My Daffodil Hill

A favorite spring planting at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is its Daffodil Hill. Here is my small version on the slope below my favorite apple tree, which I wrote about during pruning season. The brilliant yellow is a happy sight during spring, vivid life when trees and shrubs are still bare of leaves.




I thought I'd show a photo of some daffodils that I didn't plant; they are volunteers, these next to the compost pile, others popping up here and there. They are a split cup, double flower, which I know for sure that I didn't order, so they are probably the result of cross pollination, with seeds being spread by wind or birds. Life is vigorous and insistent.
UPDATE, April 26: I have found out, through Old House Gardens, that this daffodil is an ancient variety, dating back to 1620 named Van Sion. To read about it, click on the Old House Gardens link.

Five Circles

Five Circles, egg tempera on panel, 8 x 8 inches

I completed Five Circles a couple of days ago, and I still think it's a very odd image; compelling, but strange. Its presence 'in person' is much more satisfying than online because the physicality of panel and paint is an important part of its meaning. But, flawed as reproduction is, it is still great to be able to show the painting.

At first I painting the whitish surface with a varied touch of subtle color shifts, but then decided that a more uniform surface would serve the idea better. It still has variation, as you can see in the detail below, and the paint is many-layered, giving the surface plane visual weight.

The actual size of the dark interior circles is 1 1/4 inch in diameter; you can get a sense of the size of the work if you play around with the enlargement size on your screen. And below is a photo of the work hanging on the wall behind my desk (it's original hand-planed, beaded wood paneling, if you're interested), alongside a 5 x 7 inch miniature on vellum.

Scarlet Vessel

Scarlet Vessel, hand dyed wool on linen, 10 x 10 inches

I completed Scarlet Vessel a couple of days ago. When I started it, I thought that the color might be too strident, but I ended by liking it, with the greenish yellow taking a bit of a back seat to the red. The bulging lean of the red shape adds some movement, a figurative allusion, a touch of humor perhaps?

Frog Eggs and Vernal Pools

Yesterday I went down to the pond, to see if there were any results from the loud quacking love calls of the male wood frogs (which I wrote about here, and you can listen to here). And indeed there were: large masses of translucent eggs floating near the edge of the pond.




Within each egg you can see the small black dot that will grow into a tadpole, then a frog. The little specks will grow larger, we'll be able to see a small tail take shape, and then they'll burst out of the egg. I'll try to get some photos as the process unfolds. Yesterday, I almost ended up in the pond myself while trying to get this closeup: I slipped down and had to brace myself with my right arm in very cold water up to my elbow while holding my camera out of the water with my left; I felt very silly.




Just to the south of my pond, on my neighbor's land, I noticed a beautiful wonderland of moss covered rocks and vernal pools, small shallow areas of water that appear in the woods each spring and later dry up. Some are large enough to attract frogs and insects to mate in them, but I think these are too small for that. Instead, they provide intense visual pleasure as they gather and reflect light and the surrounding woods. Being in this little section of woods made me feel as if I was in a fairy tale, and that at any moment a mysterious benevolent spirit would appear.

William Kentridge

William Kentridge, drawing for 'Stereoscope', 1998-99; charcoal, pastel, and colored pencil on paper; 47 1/4 x 63 inches.

The most interesting exhibition that I saw while in NYC last week was "William Kentridge: Five Themes" at the Museum of Modern Art. The show was powerful, moving, thought-provoking, exhilarating, a very important overview of the work of a major contemporary artist. Kentridge's work does not show well in reproduction, so at first I wasn't going to write about it, but instead here is a short post urging those of you who are able to see the show not to miss it.

Kentridge is a South African artist who tackled the large themes around the morality and politics of apartheid in a series of animated films in the 1990s. To make the films, he took what were rather traditional charcoal drawings, and by erasing and redrawing and photographing them, created a new kind of narrative art. In his "Soho and Felix" series of works, he is the only contemporary artist I can compare to the Francisco Goya of "The Disasters of War" or "Los Caprichos".

