Have you heard of the Singularity? It’s this quasi-religious philosophy, or prophecy that’s emerging from the technology community. Adherents say we’re getting close to the time when it will be possible for humans to upload their thought patterns to computers thereby achieving immortality.
Painter Karen Conduff and I are meeting today to talk about our July show at Rembrandt Yard in Boulder. We both love painting from life. The role of technology in our lives is part of what we’re talking about these days.
Sister Bee is screening in Leavenworth, Washington on Friday, March 25th as part of the Wax & Wane Encaustic Retreat (which looks downright restorative, by the way).
Here are some images I meant to post a while back.
Nine paintings at BMoCA
A couple of years ago the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art underwent a massive facelift including a re-furb of its museum store. Boulder artist, and friend of mine, Sarah Kinn merchandised the space turning the formerly dusty, dog-eared shop into a destination shopping spot for local art and craft.
Paintings and books
Though not a conventional gallery, it was a pleasure to hang some of my early 5″ x 4″ botanicals there. A changeover in management last year brought new faces and ideas to BMoCA. (It’s an ever-changing place.) My friend is no longer there. Nor are my paintings. But for one short season it looked and felt like this.
These candles, though not made of beeswax, are REALLY FUN TO WATCH.
Watching this process reminds of the best and worst thing about working with wax. One: it’s bliss. And two: it’s bliss. Sometimes to the point of distraction.
In A Disaster in the Making Dr. Henk Tennekes connects systemic pesticides to declining bird populations in the Netherlands. According to Tennekes, birds are starving in areas where insects have been wiped out by clothianidin. Apparently, there just aren’t enough ground beetles around for baby birds to eat.
Weighing in at seventy-two pages, A Disaster in the Making is more article than book. It’s a sad and moving read due largely to the inclusion of a series of dreamy, watery illustrations by Ami-Bernard Zillweger. Recommended for anyone in evidence gathering mode trying to make sense of the whole EPA/clothianidin/honeybee connection.
You’re warmly invited to check out The Red Show at Art & Soul in Boulder.
Seven new encaustic paintings on the north wall at Art & Soul.
If you’re the kind of person who sometimes feels gallery-shy, this is a great chance to get out and enjoy some new paintings, all of them red, in a friendly, easygoing space. The Red Show was curated by artist Sarah Kinn who has assembled a group of surface-conscious, crimson, magenta and scarlet red paintings including works by Betsy Gill, Robert Spellman, Pattie Lee Becker,Evan Colbert and more. It’s a joy to participate.
(The biggie on the right is “This Bird Has Flown,” a 30″ x 30″ painting named after that beguiling and cryptic Beatles’ song also known as “Norwegian Wood.”)
“I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn’t it good Norwegian wood? . . .”
The Red Show
Art & Soul
1615 Pearl Street, Boulder, Colorado
Through February 28th, 2011
I pulled the title of this post from Insectopedia, a book of A to Z insect essays by anthropologist Hugh Raffles. Chapter Three is about artist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger who became a controversial figure in the late 1980′s when she started documenting radiation damaged leaf bugs in a series of feverishly made paintings of specimens she collected from around nuclear reactors.
Harlequin Wanze Nähe Three Mile Island by Cornelia Hesse-Honegger
Here is Hugh Raffles quoting Cornelia Hesse-Honegger:
Painting, she insists – reaching back to the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner; to her inspiration, the painter-explorer Maria Sibylla Merian; to the autodidact fossil hunter Mary Anning – is research, not merely documentation. It is a way of achieving multidimensional knowledge of the subject, a way to see it in its biological, phenomenonological and political fullness. Not simply a way to express what we see, painting is a discipline through which we learn to see – to see, that is, in the broad sense of gaining insight. Through painting she is able to map anomaly, to recognize patterns and relationships across her archive of collecting sites, to realize that she has encounterd this deformity somewhere before…
“It’s a discovery of a new world,” she says. “The more I look, the more I dive into this world, the more I can connect.” If only life would allow her to spend six months painting just one leaf bug. If only… “I would like to go deep, deep, deep, deep …”
I love this reminder of how engaging and deep the material world feels when you’re painting.
If you’re a culturally oriented person who likes scientific things, you might just love Insectopedia. Some of Raffles’ essays are poetic. Others have a more descriptive, informational bent. All explore areas where human perception interacts in interesting ways with the vast and largely invisible world of insects.
I have a problem with the term “colony collapse disorder” because the word “disorder” implies sickness or disease. What if healthy bees are being made weak due to exposure to chemical pesticides? Does the word “disorder” contain that possibility? Or does it keep us hunting for something wrong, diseased or inadequate within the body of the bee?
Those of you who check in from time to time may have noticed I don’t often write about the threat to honeybees known as colony collapse “disorder.” There are a couple of reasons. One: this is an art blog so I try steer clear of technical beekeeping stuff. Two (and this is the main thing): it’s a complex topic fraught with confusion, even for beekeepers and most of the big news stories that have emerged in last year have seemed just off target enough for me not to want to pass them on to you. Like when the NYTimes published Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery I didn’t post about it even though it seemed it could be definitive. In a nutshell, it tells the story of how scientist Jerry Bromenschenk documented a correlation between a fungus, a virus and collapsing bee colonies. As you can imagine, people were excited and relieved to learn that the mystery of the dying bees had finally been solved! The story burned up the blogosphere. Unfortunately for Bromenshenk (the victim of a rashly written headline if there ever was one) it fractured under scrutiny. Money magazine rebutted with What a Scientist Didn’t Tell the New York Times about His Study on Bee Deaths which cast a shadow on Bromenshenk’s work by revealing his close ties to Bayer CropScience, the manufacturer of a pesticide highly toxic to honeybees.
Interestingly, while the poorly reported Bromenschenk story and other tidbits probing the bee mysteries have hit big, a parallel story, a more human story, and in my view, a more truthful story with darker implications is struggling to rise up. In December I pointed you toward a press release about a newly uncovered EPA memo that disclosed the deeply flawed research behind the approval of clothianidin. (Clothianidin, a.k.a. Poncho, is one of several new pesticides that a growing number of beekepers suspect are linked to colony collapse.) In a surprising move, a group of commercial beekeepers followed up on the disclosure by asking the EPA to take clothianidin off the market pending new research. This represents a big shift in strategy by the community of commercial beekeepers who, for the most part, have taken a cautious approach to colony collapse – first looking inward at beekeeping practices (National Honeybee Advisory Board member David Hackenberg has wondered out loud, “Am I a bad beekeeper?”) – and then beseeching the scientific community for leadership and answers. This is the first time a national beekeeping organization has stepped up to say what many of us have speculated privately; that the new pesticides are suspect; that they were rushed onto the market without proper testing; and that the science that led to their approval is flawed.
My friend Rebekah West made this beautiful thing. (She’s on an artist’s retreat in Cabris, France.) It’s a kaleidoscopic vision of a harpist’s hands “playing the song you’re hearing.”
