First Storm of the Season

I remember when I wrote this:  "I am going to post on my back deck until I have to type in mittens....It is Sunday, November 22.  Sunny, about 55 degrees at noon. " 

I woke up this morning to the wind howling in the enormous pines off my back deck and realized that with it getting down to 10 degrees tonight, I ought to take my patio chairs, table and umbrella in the house before the furniture blew away.  Til now, I kept smiling, thinking that I could sit on my lovely deck, talk to the pines, hear the birds, if even just a few more times til the cold really set in.  It is setting in.

It is good to experience the seasons, strong weather, and the realization that we are so much less than these forces.  The Gaia Theory addresses the interconnectedness of all things and all manner of current scientific theories continue to support and expand this.  Originally proposed by James Lovelock as the earth feedback hypothesis, it was named the Gaia Hypothesis after the Greek supreme goddess of Earth. The hypothesis is frequently described as viewing the Earth as a single organism. 

The Gaia theory was developed in the late 1960’s by Dr. James Lovelock, a British Scientist after he worked with NASA on research of life on Mars. Though no life on Mars was determined, Lovelock's research led to profound new insights about life on Earth. His theory was supported by Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts. Since their early work in the 1970's, many of the mechanisms by which Earth self-regulates have been identified. For example,  cloud formation over the open ocean is almost entirely a function of the metabolism of oceanic algae that emit a large sulfur molecule (as a waste gas) that becomes the condensation nuclei for raindrops. Previously, it was thought that cloud formation over the ocean was a purely chemical/physical phenomenon. The cloud formation not only helps regulate Earth’s temperature, it is an important mechanism by which sulfur is returned to terrestrial ecosystems.

As above, so below.

Today I featured a detail of My Ostraka:  History II:  xix, a 52 x 90 inch painting on canvas.  I had been experimenting with pigment mixtures, especially with intermixing silver acrylics with other pigments.  I let these experimental mixtures on my paining dry overnight, and as different pigments settled, beautiful star-shapes naturally occurred, better than if I had tried to paint them illusionistically.  

Good-bye to November, good bye to autumn

Our church had our annual poetry service, always right after Thanksgiving, fitting.

Jennie King gave me permission to post her poem:

Daisies in October

At the end of October, Halloween,
One defiant bloom hangs on,
Persisting against the autumn chill,
   Giving new meaning to fresh as a daisy.
   Intrepid, heroic or florally crazy.

The second of November we awake,
To find it shrunken against the frost
Dark and limp in the morning sun'
   Resurrecting its vigor that afternoon
   We still know that it will wither soon.

Valiantly upright in the autumn wind
Just outside the kitchen window
It succumbs finally one week later,
   Surrounded by buds still tightly folded
   Their future gone before it was molded.

The hummingbirds have come and gone
But a few of the iris are reblooming
Giving us unexpected color and grace.
   Never mind the turkey and the squash
   Its the promise of spring that we must watch.

Thanksgiving Preparations-a week of thoughts

My Ostraka:  History IV:  v  22 x 30" 

watercolor, gouache and sumi ink on paper

This painting has been viewed in a number of exhibitions 

in the last five years throughout the midwest,

including a solo show the Director of the 

Contemporary Art Center of Peoria, William Butler, 

invited me to have.

Sunday, November 22.  I am going to post on my back deck until I have to type in mittens………

Sunny, about 55 degrees at noon.  Being an optimist, I have not put away my deck furniture nor deck umbrella.  I was pleased to see the grocery carts filling up at Kroger last night, families in anticipation of lots of cooking for Thanksgiving.  Hands down, my favorite holiday.

One of my colleagues has done a lot with food as the subject of her work and pointed out that Da Vinci chose to depict a famous meal in one of his masterpieces, ‘The Last Supper” though the associations are primarily poignant and religious, yet they center around sustenance and the metaphor for spiritual sustenance is clear.

Saturday, November 28.  This year, Thanksgiving fell on the 26th, which was the date in 1922 that British archeologist Howard Carter discovered Pharaoh Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb.  With the radio on while I was rolling out pie crust for my favorite pumpkin pie Thursday morning, there was Garrison Keillor airing his daily Writer's Almanac.  Keillor features brief biographies associated with writers and other notable persons of history and he covers notable events that occurred on that day. Keillor discussed at length the details of Howard Carter's stunning discovery 87 years ago.  It started with a young Egyptian worker discovering a step in the sand and furious digging began that led downward to the hidden chamber.

