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What happens when you put a scanning electron microscope in the hands of an artist?

This new book…

Bee by Rose-Lynn Fisher

Bee by Rose-Lynn Fisher presents sixty photos of magnified honeybee anatomy.

Antenna joint, 400x, Rose-Lynn Fisher

For beekeepers thirsting for a better understanding of honeybee anatomy this book is indispensable. For artists, it’s inspirational.

Antenna pollen, 1100x, Rose-Lynn Fisher

Available at Princeton Architectural Press.

This is the third and final installment of my interview with author Janelle Brown.

Laura Tyler – I am curious about Aoki, the international art star and ex-girlfriend in This Is Where We Live. She is something of an extreme character. She’s flamboyant, charismatic and uncompromising. I experienced her as an archetype. Can you share with my readers something about her making?

Janelle Brown – I conceived Aoki as an amalgamation of many people I had met over the years, in assorted creative industries: Flamboyant narcissists tend to float through the art and music worlds, people who use their art as an excuse for bad behavior (whether sex or drugs or cruelty to others). They are wonderful characters to study, very compelling, even when they’re maddening or cruel. And their success just enables that kind of behavior.

I also wanted to draw a character who would stand in contrast to Jeremy and Claudia, someone who had managed to “make it big” as an artist without making any apparent compromises, and someone who justified her narcissism and selfishness as being true to her art. Someone who doesn’t know the meaning of compromise. Frankly, I was fascinated by Aoki; She is possibly the most awful of all the characters I’ve written, in her destructive power, but also one of the purest. She knows exactly what she is doing to the people around her and yet feels no guilt or regret about her behavior.

LT – Have you been following the “happiness” story that’s unfolded on the culture blogs these past few weeks? I found myself wondering… What would Aoki think?

JB – Yes, I’ve been following the “happiness” debate – it’s very interesting reading. I don’t think Aoki would think much of any self-sacrificing parenthood at all. Then again, she could afford a live-in nanny.

Laura Tyler – Characters in both of your novels seem to struggle with life choices that pit the desire for a conventional family life against artistic or creative aspirations. Can you explain what interests you about this theme and why you think it’s a compelling subject for contemporary readers?

Janelle Brown – Well, being a novelist who is married to a filmmaker, this is definitely a subject that hits close to home. But it’s also, I think, one of the conundrums that’s been raised by the promise of New Economy: The rise of the Internet promised to give voice to all the artistic urges has ever had, and for a while during the boom years it seemed far likelier that you could make a living off your creative aspirations than it had in years. Anyone who ever imagined themselves a writer or artist or photographer or singer thought they had a shot at finding an audience, and making some money pursuing those “talents.” And then all that was yanked away again by the recession.

In general, I’m fascinated by the idealism of artistry, and the pursuit of the dream of a “creative” life, and how that rubs up against the reality of our shifting economy, plus the need for stability that family life triggers. I’ve seen so many people struggle with this – spending their twenties and early thirties trying to be artists or writers or musicians or filmmakers, only to hit a certain point in their lives when the reality of marriage and kids and mortgages starts to grind away at those dreams. How long do you keep trying? Do you ever give up? Or is the creative life a never-ending negotiation of time versus income versus artistic fulfillment?

Author photo, Janelle Brown

This is the first installment of a three-part interview with bestselling novelist Janelle Brown on the role of art and painting in her two novels, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and This Is Where We Live. Parts two and three will follow shortly.

Laura Tyler – When we first meet Janice, protagonist of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, we find her at home listening to the news of her venture capitalist husband’s IPO on the radio. She appears on the cusp of becoming a very wealthy woman. Nothing seems out of reach. She covets a painting, specifically a van Gogh, and “shivers at the thought of what it might let into their home.” Why does Janice covet a painting? And why van Gogh as opposed to any of the other canonized painters?

