in the Woods

A few days ago, I took a different turn on my woods walk and found myself at the foot of this charming little bridge, made by my neighbor to cross a rivulet, dry in summer but swollen during spring and fall rains. It took me back to childhood, its varied colors and widths reminding me of a toy xylophone. I love the irregular movement of its planks, tilting this way and that, inviting a dancing step.




The planks are nailed to two large tree trunks laid across the streambed.




The water below sparkles with sunlight and with fallen leaves, the bridge marked with the secret language of pine needles.




And across the stream, ranged in an august grouping, weathered tree stumps; it is as if they are sentient, and they await us for a serious conversation. It is a magical little spot, a setting for a fairy tale in which everyone is happy at the end.





*Dear readers, I'll be away for a few days to attend the wedding of one of my wonderful nephews and his delightful fiance; also to see friends and art. I'll see you later next week.

A New Painting: "Cylinders"

Cylinders, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 5 x 10 inches

This painting has a different internal scale than the previous works, which you can see below; the forms are smaller and more complex. The composition is basically divided into three parts, each with a different character, and topped by an apron overlapping the forms below. I get a kick out of the illusionism of that top rectangle; I don't know if it shows in this photo, but when I look at the painting, there seems to be a tangible space.

I had a thought while I was working on this painting that helped me to clarify what I was trying to do with this body of work: make forms that become archetypal rather than particular, so that the real objects which are the subjects of the paintings become disconnected from their origins, become simply abstract forms. I realize I've written similarly before, but working on this painting, struggling to get a balance of form and detail, made it more clear. It's funny how certain ideas that you've had become magically more concrete and present to your mind.

A suggestion: because the painting is long and narrow, it looks quite small on the blog or email page; if you click on the image, you'll see an enlargement. I must apologize for the quality of the photo; I had a hard time getting a shot without glare, which picks up the surface imperfections and somewhat changes the value relationships.

More Autumn Color

It was a beautiful day today, mild, with enough moisture in the air to give a luxurious late summer feel to the out of doors. The color is such a delight that I can't resist doing another post on this briefest of seasons, hoping to capture some of its wonder to share with you.




My walk through the woods today was so marvelous, with golden light sparkling on leaves drifting from trees. A photograph gives only a bare hint of the almost heavenly feel of walking through this landscape.






Just three days ago, the paths through the woods were mostly brown with old leaves, and now they are colorful carpets. In some areas, there are intense scarlets from the maples, in others more subtle yellows and red-browns.




The orange of a maple leaf is echoed by some small jelly mushrooms on a downed tree trunk, the bright green of lichens adding a cool note to the composition.




And to end this post, a wide view of my house perched on its small hill, a line of sugar maples brightening the view, a glimpse of Blue Mountain in the distance.

A New Rug Hooking Project: Purple Points

I've begun the second of a series of four hooked rugs that have an overlapping form jutting out from the space of a framing shape. (to see sketches of the four, go to this post.) I've used a triangle again, but this time I designed it to stick out from the background at two of its points, one slightly and one in what will be an elongated journey onto the wall. The colors are vivid secondaries, green and purple, a memory of summer flowers perhaps...

Epicurus: The Pleasurable Life

Today the word epicure means "someone who takes particular pleasure in fine food and drink", and there are recipe websites with variations on the name. We tend to think of an epicurian as something of a hedonist, a self-indulgent pursuer of pleasure. But the actual Epicurus, the Greek philosopher of the 3rd century BCE, would likely be appalled at the use to which his name has been put. As he wrote

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly.

and

Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.

Last week I read a post on Epicurian aesthetics on my philosopher friend Tom Leddy's blog and a light went on in my brain: oh my, I must be an Epicurian. Epicurus emphasized that the highest good was a life free of pain and worry, and having pleasures that are natural and necessary, therefore simple:

The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.

Granting that my understanding of philosophy is minimal, I still felt a rush of excitement in reading about Epicurus; here was an approach to life that echoed what I have been coming to understand as the meaning of my own: a deep pleasure in the simple things around me––garden and nature––and in the aesthetic pleasures of art making, reading and writing, cooking, watching movies; the joys of friendship, online and in person; the paying attention to small things.

Autumn Color

Every year in mid September, I inevitably have some variation on this conversation: "It looks as though we might not have very good foliage color this year; the leaves seem to just be turning brown around the edges; there's no red." Then another week or so passes and the color begins to intensify, with bright reds and oranges popping amid the transitional greens. The views from my windows are gorgeous with astonishing color; even though they come every fall, the hues of the season remain a marvel; the air itself seems infused with particles of orange and red. It isn't only the grand views that provide visual pleasure at this time of year; when I look across my small pond, I see the ferns at its edge have become beautifully colored with warm yellows and earthy reds.






Also across the pond, the ground under the birch trees has become a small moss and lichen habitat. Colored leaves have fallen on the club mosses; strawberry leaves, alongside branching lichen, are spotted with deep red.




The blueberry bushes are not only of interest when full of fruit; in fall they turn a beautiful range of reds, from a cool bluish red to a fiery scarlet. Walking about my land, looking at the changing leaf colors, walking on the woodland path, beginning to be carpeted with fallen color, I feel an aesthetic thrill with this explosion of richness before the coming dun months.