The installation of all the animated works at MOMA is superb; the earlier films are projected on a large wall and the sound, important in all the work, is enveloping. Two of Kentridge's more recent pieces, "The Artist in the Studio" and "The Nose", based on a Gogol story, are multi-screen installations, visually and aurally exciting, and brilliantly inventive.

You can see snippets of the animated work at the "Five Themes" link above; just remember it's a poor substitute for being there.

Planting Peas and Spinach

Yesterday was another unseasonably warm day, with temperatures up into the 70s (normal is around 50). Because of all the very warm weather––March, too, had temperatures above normal––the spring flowers are opening ahead of schedule. Early daffodils are quickly being joined by the mid-season varieties, a week or two before they usually bloom; the lawn is growing fast, and looks like it might need cutting soon: in over 15 years, I haven't had to mow the lawn before early to mid May. I have to admit that I find this warmth disconcerting; although I know that there's a difference between weather and climate, I worry that we may be facing climate change sooner and more intensely than anyone suspects.

At any rate, it was the kind of day, usual for June not April, when it is impossible to stay indoors. I decided to plant spinach and peas (earlier than usual!) because they're crops that do best in cool weather; you are supposed to plant them "as soon as the ground can be worked", which generally means the soil has defrosted and dried enough so that a handful will crumble after being squeezed. I put up the fences for the peas: a 25 foot long, 3 foot high fence for the shell peas, and a 10 foot length of 6 foot fence for the tall snap peas. A double row of spinach completes the snap pea row. I love looking at the cedar posts supporting the chicken wire fencing; they add some charm to the garden. The posts you see piled on the right make up one of my compost piles; I have three: one cooking, one building, and one to use. And the white plastic bucket is protecting the fencer for the electric fence.




Here are the pea seeds before I covered them with soil. They are planted thickly, about an inch apart in a 3 inch band. I kneel on the ground with a handful of seeds, methodically pressing them into the soil. These small shriveled seeds will swell and send up shoots in a couple of weeks. After many years of gardening, I still find this magical.

Bright Yellow

The first daffodils to bloom are small, slender cupped varieties: Jet Fire, above, has a warm orange-yellow cup; February Gold, below, is a cooler yellow. Both shine intensely in the early spring light.




The view below is what I see from my desk when I peer around the computer screen (the photo was taken outdoors, not in). The forsythia has begun to bloom, sparkling behind the stone wall. A photograph can't quite capture the intensity of the color, how it glows in a landscape not yet fully awake after winter.

Beginning a New Painting: Five Circles

I've begun a new painting, which I've titled Five Circles, a rather strange image with its 'eyes' intensely observing. It is on an 8 x 8 inch gessoed panel, so I am using paint made with the yolk of the egg. I printed the photograph which I'm using as model in the exact size of the work; I then traced it and transferred the image to the panel using a piece of charcoal covered newsprint, my usual 'tracing' paper. With all the small works I've done so far this year, I've begun in this way: by tracing a photograph. I don't always stick to the photograph as it is; sometimes I have to move elements around to make the composition work more effectively. What you see above are the first layers of paint, which will be followed by many more so as to make a richer surface with more resonant color. I can see right now that it will be challenging to get those 4 small circles of color to sit back in space and not pop forward.

When I got to this stage of the painting, I went and rummaged in my kitchen to find the perfect sized bowl or jar to use as template for the circles. A favorite mixing bowl did the trick for the large circle, and the cap of an antique salt shaker worked for the small.




This is the photographic image that I used, but cropped closer, as below. I decided that I liked the more stern and simple closeup view. It's interesting for me to think about how I would have approached this if I was still doing larger work; I believe I would have chosen the wider view above, as being more characteristic of the object, and I would have painted it closer to life size, about 18 or 20 inches square. Often when I was out painting, I would place my ruler directly on the thing I was depicting, and try to make my gouache study as close to actual size as possible; if the object was too large, I'd make a small study and planned for a very large painting. I now feel that I have freedom to move away from the object as a thing pictured, and toward a more abstract expression, while maintaining a 'realist' style.

Yearly Spring Visitors

This morning when I looked out at the pond through the front windows, I noticed a very large ripple circling outwards, a result of a large surface disturbance. And there was the cause: the pair of mallards that visit my small pond each spring had arrived. They spend only a few days here, never nesting; I imagine they don't feel safe enough. When I see them I wonder if they are the exact same ducks who were here last year, and the year before, or are descendants; it's part of the wonderful mystery of birds' migrations.

