My beautiful gardens, the last apple tree and twilights drilled by cicadas and frogs.
July steam that doesn’t end at dusk. Chiggers plague, or is it poison ivied ankles?
Another journey, leavings turn melancholy. Places change, memories shift, grasses grow wilder.
Paintings of shadow and light move on. And the black cat is nowhere to be seen.
New paintings from my garden series. 99 to 102 degrees this week. Today, a mere 88 and the first time I could stand to be out on the sun porch and paint. Monarda (scarlet bee balm) with trumpet daylilies, and a huge Mullein to rival the stalky succulents and Echium in Golden Gate Park. The radicchio is bolting, offering up tiny blue flowers to the bees.
Monarda. Acrylic on canvas panel, 12″x9″ 2010
Mullein. Acrylic on canvas panel 16″x14″ 2010.
Bee up Image ©RoxanaVilla
Bees need protection. You may be aware of Colony Collapse Disorder, but you may not know that scientists haven’t yet figured out what’s causing it. I watched a PBS program last week about the bee population having been completely decimated in some parts of China, from pollution and chemical exposure; they are now spending exorbitant amounts of money to hand pollinate fruit trees. We should learn from their mistakes! The video called ‘Silence of the Bees’, tells the tale of the collapse in different regions of the world.
To help offer exposure to the issue, Roxana of Illuminated Perfume from the Artisan Gallery Team on Etsy, launched a “Bee Up” blog chain in which many members are participating by posting about honey bees on their personal blogs. You can find the full list here. Roxana was also featured in an article on Etsy’s blog about Holistic Beekeeping.
During my stint last season as a Coordinator for Maysie’s Conservation Center SAITA program, an internship here in southeastern PA for aspiring farmers, I wrote about a honey bee production workshop on the farm’s blog, which you can read here. And I’ve included a video excerpt below.
Small farmers aren’t stressing their bees by shuttling them back and forth to distant pollination farms, and are using less pesticides than mono-cropped industrial farms. Scientists now suspect pesticides as another cause of colony collapse.
So please, don’t use pesticides outdoors when bees are active. If you must use them in your yard, wait until after dusk when the bees have gone back to their hives. In fact, there are plenty of other beneficial insects highly sensitive to pesticides and chemicals, so it’s a good reason to use integrated pest management and restrict your use of pesticides altogether.
You can find more information from this wonderful workshop given by the scintillating Mike McGrath of NPR’s ‘You Bet Your Garden‘, about helpful insects and creatures in my post here.
To encourage bees in your yard, everyone can easily plant flowers or shrubs that bees love, even in a small apartment rooftop garden. Lavender, Monarda (bee balm is the common name) and Buddleia, (butterfly bush) are just three easy to grow plants that bees can’t resist.
Trey Flemming at Two Gander Farms in Oley, PA began the workshop by showing us a cutaway of a hive, with the brood’s nest on the bottom, pollen in the middle, with honey situated at the top. 80% of the bees are sexually inactive female workers, 10-20% are the male drones. While there is only one queen and she never leaves the nest, the bees function as one entity, they’ll share food and pheromones. There can be from 30,000 to 50,000 bees in one colony, with just one queen. Trey uses the standard moveable frame Langstroth hive, invented by Philadelphia native, Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth, in 1851.
View movie of hive breakdown below:
Try to find local raw honey to help boost your own immune system from allergies to plants like ragweed. Honey has healthful properties that scientists are still analyzing today.
Some photos of the Artisan Gallery Teams’ bee inspired creations:
1. SewnNatural
2. Betsy Bensen
4. PaulaArt
8. Aroluna
Finally, please review yesterday’s post from Irene at Aroluna and don’t forget to check tomorrow’s post by Marta, you can view it here.
Save the bees and keep our fruits and vegetables pollinated!
Selling my paintings online has offered exposure to a variety of artists, artisans and designers who are using the web as a similar tool. Two of those acquaintances are interior designers; Caitlin Creer of Salt Lake City, and Victoria Smith of San Francisco. I met Victoria through Etsy and Caitlin had posted about my work – I found her by chance last week, from a search on my work.
Both have blogs that focus on the challenges and joys of coordinating a home or space, and it’s great fun to review them for inspiration.
