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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. Highly recommended for students and teachers of encaustic.

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.