Every woman needs a retreat. A place to be where the creative muses can find her while her hands are busy and her soul is at rest. For me, that place is my garden. And now, a sanctuary within that sanctuary…my greenhouse is finished !
Three days of hard work to finish the carpentry and then stain and paint and today Pat helped me to carry the books and seeds over to start filling the shelves…
Now I can cast about the studio and cabin to find some things to make it homey, and make cushions for the wicker chair I found and a few hangers for hats and jackets, and some sort of solar powered lamp. It feels so good to complete something as fanciful as this. My garden folly. Now to find the windex !
Here’s a response to the last blog post about the painting Finding Abstraction which I got from Cori, the daughter of my friend Saren and someone who does that noblest of professions for a living…she teaches children about art !
(Cori is the hard working woman at the right, alongside her mom, on the day that the entire Zink family showed up to help us clean up after the flood.)
Hi
Heather,
Love Finding Abstraction! My 4th graders just read Jackson
in Action in their new reading series. I just finished a lesson with them
using the children’s book Action Jackson and then let them do their own
Pollock (sometimes I’m down right nuts). I did not manage the consistency very
well and most of the paintings look like a mess but they had a blast. I think
they had almost as much fun crawling around with a sponge to clean the floor and
chairs as they did making the mess. And somehow I managed to not lose one pair
of pants to paint splatters!!! Their reading about Romare Bearden now – collage
is next. I’m loving this new reading series.
C. 🙂
I just love Cori’s creative way of putting lessons into action. My brushes are raised to her !
PS – today she sent along a couple examples of the student’s artwork.
They both have nailed the strength of the linear gestures and the resonance of vivid color. Wicked cool as they say where I’m from. These guys are from the Paxtang Elementary School.
Awash in flood recovery our family, our neighbors, our community and our state have been blessed with a dry sunny October week. Wherever we go now there are weary faces and stories to match. Everyone around us has been affected and so there is a sort of commaraderie that has swelled and landed us all on higher common ground.
And those random acts of kindness you occasionally hear about…you know those little gestures from someone who doesn’t even know you…that catch you off guard and that take your breath away…as we go about our days wobbling with our tired backs and heavy hearts… we seem to keep bumping into them.
Like when Pat climbed out of her muddy boots and wanted to do something normal and went to get her haircut and her gal Marianne (at Salon Oxygen in York )made a space in her schedule… and listened to Pat’s story (as she always does because Pat tells the best stories) and when it came time to pay she told her Pat’s money was no good. “You’ve been through a rough time Pat, this one’s on me. Don’t you worry. You’ve been supportive or me for all these years. Let me give something back.”
And then today… when after weeks of having the industrial dehumidifier drying us out in the basement (you’ll remember the photo of Pete kindly delivering it to us right after the flood)…and worrying all along how much this was going to cost as the days dragged into weeks. Well Pat and I managed to haul it up one step at a time and got it in the station wagon and off she went to return it. Only to have Mike, and RSC Equipment Rentals in Lancaster, say to her, ” there’s no charge”. What ? “We know you’ve had a hard time. There’s another family who rented one from us too. It’s the least we can do to help out our flooded neighbors.”
Both times we wept.
And there have been so many other small gestures that add up to some very big sighs of relief on top of the huge out pouring of friends who showed up with gloves and smiles on.
We are making great progress. They were here today to measure for the furnace which they will install next week. Here’s a pic of the garage and shed finished with reclaimed flood wood and as you can see I’ve had time to plant the fall crop and Pat helped me get the greenhouse back up around it so our little garden can begin to grow again.
Here’s hoping that your neck of the woods is drying out too and that your October days are full of crisp apples and the kindness of strangers.
OK I’m back… if only for what was supposed to be a quick entry and has now taken me two hours just to sort through some photos for ya.
I have begun to get emails and inquiries from some of you who have been worried about my blog absence…along with some not so gentle nudges for updates and more photos…I am heartily sorry and phenomenally busy. More that the usual crazy around here but we are all well and, as you will see in the pics here…just plain plowing through the spring.