The Vegetable Garden: Early Sowing and Harvesting

Over the weekend the temperatures were much warmer than normal; on Saturday, which reached 80 degrees, I wanted to revel in the heat, but it felt much too strange to completely enjoy it. But I did get into the vegetable garden and laid out all my rows, putting small stakes at their beginnings and ends. This is a very satisfying task, as I think ahead to the crops that will cover the ground by late summer. I then put out my small, 2 by 4 foot, coldframe and planted a row of lettuce and one of arugula in it. When the weather cooled off on Sunday afternoon, I placed a cover on it: some clear plastic sheeting stretched over a frame made of nailed together stretcher bars. The additional warmth generated in this mini greenhouse will encourage faster germination and growth of the salad greens during cooler days; I hope to be eating a salad of baby greens in 4 weeks or so.




The very first crop from the garden each spring are the new shoots of Egyptian onion, a perennial plant with delicious onion flavored leaves that I chop for soups and salads; it's cheering to be getting something green from the garden so early in the season. Later on, the leaves, which are really hollow stalks, grow taller and small onion bulblets, useful for flavoring, form at the top. Another name for Egyptian onion is Walking onion, because the stalks flop over from the weight of the bulblets, which then root in their new spot, wandering away from the main plant, which is ever prolific, ever reliable.

The Brooklyn Museum

An important touchstone of my childhood in Brooklyn, in addition to the Botanic Garden, was the Brooklyn Museum, a place of wonders for a youngster. I didn't think of my visits there, with family or school classes, as trips to a sanctuary of art, but as a place of fun and excitement where I could see odd and interesting things. On the first floor of the museum was a large collection of Native American objects, clothing and sculpture and pottery; I vividly remember the totem poles towering over the room; what could be more thrilling? This room is now under construction, a few of the objects scattered in other galleries. But my memory still holds on to the vivid image of stylized, powerful faces rising above me.

Another favorite place was upstairs in the Decorative Arts galleries, which housed several period rooms, magical spaces for the imagination. (You can see the 17th century Schenck house, which had stood in Brooklyn here.) I loved seeing these each time we were in the museum. They are now surrounded by the Sackler Center for Feminist Art, an undreamed of idea in the 1950s.

Statue of Metjetji, detail of head, 2371-2288 BC, wood, gessoed and painted.

Statue of Metjetji, detail of hand.

The Egyptian collection, an outstanding one at the Brooklyn Museum, was a fascinating place. For a child, seeing objects from such an ancient time––the time of the Bible, of the Hanukah Haggadah––was amazing. Of course the mummies were most compelling, and I see children today still gathering around them with interest; what magical things they are!

This wood sculpture, a portrait, is so lifelike and sensitively sculpted; it seems full of breath, and grace.

Head, Yoruba, 11th-14th century, Nigeria-Ife, terracotta.

On the first floor of the museum is a small but strong collection of African art. I have to admit that I know this area fairly well because I pass through it on the way to the cafeteria. I don't have a strong childhood memory of the African work and it may be that it wasn't housed in this area when I was young, or that the Native American objects grabbed all my attention. However, I had to photograph this Yoruba head; it is quietly powerful, simple yet expressive, and subtly rendered. I see a relationship with the Egyptian portrait above; at least I see that I respond strongly to certain styles of sculpture.

There is also a very good collection of American painting at the museum, that I look at during each visit, but paintings didn't seem to be of most interest to me as a child, at least not as I remember (and memory can certainly be faulty). I think there is something more compelling in the fact and presence of an object; it draws the attention in a way the more abstract art of painting cannot do. As children we may be less sophisticated viewers, who find it hard to translate a two dimensional image into reality. I wonder if any of you have strong memories of art viewing as children; did you love any particular things you saw? did you feel, like me, that objects stayed with you more than painting?