Caitlin Creer’s background is in art history and her keen eye for the elegance of chiaroscuro is seen in her choices of dark gray and pale whites. Her work is spare, yet relies on strong color. I’m taking a cue from what she did with her house to think about a remodel once I return to my own circa 1940 Atlanta bungalow. Some of her work is showcased below.
her house before a freshener of paint and new roof:
After:
these were her designs for a charming outdoor wedding:
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Victoria Smith is a San Francisco based ‘design junkie’, photographer and writer who also has a couple of shops on Etsy. A journalism major with an advanced arts degree in interior design, Smith’s blog SFGirlbybay, is so successful that guest bloggers are a regular feature. Arranged by category helps make it a bit less daunting to browse. She offers new product reviews, shopping tips and best of all, great eclectic choices for her readers. A few excerpts below.
photo display by guest post: Hindsvik.
lace fences – who knew? lace fence via jodeska.
vintage tea kettles from a guest post by Cathrineholm.
Bed from london with love.
An architect’s ’shack’ in West Virginia, via cubeme.
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Now all I need is someone to blog about a spiffy and cheap vehicle that will carry both my large paintings to galleries, and manure for my next garden. When it rains…. I’d known that Toyota had their recall for rusted out pickup frames going on, I just didn’t think my own ‘97 perfectly fine running Tacoma would suddenly not pass inspection. So much for the mechanics I was using the past couple of years and no matter that I asked about frame rust. Apparently they didn’t try the finger pushed through metal test.
Yep, it’s about like this. I’m now shopping for a late model used car. I like these zippy things.
Hommage Aux Pommes. Acrylic on canvas panel, 14″x16″ 2010.
Yesterday afternoon my neighborhood came through a freak storm of high winds and heavy rain, but despite not losing power, or having a tree fall on the house or car as some in the area suffered, I lost one of my beloved apple trees. This morning I found the 4 yr old semi-dwarf Liberty thrown to the side border, its trunk snapped clean at grass level and apples scattered all over the area where it once grew.
I’m sad, because this is the first season that I’d sprayed both trees with fungicide and they were both producing heavily and seemingly finally healthy; free of most cedar rust and scab that have plagued them for their young lives.
Ali had come out for a couple of days to help with yard work. This is the way the tree looked before his visit – it’s directly behind him. He’s eyeing a tall mullein (verbascum) ready to burst into bloom.
I guess now I’ll be making an apple pie or crisp, there’s not much else to do with green apples. Amazingly the Dutchess tree survived unscathed. This is probably its last year to fruit since it now has no pollinating helper.
On a more upbeat note, the yard is finally mulched with Ali’s help! All is neat and tidy instead of wild and ungroomed. Finally, a cleared border. The neighbors should be so happy now….
Thanks Ali! He’s wearing a hat from Angkor, Cambodia and an old St. Joe Valley Greens T-shirt whose logo I designed. After a few harrowing detours around downed trees and missed trains, he’s finally back in the city safe and sound.
June Gardens. Acrylic on canvas panel, 9″ x 12″ 2010.
The painting was inspired by the riot of color in my gardens. Daylilies, roses, peonies and a wonderful dusky green mullein (verbascum) plant just beginning to bloom.
Tropic of Capricorn. Acrylic on canvas panel, 9″ x 12″ 2010.
This painting is both an homage to Henry Miller’s book of the same title, and to summer. The long, hot summer.
I haven’t been able to find many glowing reviews of this 1964 film and it seems to be misunderstood on almost every level. Most reviewers portray the director, Arthur Penn, as having failed at his task of creating a coherent narrative and Warren Beatty as being ‘energetic’ but miscast as the lead. As one of the few supportive mainstream critics, Judith Crist loved the film, calling it ‘a brilliant original screen work’. I felt the same way when I watched it earlier this evening on Crackle.
Penn offers a multi-layered work of art that incorporates new wave and experimental film techniques new at the time, such as layered clips and double exposures. He adds an iconic beckoning character who keeps popping up during Mickey’s darkest moments; a Japanese performance artist who uses a horse and wagon to drive his sculpture around the city. This is fairly transparent symbolism – the artist as grinning clown who seems to live only for his art – but the scenes still serve as a bridge to the lead character’s final revelation.
The plot lays bare neurosis and paranoia; the general state of the country coming out of the McCarthy era and the communist ‘menace’, and heading into the Viet Nam war. Penn admits in one interview that he wanted to capitalize on the original play’s exposé of the era’s ‘timidity’ and ’sense of guilt and a sort of silence and evasion’. In another interview he denounces the fear of communism as nonsense, saying that the American people knew better. In other words, it was obvious propaganda from a government using scare tactics to control its populace. His Mickey was running ‘from allowing other people to have possession of you.’