With a very few exceptions I have been painting non-stop getting ready for the big Granary show this summer and a June show at Gallery 1261 and a special exhibition in Santa Fe in July ! I promise to fill you in on all of those very soon.
But for now here are some highlights of our early spring weeks…
The Lake Placid Lackeys came for an extended visit that spanned the entire month of April and right on into May. Jon was working on a stunning stone project in lancaster and commuted from our place while Zoe and her mom Tonya hung out with Gran and Mima. When T went back home to her teaching gig Zoe took over grandma sitting and we worked in the garden and built a new arbor with raised beds for some more veggies and herbs and a grapevine. I gave Zoe her first woodworking lesson at the shaving horse. And she got her very first taste of Reeser’s ice cream !
On the back end of that trip we spent my favorite day of the year at the Sheep and Wool Festival. It was one of my all time highlights to introduced Zoe to this event and except for one very big and loud Baaaaaahhhh…she had a blast.
Now it is mid May and the northern visitors have left and all that rain, the wettest April on record, has indeed brought the most beautiful May flowers I can remember. The beach rose which I brought back as a tiny seedling from the island is in full bloom and her scent carries me back to the bluff every morning when I come over to the studio yard to begin the day.
A loving couple of bluebirds has taken up residence in the blue birdhouse in the studio garden and all day long they flit around perching on the tops of shovels and dogwood branches and they have christened the new arbor as their very own sky box for a view of our comings and goings.
Herself and Finnegan have developed a daily walking routine that is getting them both in fabulous shape and they are unchaining my ankles from the easel for a couple hours on the sunny days to let me work in the garden which is helping me to deal with pre-show stresses. Frames and professional photographs are starting to come in for the finished paintings and the studio is a beehive of activity. Look for previews here soon and details on all the upcoming shows.
And last night we attended the Dutchland Roller Derby Bout with the debut roll of our first grandaughter Amanda…or as she’s know in the Rollerderby world…Seeds of Destruction ! (that’s her…the blur of a watermelon helmet with tiny pink shorts complete with sewn on watermelon seeds…of course ). It was awesome and terrifying to watch her confident, atheletic and graceful body spin round and round that track. She jammed her way through that pack with style and grit and, though there just isn’t enough padding in the world for her grandmothers, it was amazing to watch her. (In the bench shot you can just catch a glimpse of the mascot…an Amish girl and her black hatted little brother who ran around the ring with cowbells to rally the fans. It’s not your mother’s roller derby anymore.)
So our spring has been bookended with time spent with the oldest and the youngest grandchild…doesn’t get any better than that.
Pat just called and frantically yelled to get my camera and come outside…
Here’s who came to visit the studio this afternoon…
She , or he, sat perched in this hickory for enough time for me to circle around and get the sun in the right angle and then sat long enough for us to call Sue and Zola to look out their windows and then an electric truck drove by and that was time to bolt…
It wasn’t until it had taken off that we saw there were two of them flying around together. When I came inside to look at the photos the other one was there all along…
The whole neighborhood came out to see and it was a wonderful break from a long day of painting shingles…You can just make her out in the upper left corner…my easel window in at the bottom right corner…
Someone told us they are living in a nest down the lane…now that they know their way to the studio I’ll be sure to leave some goldfish out for a snack…
It’s been a couple of seasons since we had the pleasure of John O’Hern’s company in our little corner of the planet. As part of his east coast travels, he came to the studio to interview me for the American Art Collector Magazine. John is one of those rare humans who has a thriving curiosity, the intellect to follow where it leads, and a profound peace at the center of his core. The combination makes for stellar conversation and his rapier like wit always keeps me on my bog-Irish toes.
I’m so grateful to John for his continued support and to Joshua Rose, the editor of AAC for profiling my work in this issue. The magazine is my go to source for the latest from artists and galleries and I’ve found something new and important for my work in every issue.
