The diverse and urbane culture of Princeton, NJ was my own childhood’s setting, a direct opposite of rural small farm life in the South. New York City was a frequent sojourn for family and school treks, my father commuted to the city as a film editor, my mother took art classes at the Art Students League. Our public schools immersed us in art, taking us children to the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The circular ramp at the Guggenheim remains my first and favorite museum experience; my parents took me there for a birthday treat, a year after it opened in 1959.

Yet North Carolina’s rough talking tabacca chawin’ neighbors, who drove up and down Red Bank Road on their tractors- and my grandparents who were cooking bacon, biscuits and fried apples for breakfast on a cast iron woodstove into the 1960′s – were as big an influence on my young development as was Princeton’s sophistication.

The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934. Thomas Hart Benton   Spencer Museum of Art, U. of Kansas.

The Wreck of the Ole ’97, 1943. Thomas Hart Benton Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN.

Benton showed compassion in his work for the underbelly of the nation; rolling hills peopled (always peopled) with folks just like my grandparents and their town locals lining the winding country roads. The romance of country living was a fantasy of city dwellers. The realities of the country – lonely boredom, violence, racism and if you were lucky, love – were Benton’s objectives. He succeeded in innovating a first truly American painting, what Henry Adams not so much rhapsodizes about in his 2010 book Tom and Jack, as tells his reader in plain language that any country hick can understand. Was Benton’s philosophy accepted in the art capital, then as now, New York? No, not for a minute. The idea in the 1930s that ruffians and down home carrying on could be suitable for a high art was out of the question.

Persephone, 1938-39. Thomas Hart Benton. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Benton’s own influences ranged from El Greco, Goya and Tintoretto to a brush with early Cubism. But his ideas and teachings focused on the tenets of Synchromism; what Stanton McDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell had rallied around in their early careers. Adams notes that no other writer connected Pollock with Synchromism, despite Benton’s influence.

Cosmic Synchrony (1913-1914) Morgan Russell – Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute.

As a professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University, and the foremost scholar on Benton, Adams knows his stuff. Andrew Wyeth noted that his book on Thomas Eakins, Eakins Revealed, was the ‘most extraordinary biography I have ever read on an artist’.

Adams says in his book ‘Tom and Jack’ - ‘My point is not that Pollock’s paintings were identical to those of Benton, but something just slightly more subtle and for that reason more difficult for most art historians to grasp: the notion that Benton’s form of composition, his pattern of artistic creativity, and his concept of the artistic self, provided the essential reference point for Pollock’s forward leaps…. Benton’s frameworks were his starting point…One could see that his splashings were not purely chaotic but determined by organizing principles.’

As an artist who has had difficulties in ‘seeing’ Pollock’s work as anything more than drips and relatively meaningless abstractions, this book jump-started the realization that he indeed was taking off from representation. His own personal symbolism, iconography and ‘borrowed’ appropriations from Benton and modern art became fodder for these wildly gestural pieces.

Untitled (1942-44) Jackson Pollock - National Galleries of Scotland.

Mural (1943) Jackson Pollock – University of Iowa Museum of Art.

In one of his last chapters on Pollock, Adams makes the observation that forgeries ‘generally look all right for a few minutes, but very quickly they become boring. We soon see that they are made up of repetitive gestures. They represent nothing of significance, and the gestures, while initially arresting, soon reveal themselves as superficial and tiresome. …Pollock’s drip paintings at their most basic underlying level are ghost-like Benton figure paintings, which are then pushed to even a higher level of generalization. Because they have this imagery and meaning, even though it is difficult to fully discern, they are not dull and repetitive but are filled with inner life.’

Tom Ball, a Cleveland filmmaker, produced a wonderful film clip of Adams talking about Benton and Pollock on his own fascinating blog.

The Jackson Pollock Code from Thomas Ball on Vimeo.

You can watch a former student and a friend of Benton’s talking about his work, in the PBS aired Burns’ 1988 film, here. In Kirk Varnedoe’s excellent 1999 book, ‘Jackson Pollock’, Pollock himself ascertains that he is a representative painter. But while he was aligned with the NY School of Abstract Expressionists, he fought any definite label except the avowal that he was the greatest living painter of the era. A PBS interview with Varnedoe can be found here.

This news particularly struck home as I leave my own half acre behind in a move back to the South, having enhanced this already loamy soil and grown bumper crops of strawberries, tomatoes, and asparagus for the past six years. The apple trees and blueberry bushes were going on their 5th year, finally producing well. It can take years to build good soil but it takes very little time to let it go fallow.

Founded in 1632, the Tuttle farm survived and stayed in the same family for almost 400 years. From the Tuttle website we read: The Tuttle Farm of Dover, New Hampshire, is the oldest continually operating family farm in the United States, having passed down through 11 generations from father to son since the 1630’s when John Tuttle arrived in the New World bearing a land grant from King Charles II.”

This was even before William Penn arrived near where I live now in the Brandywine Valley, to establish his own land grant from King Charley.

Klinkenborg reminds us that “Galileo was still publishing, and John Locke was born” in that year. “There were only 10,000 colonists in all of America” at the time. What he stresses though, is that soil is not depleted by these farmers, but built up over the generations. “Farms go out of business for many reasons, but few farms do merely because the soil has failed. That is the miracle of farming. If you care for the soil, it will last — and yield — nearly forever. America is such a young country that we have barely tested that. For most of our history, there has been new land to farm, and we still farm as though there always will be.”

Klinkenborg again: “It is too simple to say, as the Tuttles have, that the recession killed a farm that had survived for nearly 400 years. What killed it was the economic structure of food production. Each year it has become harder for family farms to compete with industrial scale agriculture — heavily subsidized by the government — underselling them at every turn. In a system committed to the health of farms and their integration with local communities, the result would have been different. In 1632, and for many years after, the Tuttle farm was a necessity. In 2010, it is suddenly superfluous, or so we like to pretend.”

The Tuttle Farm, like so many other ‘small farms’ today, is protected by a conservancy easement which will hopefully prevent any further development. But who will take over the business and will they still farm it? As I discovered with my own property in Atlanta, not every future tenant is interested in maintaining antique roses or the soil tilth necessary to grow lush produce. However, from my work with young farmers in this region, I’m hopeful that farms like the Tuttles will see new life in the hands of competent young women and men.

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.

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:

HiveDemoweb

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

3. QuercusSilver

4. PaulaArt

5. BlueTerracotta

6. JealousyDesign

7. IlluminatedPerfume

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?’