Laura's Art Blog, Exploring the Material World

Ladybugs!

Ladybug gathering 7/18/09

While it’s normal to find insects, including clusters of ladybugs, at the top of Green Mountain in Boulder, Colorado it’s NOT normal to find so many.

Ladybug Tree

This singular tree, just south of the summit marker, was covered from tip to toe when I hiked up to check them out last Saturday. Entomologists are citing rain as the responsible party for this so-abundant-it-seems-magical event.

Holding Ladybugs

Unexpected gifts like this make life seem wonderful.

Old Fashioned Rocketry, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

Do you watch NASA TV? My husband streams it in his office so I get to pick up bits and pieces whenever I stop by. The broadcasts are sweet and earnest, astronauts and crew doing important work with gratitude and a touch of old fashioned gallantry.

Superkitty, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

Superkitty is my alter ego. She’s like Hello Kitty but scruffier, older and over being cute.

Spring Blade, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

We’ve had an extraordinary spring and summer here in Boulder, Colorado. Lots and lots of rain! It’s mid-July and everything’s still green. The world is light, precise and easy. I don’t remember summer ever feeling this way.

It’s an honor and a pleasure to announce a suite of ten new encaustic paintings hanging in the lobby at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. The concurrent exhibit in the main part of the museum, Pure Pleasure, is excellent, by the way. Definitely worth checking out. Admittance is free on Farmer’s Market days.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary is another great summer read for artists. It tells the story of an unlikely friendship between Renee Michel, a 54 year old concierge who lives and works at a luxury Parisian apartment building, Paloma, the suicidal pre-teen intellectual who lives upstairs and their mutual fascination with the building’s new tenant, Kakuro Ozu, a Japanese film director.

It’s about the power of art to save lives, to make life bearable. I LOVED it, read it a few months ago and am still thinking about it today.

An excerpt:

My name is Renée. I am fifty-four years old. For twenty-seven years I have been the concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, a fine hôtel particulier with a courtyard and private gardens, divided into eight luxury apartments, all of which are inhabited, all of which are immense. I am a widow, I am short, ugly, and plump, I have bunions on my feet and, if I am to credit certain early mornings of selfinflicted disgust, the breath of a mammoth. I did not go to college, I have always been poor, discreet, and insignificant. I live alone with my cat, a big lazy tom who has no distinguishing features other than the fact that his paws smell bad when he is annoyed. Neither he nor I make any effort to take part in the social doings of our respective kindred species. Because I am rarely friendly — though always polite — I am not liked, but am

tolerated nonetheless…

The Sister Bee trailer is now available on YouTube. You’re warmly invited to share.

It’s been a long time coming, but Sister Bee finally has a new website all her own. You can check it out here. The site includes biographies of the Sister Bee beekeepers, information about the soundtrack and She Said, a retrospective blog about the making of Sister Bee including quotes and outtakes like these:

It’s wonderful to see… life!

- Mery Molenaar

I’m a beekeeper. Um hmm… The bees keep me.

– Marge McLellan

Some of the hardest lessons, the best lessons, have come from making dumb mistakes.

- Patricia Butler

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

- John Adams, 1780

The first time I read the above quote it charmed me. We know our founding fathers and mothers to be starchy advocates of industry and piety, not the arts. So the reference to painting, poetry and music as something children ought to have a right to study… well, I love it. But having just watched the HBO mini-series John Adams I’m seeing the quote differently. Actor Paul Giamatti delivered the line with a contemptuous edge, sitting at table in France during the American Revolution surrounded by sensual excess. Though I prefer my earnest reading of Adams’ words, I appreciate the complexity lent by Giamiatti, who played Adams as a smart and principled but neurotic man who was hard on his children. A deeply humanizing portrait that I loved.

Happy Independence Day, 2009.

“John Adams 1823–24″ by Gilbert Stuart, oil on canvas 30″ x 25″

Wow. This dinosaur skin fossil looks like honeycomb. I think it’s beautiful. You can click to see a larger image and read the story here.

The philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter, and is considered a form of physicalism. Fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions; therefore, matter is the only substance.

Pigeon egg with hand and clover