More Signs of Spring

Today––a gorgeous, much warmer than normal one––was perfect for the first time this year to hang laundry outside to dry. I washed the green flannel sheets, which will now be going into the closet as the white cotton, aired out in the spring breeze, will now cover the bed. I love the fresh smell of laundry coming in from outdoors; there's nothing like it.




Now that there's some growth in the vegetable garden––the green row surrounded by hay is garlic and the green clump in the distance is sorrel––it was time to put up the electric fence. I've seen several deer near the garden each evening, and the naughty creatures have come up to the front of the house to munch on the new daylily shoots. I bait the fence with peanut butter smeared on a piece of aluminum foil, which I then wrap around the fence wire. If a deer tries to eat the peanut butter, it will get a nasty shock and will stay away from the garden all season long.




And today, a big surprise: the wood frogs are in my pond, making a glorious racket, two weeks earlier than last year. I can see them as points of light surrounded by circular ripples. They are very shy creatures and generally disappear below the surface of the pond if I move near. But I learned something from reading a journal entry by Henry David Thoreau of April 18, 1858:

Frogs are strange creatures. One would describe them as peculiarly wary and timid, another as equally bold and imperturbable. All that is required in studying them is patience. You will sometimes walk a long way along a ditch and hear twenty or more leap in one after another before you, and see where they rippled the water, without getting sight of one of them. You sit down on the brink and wait patiently for his reappearance. After a quarter of an hour or more he is sure to rise to the surface and put out his nose quietly without making a ripple, eying you steadily. At length he becomes as curious about you as you can be about him.

So, I walked very slowly down to the pond, step by step, so that I became a part of the landscape, and the frogs didn't disappear, but kept floating and singing their raucous chorus. The first time I heard these frogs years ago, I kept running out of the house to see if there were ducks on the pond, because that's what they sound like: quacking ducks. If you'd like to hear them, with a background of high pitched peepers, click on this link for a recording. Play it loud and it will put you next to a spring pond in your imagination.

Cactus at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

It was a visual feast at the Desert Pavilion at the Conservatory of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I love looking at cactus and succulents; their strong clear forms are like expressive sculpture, and they have a wide array of shapes: the leaves and spines seem to be created by a wackily inventive artist, playing with varying geometries.




From large dramatic forms to smaller and more complex ones, they can be forbidding or amusing.




The spines on the cactus above look like horned insects (I'm thinking of the tomato hornworm) marching up the wide stalk.




And here, the gracefully spiky thorns array themselves like the corps de ballet around the prima ballerina: a small red horned protuberance, probably a flower, which sits jauntily atop the slender arc of green.




The geometry of the golden section is very evident in the swirl of this cactus. I believe that most of the cactus display this pattern of growth, which I wrote about in this post and that is what makes them so engaging to look at, and so beautiful.

As for the plant below, I won't comment on it lest I get silly. Just enjoy.

Blooming at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

There are places in Brooklyn that are very close to my heart because they are an integral part of my growing up. One of these is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where I spent many happy hours with my parents and later, by myself or with friends; I still feel that I know the grounds well and that there are pleasant remembrances in so many spots: the Japanese Garden, the Shakespeare Garden, Daffodil Hill, the cherry trees and rose garden.

I got into Brooklyn early enough on Sunday to have a quick stroll through the Garden before the rain began, rain which continued for the next two and a half days, with a blustery rawness in the air that belied the idea of spring. But there were blooms, bright spots of color nestled in greens of grass and leaf and gray of sky, such as the pretty candy striped tulips.




The BBG has a magnificent grouping of magnolia trees, and most were in full bloom, with flowers in whites and pinks emerging from fuzzy pods. While I was wandering through the magnolia plaza, I heard a docent explain that this species is very ancient, many millions of years old; it predated bees, so beetles pollinated the flowers.




Hellebore, another early spring flower, showed its lovely variegated petals. Alongside this variety of pink and green was another with lime green flowers.




There were quite of few of these greenish yellow flowering shrubs scattered about, with flowers that from a distance looked a lot like forsythia, with a similar cheer and brightness. But walking up to the shrub, I saw that the growth habit of the flowers, in long pendulous sprays, was very different from that of the official flower of Brooklyn. They are called Spike Winterhazel.