The February issue will be out soon, if not already, but here’s a peek at the first page of John’s article…
There are still some maple trees holding on to the last of their glowing yellow leaves and the sunrise was a stunner with every shade of red clinging to the edges of the clouds. The light is strong and the air is crystal clear. My lungs have followed suit and yesterday’s reaction to the flu shot is a whispered memory. Finnegan had a good romp in the leaves with her bucket and is snoring peacefully at my side.
In the words of Monty Python… I feel much better. I feel Happy !
I’m still reeling from a power packed weekend of art and artists and curators and interviews and new and old friends and a studio filled with all that and then some.
The Brandywine River Museum show was spectacular. The opening was mobbed but there were enough spaces in the crowd to get to meet all of my Realist heroes. The museum has put the paintings up on their website in an online catalogue version. It’s a nice way to have access to the images but I long for the old days when you could buy a nicely bound book to bring home and peruse at your leisure and revisit the images over the years.
With gracious appreciation to Bob Jackson, Pat and I were invited to join the artists and museum staff at a dinner following the reception and a luncheon the next day following a panel discussion. Both opportunities were pure gold and I will live on the fruits of those many conversations for months.
It was also a chance to meet many of the artists with whom I’ll be showing next month at the 1261 Gallery in Denver.
I’ve been painting round the clock to have some new works to show them and this morning the gallery director said yes to them all so …. off to the photographers and the framers went Pat today and I’ll be shipping them out early next week.
Here’s a preview of one of the paintings that will be in that show… Oils on Canvas
They too will have an online version of the show and I’ll post that link when it’s up.
The show is titled, Reality Boost and will be featured in the October issue of American Art Collector Magazine so check your bookstores or mailboxes for that…
and….
stay tuned for an artist’s profile on yours truly that will appear in the AAC Mag sometime in the near future… Contributing author, curator and all around man of the arts…John O’Hern… was in town for the Brandywine show and spent the rest of the weekend visiting here in the studio and interviewed me for his upcoming article. It was a once in a lifetime experience to share our space with him and the gift of so much of his time, depth of knowledge, and rapier like wit and charm.
John’s genius is well documented in the years of Re-presenting Realism series of shows which he curated while leading the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, NY. But it is perhaps his current creative incarnation as a freelance curator, writer and consultant that may leave a more indelible mark on the artworld.
His most recent work was to collaborate with EVOKE Contemporary Gallery in Santa Fe and curate the show…Re-presenting the Nude. You can view their online catalogue version by clicking here. It’s a powerful collection of work and I’ve been spinning off of the catalogue to research artist after artist whose work he has now introduced me to.
Spinning is indeed the operative word for my head right now…
Add to all of the above a stellar week of sales at the Granary Gallery and we are holding on tight to this wave of positive energy flowing around us… it’s certainly nice to have good things to report on and we’re not taking one second of it for granted.
Now it’s back to the easel for me… and you all get out and take a walk in this crisp clean air !
Can you imagine a better frame shop than one which delivers ?
My pals at Artworks are the best. The very best. And this morning Julie hauled all the frames for this year’s show in the big van and delivered them right to the studio door. Julie is one of the many young people it was my great pleasure to work with over the thirty years that I made my living as a picture framer. I’m so proud of her evolution into a strong, confident mother, business manager, and all around decent human. Good on ya J.
So here we are again… a studio full of frames, most of which are still up at the photographer’s being shot, and less than three weeks before the trailer heads out of the driveway for the vineyard show.
I finished the very last of the paintings late yesterday afternoon. That one will be for the Vegetable portion of the Animal, Veg, Min. show …more on that later but the first show opens this sunday at the Field Gallery…more info here.
There’s a mountain of office work to do and bills to be paid and commission portraits to be started … and today Julie made that list a lot shorter by bringing the frames to me. Big thanks.
Every woman needs a retreat. A place to be where the creative muses can find her while her hands are busy and her soul is at rest. For me, that place is my garden. And now, a sanctuary within that sanctuary…my greenhouse is finished !
Now I can cast about the studio and cabin to find some things to make it homey, and make cushions for the wicker chair I found and a few hangers for hats and jackets, and some sort of solar powered lamp. It feels so good to complete something as fanciful as this. My garden folly. Now to find the windex !