Everett Collection
The jazz score by Eddie Sauter and Stan Getz’s sax improvisations plays to a voiceless fight scene in much the same way that Penn would use an excruciatingly slow shutter speed three years later for Bonnie and Clyde’s final denouement. The contrast of the beauty of music and motion to violence is what makes his films’ violence seem so completely detached from reality. In much the same way that audiences detach and become numb when they watch any violence at all.
Penn must have been impressed by the surrealism and wide shots of Antonioni’s Red Desert from a year earlier. His close-ups of cars being crushed (often with bodies still inside) and girders framing Beatty are reminiscent of that film’s wide angles of a nuclear power plant and the existential bleakness of its own industrial landscape. Robert Bresson’s cinematographer, Ghislain Cloquet, was hired to shoot Mickey One in black and white, because as Penn said, it was essentially ‘a colorless’ film.
Panned by Bosley Crowther in a 1965 NY Times review, the film should have garnered more acclaim, not least for Penn’s resistance to a Hollywood pat theme of good triumphing over evil. What we’re given is compromise, that ubiquitous and not very dramatic solution to a human dilemma. The mob has either given up chasing Mickey or they’re willing to let him go through life as a mediocre talent. Apparently he’s no longer important enough to be wiped out. And Beatty’s character has given up running. He chooses to live one last evening (a small courage) on stage rather than to keep living in fear. His last words on screen are ‘or is that the word?’
From June 7 through July several of my paintings will be shown in the Hudson Valley Gallery in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. This is a ‘window’ gallery, one of the many alternative spaces for exhibiting work that have cropped up in the city. The circa 1920 building has been owned since the 1980’s by Larry Silver, a gallerist who lives upstate outside Woodstock. A few years ago, Silver decided to turn his love of art into support for emerging artists and he began showing select works in the large window of the building’s bottom floor.
Hudson Valley Gallery, 132 Broadway at Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211. Information: 845.687.6146
Video by NY arts blogger Loren Munk.
Works shown:
Green Tomatoes. Oil on canvas, 50″x40″ 2003
Tiber Bridge. Oil on canvas, 24″x20″ 2007.
Pines. Oil on canvas panel, 18″x14″ 2008.
Spring. Oil on canvas panel 8″x10″ 2008.
The gallery is across the street from the renowned Williamsburg Art & Historical Center (WAH), a multicultural art center in the epicenter of the neighborhood’s artists’ community. Larry introduced me to the center’s founder, Yuko Nii, who just happened to be in the historic 1876 Landmark building, setting up an exhibit. Hers is an astounding story of dedication to the arts. She bought the building in the mid 90’s and established the foundation soon afterwards.
Currently on view; the Brooklyn College MFA Thesis show.
An excerpt from the center’s history;
In the late 1980s a trickle of artists began to flow into Williamsburg Brooklyn on the north side around Bedford Avenue because of cheap rents and the convenience of the subway to Manhattan just one stop away by L train. Artists began to open their studios as small pocket sized galleries and this began to attract weekend visitors, a few collectors, and even some museum and gallery folk from Manhattan. Little by little the small art colony grew. Meanwhile, the south side remained an underdeveloped area and was considered to be a “dangerous” place. Then in late 1996 the artist Yuko Nii bought the Kings County Savings Bank Building on the south side at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge on Broadway at the corner of Bedford Avenue, and founded the not-for-profit Williamsburg Art & Historical Center (WAH Center), based upon her Bridge Concept. That concept envisions a multifaceted, multicultural art center whose mission is to coalesce the diverse artistic communities, and create a bridge between local, national and international artists, emerging as well as established artists of all disciplines. Thus through the international language of art we come to understand each other to create a more peaceful and integrated world. The WAH Center is truly a force for peace and understanding and it’s concept is incorporated in its acronym: “WAH” in Japanese means “peace” or “harmony” or “unity.” Nii also wanted to preserve the WAH Center’s building, a French Second Empire masterpiece, which is on the National Register of Historic Places and a New York City Landmark, and make it a functional part of the cultural community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.
A couple of new paintings inspired by all the songbirds who love my backyard. The returning cardinal was flashing his red in my apple tree this afternoon.
Birdsong. Acrylic on canvas panel, 16″x20″ 2010.
Strawberries keep coming despite the weediness of the beds. Like Ruth Stout, I have no intention of wasting time weeding while they keep producing like crazy. I already have enough to fill a shelf in the fridge.
this one is called Waterfall. Acrylic on canvas panel, 12″x9″ 2010.
…this is just the beginning. I’ve read that it’s impossible to eat too many strawberries.
these are the late strawberries and luckily the two beds are staggered, or I’d be out there picking non-stop.
the white peony always blooms first. Ants love it.