The greenhouses were a welcome respite from the cold wind outdoors; I walked into the tropical section and took out my camera to photograph some of the large, beautiful ferns, but my camera fogged up from the moist heat. I was able to photograph the Bird of Paradise, which is in a more temperate zone; its horizontal bird-like beak with a crown of spreading orange creates a graphic drama against the simple shapes of dark green leaves.

I also visited one of my favorite rooms, the one containing the Bonsai collection, which years ago inspired me to learn the art of Bonsai. I was very taken with the desert pavilion, and I'll be doing a post on desert plants next. It's wonderful to be able to wander through different climates and see plants from all over the world in a short span of time, a welcome enlargement of my world of nature.

Swelling Buds

After a mild month, March has turned quite chilly, slowing the rapid turn toward spring. The robins didn't seem to mind the temperatures in the 20s yesterday; a large flock arrived and happily hopped and pecked around the lawn and gardens. The buds of the early flowering tiny shrub, Daphne, are enlarging in pinkish purple dabs of color. The flowers have a remarkably sweet penetrating scent, the first intense beautiful perfume of spring.

This afternoon I'm heading down to an opening at the Brattleboro Museum; I have a few works in an exhibit "Contemporary Masters of Egg Tempera". Then I'll be driving to NYC to spend Passover with my family. I'm looking forward to going south where spring is several weeks ahead; daffodils will be brightening the small gardens of Brooklyn.

A Miniature: Green Dots

Green Dots, tempera on vellum, 3 1/4 x 4 inch, image size, on a 5 x 7 inch panel

Now that I've finished Green Dots, my first painting made on vellum stretched over plywood, I can report that the stretching, which I wrote about in this post, was a great success. The vellum remained taut while I worked on it, with no wrinkling or movement at all. The image, of a line of raised green disks bordered by horizontal and vertical blacks, is floating on a ground of ivory-colored parchment. I painted a transparent narrow border of red with a thin glaze of gold, which creates an illusion of solid form raised above the ground.

I wanted to talk a bit about deciding on a composition to move forward with; as I've mentioned before, I have gone through my file photos looking for interesting images. In this case, I had three variations that included the row of "dots". The first photo (I would have made the greens parallel to the edges) had just the green with black tubes to the left.




The second photo had some red under the green, making a green red black image.




The third photo had an additional line of black with the tilted bolts in a jaunty chorus line at the top. I decided to go with this composition because I liked the framing of black around two sides of the green, also the way the geometric edges of bolts played with the tubular hoses; it was also more simple than adding a third color. You'll notice that I chose to paint the green a warmer color than the very blue-green of the photo.




Working with a new medium brings big questions of technique and presentation. A great problem has been solved by stretching the vellum. Below, you see a photo of the panel Green Dots in front of one of the 6 x 6 inch panels of Yellow Whorls; the image is surrounded by the blank warm vellum. What I've been wondering is how the painting would look if it went to the edge of the panel, as with my paintings on gessoed panels, so I've stretched a little panel which will be the exact size of the image and another which will have a 1 1/2 inch border around the image. When these paintings are complete, I'll have a better idea of which approach will work best.

A New Rug Hooking Project: Scarlet Vessel

This thumbnail sketch has been hanging on my wall for a while; I've decided to use it for my next hooking project, going back to a rectangular composition and intense color. The design has both pottery and Ellsworth Kelly as inspiration.




As I started to work on the full sized drawing, above, I ruled out a 10 by 9 inch rectangle because the thumbnail has a near-square rectangular look to it. But when I drew the shape, it looked cramped in that format, so I widened it into a square. What you see is a 10 inch square, but it still looks to me like a rectangle. I drew and redrew the curved lines, trying to get a balanced feel from an off-balanced shape, which I hope will give the work some movement and energy.




The intense colors are a scarlet red and cool yellow with some green added to make it close to chartreuse. I wanted a cool, rather than warm, yellow so that it would contrast more with the red.




And here is the beginning of the work on the linen backing. I left some of the ends of the wool strips uncut, so that you could see how they look during the process of hooking. I plan to hook the yellow background in a random pattern and the red shape in parallel lines, which I think will emphasize the thing-ness of the "vessel", floating on its ground.