Carter knew he had come to an unrobbed tomb once all the sand and dirt was removed from the staircase leading down to the chamber because the clay seal on the door handle to the chamber was undamaged. His heart must have leapt when he saw the cartouche (royal seal) of Tut-ankh-Amen pressed into the clay.

I have used this black and white photographic reference of the door and the clay seal with Tut-ankh-Amen's cartouche in numerous paintings, both watercolors and paintings on canvas.  Of course, the door handle and seal no longer exists except in photographs because the seal had to be broken by Carter to enter the unimaginably lush tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen.  It is an artifact of memory every Egyptologist recognizes.  In the painting above, I featured Tut-ankh-Amen's door, door handle  and clay seal in a delicate red outline.  Behind it is the sculpted face of a royal queen, Tiy or Nefertiti that is called the 'Royal Fragment,' in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York.  I saw this beautiful sculpture in a seminal exhibit "Pharaohs of the Sun"at the Art Institute of Chicago. I am thankful Carter found Tut-ankh-Amen's tomb 87 years ago - November 22, 1922.

My Ostraka: History II: xxv

 Autumn and Faculty Biennial ExhibitionWe have had such a rainy spring, summer and autumn here in Illinois, I marvel that we all haven’t molded and turned various shades of green.  For the moment, I have given up my back deck, the ladybugs and oak leaves and moved to my living room and fireplace.  I traded a cord of good firewood for a landscape watercolor last year and have tried fiercly to make a dent in the pile of wood my good friend Carl has provided. So it is wonderful to type to the crackling of the fire, a nice compliment to the rustling of leaves on my back deck where I usually write.

We had our Faculty Biennial exhibition open Tuesday night and the exhibit runs through January 31, 2010.  There sure is plenty of time to see the show.  I am showing one of my major paintings from a series I started in Vermont at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003.  What a superb place.  The paintings I did there are seminal to my current artisitic concerns.  I made my first painting using a rare and beautiful Egyptian sculpture referred to as the ‘Royal Fragment” while I was in Vermont and I showed this first painting in the 2003 Faculty Biennial exhibit. I am showing a new one featuring the archaic landscape I have used for this series along with a mirage – Marilyn Monroe – in the desert as she faces (cajoles?) the Sphinx of Giza.  I love the quote from Grace Hardigan, who sadly recently died, “The past and present is part of a continous cloth.”

Jane Hammond:  "Fallen"

http://www.janehammondartist.com/articles/art_in_america_fallen.pdf

This is perhaps the most powerful metaphorical use of fallen leaves that has ever been used in art.  Jane Hammond started “Fallen” in 2004 and this ongoing installation of handmade paper leaves represents U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.  Hammond gathered leaves herself to use as templates for these digitally-printed paper leaves. Each leaf represents a fallen soldier with the name of the soldier carefully handwritten on the back.  This memorial/installation began with 1,511 leaves and now has nearly 4,000.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has purchased this powerful work and various funds have been made available so that the artist can continue it.  Conceptually, this is brilliant – it grows as the sad facts that govern the piece change.  Aesthetically, it is visually compelling, each leaf a stand-in for an American who has died in Iraq.

The Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin says: “Having initially seen Fallen in its earliest gallery exhibition, it is something of a bittersweet honor to present this work—now three times its original configuration—at the Wexner Center.  No matter what one’s political or military perspective, one can’t help but be touched and overwhelmed by the poetry of Hammond’s gesture to mark each individual life lost with a unique, meticulously crafted reflection of nature.”  The work was shown in its expanded version in 2008.  It was last seen at the Museum of Contepmorary Art-San Diego in 2009 and when I find out where it will go next, I will report on this stunning and poignant evolving work.  When the war in Iraq ends the piece can come to rest.

Jane Hammond is represented by Represented by John Berggreuen Gallery, San Fransisco, Galerie Lelong in New York, Bryon Cohen Gallery of Kansas City, Missouri, Lemberg Gallery in Ferndale, Micnigan and Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm.  Numerous print publishers publish her prints.