Janelle Brown – Janice grew up poor in the Midwest, and found herself accidentally pregnant before she graduated from college. As a result of that, she had to let go of her vague fantasies about living a semi-bohemian life Europe in order to be a stay at home mom. Nearly thirty years later, she still imagines herself to be an artistically-minded person — despite knowing very little about art (which is why she fantasizes about a van Gogh as opposed to a more obscure artist) — and longs for the stamp of pedigree that being a patron of the arts would give her. Hence, her fantasies about owning art as opposed to real estate.

As for van Gogh – there is something wild and free about his paintings (he was, after all, somewhat bats) and I liked how this is symbolic of both her longing for escape from her current life, as well as her simultaneous terror about leaving that life altogether. She’s ambivalent about her world, but is always very controlled about all things, and van Gogh represents both the polar opposite of that control and the worst case scenario of when control is lost: You end up slicing your ear off and sending it to a prostitute. You don’t get any further from Janice’s world than that.

Looking for a summer art read? I found one!

This is Where We Live is a smart and gently snarky novel about a young-ish couple trying to hang onto their deflating Los Angeles home on the down side of the real estate bubble. He’s a “famous on college radio” musician with creative block and an art star ex-girlfriend. She’s a Sundance filmmaker whose tender first film tanks at the box office in its first week of release.

Janelle Brown writes about hot-button cultural issues from an upper middle class point of view. Her characters are members of California’s creative class. They’re filmmakers, musicians, writers, artists, investors and their spouses who struggle to balance the comforts and demands of family life with creative aspirations.

I devoured This Is Where We Live in a single day and followed that up with an equally ravenous read of Brown’s first novel, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. Brown writes beautifully with clarity, humor and compassion. Both her novels are compulsive reads with artistic themes that ride the fine line between popular and literary fiction.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Brown about the role of art and painting in her novels by email. She shared some juicy thoughts. I look forward to sharing them with you later this week.

In the meantime, read more at DoubleX.

One of my students brought a brand-spanking-new copy of Patricia Seggebrush’s Encaustic Workshop to class. Though I didn’t get a chance to read the whole thing, I DID page through and can tell you it’s a juicy one. It’s a technique book chock full of lush, inspiring how-to pics. We passed it around the class (lots of oohs and ahs) and everyone seemed to find something take inspiration from.

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…

Oh, man. I inhaled The American Painter Emma Dial this weekend. It’s a fantastic novel about a NYC artist’s assistant who paints the paintings dictated by her famous boss. It’s the best, most real depiction of painting I’ve had the pleasure of reading or seeing on film and it’s deliciously quotable, too…

There is nothing sexier than a well-drawn line…

I was trying to build my world around being a painter. I worked tirelessly, fantasizing about the picture I was making. all the pictures to come, and what it would be like when they took on another life out in the world, apart from me. I never doubted that painting was my future…

When we got stir-crazy we went to the bar. Irene and I spoke contemptuously of some of the bar’s denizens who wore painter’s clothes and had not made a thing in years, or the ones who hid out in graduate school rather than face the difficulty of earning a living and figuring out hot to build a life as an artist. There used to be loads of people like us around, young and old, artists working without much thought for the business side or the academic side… But I did not know them anymore and I felt, thinking of Michael’s studio where I painted five days a week, that I was missing out…

Cannot think of a better summer read for an artist.

Have you ever wondered what’d happen to your garden if you let things go for awhile? How long it would take for the weeds and critters to take over? Well, dear reader, wonder no longer! Alan Weisman has written a strangely alluring book, The World Without Us that explains, in gross detail, what’d happen to the planet & its occupants if humans just poof! disappeared. I just finished reading the art chapter and it totally shifted my conception of the word “archival.”

Without giving away Weisman’s surprising prognosis for the survival of human culture I can tell you…

• That sculptors working with traditional materials own the word “archival.”

• Artwork made out of ceramic or bronze has the best chance of lasting through millennia.

• Ceramics are a lot like fossils. “Unless you smash them, ceramics are virtually indestructable.”

• Paintings are fragile. “Unless they’re hanging in 4000 year old pyramids with zero moisture, within a few hundred years of neglect, paintings on canvas will be a dead issue.

