The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way toward the sun.

- Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature

Out of the Same Soil
New Paintings by Laura Tyler and Karen Conduff
Opening reception, Thursday, June 23rd from 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Rembrandt Yard Gallery
1301 Spruce Street
Boulder, Colorado

It is a joy to pick new flowers.

- Lucretius

Wishing you and yours a beautiful 2011. May all our gardens grow.

- John Greenleaf Whittier

“You know, you reach a time in your life when you’re not trying to impress. You just want to get along.” – Marge McLellan

The above quote is one of my favorites from Sister Bee. It’s a tricky one that I didn’t quite get at first. I remember it seeming important when Marge said it because her tone shifted from lighthearted self-deprecation to solemnity which grabbed my attention. At first, I thought it had something to do with resignation and the giving up or softening of ones opinions/principles/stridency with age. Today it seems to have more to do with an opening or generosity that comes with maturity. When we’re young we have so much to prove! Marge helped me see that age can bring the confidence it takes to take a break from trying to ourselves to listen and appreciate what others have to say.

Marge McLellan using the uncapping knife on a frame of honey

Marge McLellan modeled graceful aging for me. She was a dear friend and mentor to many. I miss her already.

Marge McLellan walking with her garden cart

There’s a good interview with Pamela T. Boll, director of “Who Does She Think She Is?” at Salon.

A choice quote:

“… In the arts, there’s no guarantee for success. Even if you’re working at Wal-Mart, if you show up, you get paid. In the studio, you don’t. It’s very risky business. You have to create your own life and have a very strong understanding about what your have to offer. There will be a lot of people telling you that you’re just fooling around. Society just doesn’t consider an artist’s work as “work” — just like motherhood isn’t often acknowledged as being real work.”

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.

- John Muir

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are good arguments both for and against the use of destructive imagery in art (yes, I think glamorized images of smoking are destructive). John H. Richardson’s personal take in, “My History of Violence,” is great and though his focus is on violence his arguments apply to all images that depict self-harm or the harm of others. An excerpt:

When I was a cub reporter starting out at the Albuquerque Tribune, I found a report in the police blotter about a pair of 16-year-old lovers who gassed themselves in a car. I about choked on how great a story it was, did a little reporting, found out they did it in a closed garage and that their bodies were discovered by the very same parents who were trying to split them up. Then I pitched it to my editor. no way, he said. I said, “What? Are you crazy? It’s Romeo and fucking Juliet!” He gave me a sad look. “If I run this story, and give it big play and a nice layout, I guarantee you there will be a copycat suicide. Maybe a bunch of them. Do you want that on your conscience?”

I said, it’s not my responsibility what crazy people do. It’s the truth and that’s what I want to write, the truth. Would you tell Shakespeare to stick to comedies? Would you tell Tolstoy to write Peace and Peace?
…

Somehow, my editor managed to resist my blinding rhetorical onslaught. He didn’t run the piece. And I thought, this little burg is just too small-town for me, baby. These people don’t understand art. They don’t understand transgression. So I went to Hollywood. And just after I got there, some guy made a movie called The Program that had a scene where some kids lay down on a highway divider as a dare—and sure enough, there were copycats out in Pennsylvania who laid their dumb asses down on highway dividers and got squashed. And the studio said, hey, it’s not our responsibility what crazy people do. These people just don’t understand art…”

You can read the whole article on Paste.

- Max Beckmann

- 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″

- Wassily Kandinsky

- Mark Twain

As a passionate observer of nature’s patterns (plant symmetry, honeycomb, etc…) and a long time migraine sufferer I found this article by Oliver Sacks fascinating. It hints at the idea that there’s some kind of universal/chemical truth underlying all instances of geometric pattern and it has something to do with how we’re physically made.

A choice quote:

“There is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems — one may see it equally in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time, very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.”

Poets, painters, and puddings; these three
Make up the World as it ought to be.

Poets make faces
And sudden grimaces:
They twit you, and spit you
On words: then admit you
To heaven or hell
By the tales that they tell.

Painters are gay
As young rabbits in May:
They buy jolly mugs,
Bowls, pictures, and jugs:
The things round their necks
Are lively with checks,
(For they like something red
As a frame for the head):
Or they’ll curse you with oaths,
That tear holes in your clothes.
(With nothing to mend them
You’d best not offend them.)

Puddings should be
Full of currants, for me:
Boiled in a pail,
Tied in the tail
Of an old bleached shirt:
So hot that they hurt,
So huge that they last
From the dim, distant past
Until the crack o’ doom
Lift the roof off the room.

Poets, painters, and puddings; these three
Crown the day as it crowned should be.

- Richard Hughes

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

- Jeanette Winterson

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read my blog, or take in my paintings, or see Sister Bee in 2008. You inspire me! I look forward to posting more after Christmas. ‘Til then may warmth and wonderment be yours.