Harriet Finck, fractals, and hidden gems...

In Harriet Finck's exhibit "Visual Midrash: Text as Form" the artist explores the written Hebrew word; sometimes the words are written directly on the paper but often they are buried deep within the paintings.  These works of paper tell, as per the artist's statement, stories of birth and death, angels and dreams, despair and redemption.  I don't see the words, even in the closest close-up below, but it is not a language with which I am familiar.  These paintings remind me of aboriginal paintings of the Dreamtime.  I would happily put one of these stunning pieces on a wall in my house (all click to enlarge). 

a triptych

a diptych

another painting

closer....

closer....

and closer....it's fascinating and equally beautiful at every scale....a fractal painting 

Above, detail of painting.....below, detail of carpet in art deco bar in South Beach.  In scientific terminology, an example of convergent evolution.

....and the hidden gem?  the local university art gallery.

Ed Mezitt's PJM Rhododendron

The first spring rhododendron that blooms in New England flowered this past week.  It is a hydrid called PJM that is everywhere, its popularity entrenched by the fact that it blooms weeks before most other azaleas and rhododendrons -- an easy hardy plant.  The PJM was hybridized by Ed Mezitt in Weston, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1945.  Ed named the new plant PJM in honor of his father, Peter J. Mezitt, the following spring.

The father Peter had received a plant specimen (believed to be R. dauricum) collected by missionaries in the mountainous region between Mongolia and Kazakhstan (the 19th century was the heyday of missionary/botanist collecting in Asia).   Ed crossed this plant with R. minus Carolinianum.  The American Rhododendron Society speculates that the PJM Group is probably the most widely planted rhododendron in the United States today.

With all the forsythia and daffodils blooming at the same time, pink and yellow never looked so good together.

How can I have enough of life and love?

The Earthly Paradise....Live.  Tomorrow (Tuesday) the BBC Symphony Orchestra will broadcast a new piece by Ian McQueen based on William Morris's great work The Earthly Paradise.  This was the collection of poetry that brought Morris widespread fame and popularity and resulted, upon the death of Tennyson, in an invitation to be England's Poet Laureate.  (He declined, I wish I knew why.)  From the BBC: "The search for the land where 'none grow old' guides the twists and turns of William Morris's The Earthly Paradise. Ian McQueen's work for chorus and large orchestra evokes the poem's extraordinary world, surges with erotic charge, and conjures up Morris's magical vision of Iceland's landscape and sagas."

From my reading of the BBC website, the performance will be broadcast live at 19:00 GMT which according to my detailed calculations will be 2PM on the East Coast (adjust to your time zone).  Going to the BBCRadio3 website and clicking on the LISTEN icon in upper right should work (hopefully).

The Earthly Paradise follows the story of a band of (erotically charged?) medieval wanderers searching for a land of everlasting life, but instead they discover a lost  colony of Greeks with whom they exchange tales.  While Morris illustrated the published edition of his stories in his typical style (see excerpt above), his friend Edward Burne-Jones painted scenes from the many stories.

Here is Perseus and the Graiae painted by Burne-Jones in 1892.  His Perseus looks a whole lot sweeter than Sam Worthington in Clash of the Titans (below) although they do appear to be wearing the same outfit.

Burne-Jones also seems to have envisioned the three witches quite differently.  I'd much rather be a Burne-Jones witch.

An earlier Earthly Paradise post about the love story of Cupid and Psyche. In case you need a refresher on your myths....another earlier post. I think I'll go see the movie.

Weekend Warriors

It's springtime in New England and that means lots of action among our animal brethren.  I was not four blocks into a walk last evening when I encountered what can only be described as a major "preen-fest" between two huge turkeys trying to impress a seemingly blase troop of six females.  It was like watching a poultry version of the "Walk-off" scene in Zoolander.

Turkey #1 (in the street) was so puffed up he looked massive and he dragged his striped wing feathers along the ground such that it sounded like stiff cardboard being dragged along the road.  He also seems to have created some kind of weird chest ornamentation for himself (all the better to impress the ladies!).

Mean while on a nearby lawn Turkey #2 appears to have most of the gals in his harem.  Only one is near T1 and I think that is just because she got accidentally separated on the wrong side of the fence.  The old "divide-and-conquer" strategy no doubt.

 Turkey 2

 back to Turkey 1

"Don't go back to that moldy pile of pin feathers!  What does he have that I don't?  Look at this chest!"

Keep in mind this is going on in the street of a city of 90,000 people, possibly even in front of children (should any be lucky enough to actually be outside playing).  After twenty minutes I got restless and continued on to a small pond in nearby Boston.

As I arrived ten minutes later it was clear that another major avian rivalry was underway.  A white swan was on a rampage, terrorizing, intimidating, and pursuing a flock of Canada geese who apparently also felt a desire to swim/nest/congregate in this particular pond.  I needn't tell you how un-swanlike this behavior was....in fact, this swan was swimming after individual geese so quickly it was like watching the galleys going "ramming speed" in Ben Hur.

look at that wake!

At this point my camera battery died so I did not get the shots of the swan literally running across the top of the water with wings spread as wide as they could go, his neck fully extended, and making loud (and again, very un-swanlike) guttural noises.  I eventually had to depart even though the action showed no sign of abating.  I left content in the knowledge that there is actually a creature is the world that can intimidate a Canada goose.

