Laura's Art Blog, Exploring the Material World

Eldest Daughter, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It’s a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it’s time to reflect on what’s come before.

Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure, Thanksgiving, 1992

To the bee, a flower is a fountain of life, and to the flower, a bee is a messenger of love.

- Kahlil Gibran

From a carefully written overview of collapse disorder at physorg.com.

Hither, encaustic and ink on panel, 10″ x 8″

Filmmaker, Michael Moore, has written some interesting things about what an Obama administration might mean for artists. Here’s a tasty bit from his longer message…

We may, just possibly… see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles. All week long I have been inundated with media asking me, “gee, Mike, what will you do now that Bush is gone?” Are they kidding? What will it be like to work and create in an environment that nurtures and supports film and the arts, science and invention, and the freedom to be whatever you want to be? Watch a thousand flowers bloom! We’ve entered a new era, and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything Is Possible.

Let the flowers unfold!

Thanks to my friend Laurel Kallenbach (who viewed the election results with a bunch of scientists from NOAA) for the heads up.

Attended a dinner a mile below the tower in 2nd Street to celebrate the raising of the roof of an African Church. About 100 white persons, chiefly carpenters, dined at one table, who were waited upon by Africans. Afterward about 50 black people sat down at the same table, who were waited upon by white people. Never did I see people more happy. Some of them shed tears of joy. A old black man took Mr. Nicholson by the hand and said to him, “May you live long, and when you die, may you not die eternally.” I gave them two toasts, viz: “Peace on earth and good will to man,” and, “May African Churches everywhere soon succeed African bondage.” The last was received with three cheers.

- Benjamin Rush, August 22, 1793

Here’s a pumpkin drawing I made in Pencil I at the Denver Botanic Gardens. (They’ve got an amazingly good botanical illustration program.) It’s satisfying to draw realistically from life. There’s something about it that feels magical. But this drawing doesn’t qualify as art to me. I need transformation. When a recognizable form shifts & becomes something new… that’s art.

My blogging hero, Andrew Sullivan (who blogs faster than the speed of reading), has a great article about why he blogs in this month’s Atlantic.

My favorite quote:

The key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast,
not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling,
it sinks.

This is great advice. I’ll never blog at the pace Andrew does but love the inspiration to write more, rougher, faster, stronger.

“When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art.”

– Marc Chagall

Here’s an intriguing story about the beguines – a medieval order of Catholic Sisters that may have represented “the world’s oldest women’s movement.”

A choice quote:

Unlike sisterhoods that required a life spent apart from society under vows of chastity, these Catholic women looked for holiness outside monastic norms. Although they lived and prayed together within an enclave, partly as a form of mutual protection… beguines were not confined to the cloister. Many ministered to the poor and sick outside their walls. Lifelong celibacy was not required either. They could leave the order and marry (but not return).

“Holiness outside monastic norms…” I like that.

I love the week between Christmas and New Year’s. For as long as I can remember it’s stood out as a period of reflection and hope. The nights are long. Business slows. But a new year is on the way! So there’s much to look forward to.

Here’s a quote I pulled from today’s NYTimes. The article is called “A Tale of Trigger.”

“Are you willing to own, that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness… to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings?”

- Heny van Dyke

This we know, all things are connected, like the blood that unites one family.
All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
he does to himself.

- Chief Seattle

If you find honey, eat just enough – too much of it, and you will vomit.

“If you can’t make it good, make it big. If you can’t make it big, make it red.”

- Unknown

There’s an entertaining story about honeybees in today’s New York Times, “In Hive or Castle, Duty Without Power.” It’s extremely well written and makes an apt comparison between honeybee queens and Queen Elizabeth II of England. Duty without power indeed. Here’s a quote:

‘There is no top-down structure to honeybee society, no central command post or leaders with whips. Power is disseminated through the hive, and daily decisions about, say, whose turn it is to feed the larvae, take out the trash or fan the nectar into honey are made consensually and regionally, through a constant exchange of chemical, tactile and visual cues. “It’s a lot of local responses to local stimuli,” Dr. Robinson said. “Little things collectively give rise to decisions.”

As for the queen, she is so far from being a decisive potentate that she can seem goofily out of the loop. When a colony is ready to move to a new hive, for example, about three dozen scout bees appraise the local real estate, consult with one another and with other workers and finally, communally, settle on the best new spot. Come moving day, the queen has no idea where to go and must be shown the way.’

– Natalie Angier for the New York Times

I love the synthesis of honeybee biology with social observation. What better way to understand ourselves than by watching our sisters the bees?

Do you read the The Sun? This month’s issue (April 2007) features an interview with author John O’Donohue. I love what he has to say about wilderness:

“Sometimes you see a beautiful woman who quickens your heart. Then you meet her again years later and she’s become a domesticated relic of who she once was, and you think Where is the dangerous vision I saw in her? The same happens to men.

I think it is more interesting to be with somebody who still has his or her wilderness territory – and by that I don’t mean bleak, burned-out, damaged areas where wounding has occurred; rather I mean genuine wilderness.”

- John O’Donohue interviewed by Diane Covington in The Sun, April 2007

I’m wholly taken by this idea of wilderness as an inner, human state. But what’s he actually talking about? What’s “genuine wilderness” to a human? Aren’t humans, as social animals, domestic by definition? And why is wilderness desirable? Is he talking about sex? The forest? Danger? Mystery? Instinct? I’m not sure. Curious though.

Here’s a quote from Marc Bekoff’s “The Emotional Lives of Animals.”

“Domesticated humans have a long and troubled history with the wilderness that exists at the edges of their civilization. We try to tame it and keep it at bay, but we almost never just leave it alone. Perhaps we can’t, and it’s not really our fault. Wilderness is considered “wild” for a reason…”

- Marc Bekoff