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I’m a sucker for color charts. Mervi Hjelmroos-Koski has written a nice post about pollen color (which includes a link to this peach of a chart) for the botanical illustration blog she writes for the Denver Botanic Gardens.

Thank you, Mervi!

From “The Pollen Loads of the Honeybee” by Dorothy Hodges

Gravid, 10″ x 8,” encaustic, ink and gold leaf on panel

Grav•id
adjective technical
pregnant; carrying eggs or young.
• figurative full of meaning or a specified quality : the scene is gravid with unease.
ORIGIN late 16th Cent. from Latin
gravidus ‘laden, pregnant,’ from gravis ‘heavy.’

Art Opening and Hors D’oeuvres
Thursday, August 13th, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Wright Kingdom Real Estate
4875 Pearl East Circle, Suite 100, Boulder
Hosted by Open Studios and Wright Kingdom

Two Moons, 10″ x 8,” encaustic and ink on panel

Two Moons is one of ten new encaustic paintings on display this month at Wright Kingdom in Boulder, Colorado. I made the series using beeswax to create a skin-like sheen over rigorously cropped drawings of leaves, stems, pods, flowers and other pert, green things. The opening is tonight. You’re warmly invited to attend.

Art Opening and Hors D’oeuvres
Thursday, August 13th, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Wright Kingdom Real Estate
4875 Pearl East Circle, Suite 100, Boulder
Hosted by Open Studios and Wright Kingdom

The other exhibiting artists are Annette Coleman, Theresa Haberkorn, Donna Mayo, and Joan Wolfer. All wonderful.

There’s a brilliant happiness essay in today’s NYTimes, Oh, Sting, Where Is Thy Death? by Richard Conniff. It’s about the Justin O. Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Entomologist Schmidt, who’s worked with all kinds of stinging insects, expertly rates their stings by level and variety of pain.

According the the Schmidt scale, a honeybee sting is “like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin,” while a yellowjacket’s is “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”

The Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the Loveland Museum is gorgeous.

Wayne Thiebaud, “Bakery Case,” 1996

I went for the cakes (there’s something deliciously subversive about all that sugar) but ended up falling for his newer work – vertiginous, playful landscapes – a few of which are on view in this nice slideshow by the Sacramento Bee.

Of course, Thiebaud’s paintings are right and wonderful as they are, but I can’t help wondering how even MORE wonderful they’d be if they’d been rendered in wax. Thiebaud has a fantastic brushstroke that’s both indulgent and restrained. it’s hard to see in reproduction, but he makes these careful linear strokes and then mars them with goopy flourishes. It’s a sensual technique that seems ready-made for encaustic.

I’m a sucker for museum gift stores and picked up this sweet little book Counting with Wayne Thiebaud when I was there. Its cropped reproductions show Thiebaud’s brushstrokes fairly well.

It’s nice to know that, at 88, some people still paint like rock stars.

There’s a great article about collapsing bee colonies at Salon.