Hmm…

A beautiful slide show in Sunday’s NYTimes.

William L. Coggshall and Roger A. Morse’s Beeswax: Production, Harvesting, Processing and Products is an excellent resource for artists who want to understand the science and process behind beeswax production in detail. It’s got comprehensive information about the physical properties of wax, harvesting, testing, bleaching and a thirteen page chapter on the uses of beeswax in art and industry.

Check out the two electron photomicrographs of beeswax scales on page 34. Gorgeous, eh? (The layers just slay me.)

Enjoy!

When I wrote about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in September 2007 it appeared as though scientists had identified a pathogen (Israeli Acute Paraylsis Virus) responsible for the massive bee die-offs of 2006 through today. Alas, it didn’t take long for scientists to disprove IAPV as the primary cause of CCD. Since then the prevailing story’s been that CCD is a complex syndrome resulting from multiple stressors working in concert to kill the bees.

Well, dear readers, I just finished reading Michael Schacker’s new book A Spring without Bees. It feels as though the scales have fallen from my eyes. Shacker makes a compelling case that a single substance, the chemical pesticide imidacloprid (IMD), may be responsible for the bee deaths currently categorized under CCD.

A few of Schacker’s points:

• In the United States and France there are strong geographic links between IMD and colony collapse disorder.

• The advertised benefits of the IMD product PREMISE (for termite control) closely match the symptoms presented by a collapsing colony of honeybees. According to the PREMISE label the termites “stop feeding and are unable to maintain their colony” and “makes termites susceptible to infection by naturally occurring organisms.”

• American media has grossly underreported scientific research and policies coming out of France (and now Germany) that show a strong link between CCD and IMD, choosing instead to emphasize the mysterious aspects of CCD.

This is an important book. It’s passionately and clearly written. Carefully researched. A pleasure to read. Highly recommended for anyone seeking new insights into what’s ailing the honeybees.

One of my favorite beekeeping books is “Toward Saving the Honeybee” by Gunther Hauk. Mr. Hauk writes about honeybees in a detailed and poetic way. Here’s what he has to say about beeswax (my painting medium):

“Beeswax, the product of an animal that has been considered sacred in almost every culture throughout history, is indeed a very special and precious substance. It has been used with great reverence in many religions for ceremony and ritual. The aesthetic beauty, the fragrance, and the multitude of uses that beeswax offers to man are in themselves accomplishments. The bee, in its simplest acts of life. reveals to us a constant stream of wondrous synthesis, industriousness and transformation.

Whereas other types of bees and wasps use materials from nature to build their combs (living plants, earth, old wood), the honeybee alone creates the substance for the comb in her own body, out of her bloodstream. We can marvel at the significance of the bees’ nourishment, which is the nectar of flowers – the finest of substances produced by the plant. This sap or nectar results from a unique combination – a synthesis – of physical substances (mostly oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen) together with that cosmic force that enables all life on this planet: light.

It is this purest and most ennobled of food substances that the bee ingests, assimilates and converts into bee ‘substances’, including blood. Just as our bones crystallize out of our bloodstream – (beautiful to observe in the growing embryo) – so the bee’s blood is transformed into wax that is ‘sweated’ out in thin, wafer-like, almost translucent white plates on the underside of her abdomen…”

- Gunther Hauk

I’m reading “The Book of the Courtesans” by Susan Griffin. You’d love it. It’s a sparkling history of courtesans jam-packed with tales of gumption, wit and style. AND they’re accompanied by some highly readable art criticism too. In other words, great fodder for artists. Here’s a quote on beauty.

“Although conventional wisdom tells us that courtesans made themselves beautiful in order to attract wealthy men, the reverse was also true. Many sought wealth precisely because they wanted to create and possess beauty. Given the profundity of the experience, it is no wonder that regardless of circumstance, whether female or male, educated or not, we all seek what is beautiful.” – Susan Griffin

I want to create and possess beauty too.