Finally, on a different subject, here is my newly cleaned and reglazed window I bought on Craig's List from a contractor who was demolishing a house in my town.  Look at that glazing job!  Uncle Joe, you taught me well......

Trinity Church, Copley Plaza, Boston

I recently ducked into Trinity Church to take a look at the Edward Burne-Jones stained glass windows that were commissioned from Morris & Co. in 1882.  Trinity Church is a Boston landmark, the building that established Henry Hobson Richardson as one of the leading architects of his day.  Indeed, the style of this building, characterized by polychromatic rough stone, heavy arches, towers, and clay roof became known as Richardsonian Romanesque and was a uniquely American architectural style.

The late afternoon sun was shining directly on the main altar setting all the gold paint aglow.  Murals covering over 21,000 square feet (about 2,000 m²) of the interior were painted by John La Farge, an artist and worker of stained glass whose reputation was also established as a result of this commission.

Four Burne-Jones windows were installed, three of which (showing scenes from the Nativity) were very high up and hard to photograph.  Here's one....

The most beautiful window depicts "David's Charge to Solomon" and is on the first floor.  The window is on the east wall so it would be better viewed in the morning.

So lovely....

Le Farge's murals....the truth shall make you free....

Wall Envy

Get to know your birds...

 
....whenever you see one you don't know, look it up in the guidebook you keep on your kitchen shelf. 

On Sunday I stopped at the Traveler Restaurant (and bookstore, Exit 74 off I-84) in Union, Connecticut.  This place is about 2/3rd of the way between NYC and Boston and I've been stopping here for decades to eat, rest, then browse the used bookstore in the basement where nearly always some treasure is to be found (along with the free book you can select upstairs).  I found these nature guidebooks from 1917 for $8 each.  Neltje (Nellie) Blanchan was the Roger Peterson of her day with her writing known for its "synthesis of scientific interest with poetic phrasing".  Here are the illustrations of some of my favorite locals with excerpts from her descriptions.....

The robin:  "No bird that we have has so varied a repertoire as Robin Goodfellow.....Indignation, suspicion, fright, interrogation, peace of mind, hate, warning to take flight----these and a host of other thoughts are expressed through his flexible voice."

The mourning dove:  "No sympathy need be wasted on this incessant love-maker that slowly sings coo-o-o, ah-coo-o-o-ooo-o-o-ooo-o-o, in a sweetly sad voice.  Really he is no more melancholy than the plaintive pewee but, on the contrary, is so happy in his love that his devotion has passed into a proverb."

Find one and you will surely see his/her love nearby.....

The tufted titmouse:  "A famous musician became insane because he heard one note ringing constantly in his overwrought brain.  If you ever hear a troop of titmice whistling peto over and over again for hours at a time, you will pity poor Schumann and fear a similar fate for the birds."

The loon:  "A mirror-like lake in the Adirondacks or White Mountains is ever a loon's idea of paradise."

You can hear their "long-drawn, melancholy, uncanny scream (that) seems to rend the very clouds" here. 

The mockingbird:  "His love song is entrancing.  "Oft in the stilly night," when the moonlight sheds s silvery radiance everywhere, the mockingbird sings to his mate such delicious music as only the European nightingale can rival."

The passenger pigeon (so sad, a long excerpt...):  "The wild pigeon no longer survives to refute the adage, "In union there is strength."  No birds have shown greater gregariousness, the flocks once numbering not hundreds nor thousands, but millions of birds; Wilson in 1808 mentioning a flock seen by him near Frankfort, Kentucky, which he conservatively estimated at more than two billion, and Audubon told of flights so dense that they darkened the sky, and streamed across it like mighty rivers.  The modern mind, accustomed to deal only with the pitiful remnants of feathered races, can scarcely grasp the vast numbers that once made our land the sportsman's paradise.  Unlimited netting, even during the entire nesting season, has resulted in sending more than one million pigeons to market from a single roost in one year, leaving perhaps as many more wounded birds and starving, helpless, naked squabs behind, until the poultry stalls became so glutted with pigeons that the low price per barrel scarcely paid for their transportation, and they were fed to the hogs...........The passenger pigeon is today as extinct as the great auk."

Spring hike, via the aqueduct

ahead

behind

Happy Easter from Happy Valley...

I just returned from visiting my kids in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, the region around the town of State College.  Nobody seems to know why this area is called Happy Valley but the town does seem to "talk the talk"....

A little closer to home, here are a few more pics from Pioneer Valley, in western Massachusetts.  Specifically, these are 19th century tobacco barns near Deerfield.  In the 1860's, Deerfield was the leading grower of tobacco in the nation ---- this old wood seems almost spiritual.

All the door panels are thrown open when the tobacco leaves are drying.

Finally, there is a new museum, the Flynt Center of Early New England Life in Deerfield that displays a large collection of 18th to early 20th century decorative arts.  Here is one piece to give you a flavor....it is a wool "bed rug" from the late 18th or early 19th century, in a Tree of Life pattern, based on 17th or 18th century Indian palampores.  What is interesting is that William Morris was inspired by the very same fabrics and patterns later in the 19th century (see this post here)......compare to his wallpaper pattern below.

What you see here is about five feet across.

Morris Pink and Rose wallpaper (1891)