We joined the Red Hook CSA, and life is looking brighter by the minute. This is week one and it's already feeling like water in the desert, especially after months of missing the Park Slope Food Coop's heavenly cheap and great organic produce (that's another story), compounded by the horrors of Fairway and Trader Joe's produce . . . Needless to say, Community Supported Agriculture is the way to go. And Added Value Community Farm is rocking it out with urban gardening and community activism at is best. These line drawings/watercolor paintings, the first in what will be an ongoing CSA series, are for sale in my Etsy shop.
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Radishes
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| Garlic Scape |
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| Snap Pea |
It has almost been a month since the earthquake devastated Haiti. Here is the first of a series I am painting in honor of the 230,000 (+) people who lost their lives, and as a gesture of solidarity with the hundreds of thousands more people who are injured and/or left without a home.
How can I hope to make a dent in the overwhelming collective pain that Haiti has experienced?
I really do not know. I'm just painting some pieces and offering 100% of the sales to Partners in Health, the nonprofit medical relief organization that founded its first community clinic in Haiti in 1985. I chose this organization because its co-founder, Jim Yong Kim, is currently president of Dartmouth College, where I spent four years as an undergraduate. From the Partners in Health website: "Zanmi Lasante ('Partners In Health' in Haitian Kreyol) is PIH’s flagship project – the oldest, largest, most ambitious, and most replicated. Today, ZL ranks as one of the largest nongovernmental health care providers in Haiti – and the only provider of comprehensive primary care, regardless of ability to pay, for more than half a million impoverished people living in the mountainous Central Plateau."
This first piece is called "Tree Fern for Haiti." It is a tree fern leaf, painted on a dictionary page that includes the entry "Haitian." This comes out of some research I've just started on the flora and fauna of Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere and one that is over 90 percent deforested. I don't yet know how many tree ferns are still growing in Haiti, but I know they are an indigenous species. When I looked at the digital specimen image library of the Freie Universität Berlin, I found this particular leaf shape as a specimen from Haiti.
This original watercolor painting is on sale in my Etsy Halflight shop for $35. The complete proceeds from the sale of this and following paintings from this series (Trees for Haiti) will go directly to Partners in Health, for their efforts there.
I have begun a new series that I'll be posting for sale in my Halflight/Etsy shop: paintings and drawings on old dictionary and encyclopedia pages. This first piece is an acrylic painting of a juniper branch in a range of greens, on an encyclopedia page from the 20's (though I can't be sure, Sean and I saved a human-sized stack of a set that we rescued from Pacific St. in 2001, until our move in 2005, at which time I tore out the pages that seemed interesting, none of which seems to be a title page with a date). The pages have all been through some weather, so they are brittle, brown around the edges and water-damaged, but this makes for a perfect surface upon which to paint a simple image. So these days I've been asking myself if painting matters anymore, since I don't seem to be doing it (now that Little Creatures and MME have taken over life as I know it)...and we shall see. I'm hoping and praying it that does matter, for if it doesn't, it will be like the death of a dear friend, and nothing less.
Pod Heads, as we know, have a way of finding each other. What a beautiful Etsy treasury my green pod painting has been featured in. (I'm ending in a preposition in honor of all the misplaced apostrophes of the world.)
I grew up climbing Magnolia trees, especially those at Duke Gardens, when we still lived in Durham. The trees were so tall, and the branches perfect for climbing . . . you could go until it was just you and the sky. . . I know there is a picture of me, somewhere in the files, playing far up in one of those glorious trees, circa 1981. I went back with Mom and Dad in 2006, and sat in the branches of one of them, and the nostalgia was pretty heavy.
We planted a Magnolia tree in our yard in Shelby, around 1990. Now it is over forty feet tall and produces perhaps hundreds of giant fragrant flowers a year. Here's a watercolor I did of one of the pods, with one last bright red seed hanging on.
Three of my paintings are included in a show called You are Here, currently on view at the Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan College in NYC. The show opens this Thursday, December 11, and continues through January 6. Details of each piece are shown here:
The first depicts an aerial view of New Orleans, after the flood. Collaged under the oil painting are black and white photographic images of the destruction. It is entitled Into the waters they go, the wise and the lovely, after an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem, Dirge Without Music. See NYTimes article that inspired this title.
The next two paintings are part of an ongoing series of large-scale works depicting historically/politically weighted cities, superimposed on one another on the same picture plane. I have cut into these canvases to stuff and sew sheer pockets of fabric with seeds and other organic forms, as a way of marking significant points on these maps where the course of history has changed. Locations I have marked within Seeds of Empire (Rome/D.C.) include the US Capitol Building, the White House, the Forum and the Coliseum. Locations in He turned their waters into blood (Tigris/Mississippi) include the Iraqi National Museum, the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, the Superdome and the Lower Ninth Ward. See painting/map key here.
I suppose I never thought that one day I would actually be older than Jesus ever was when he walked the earth. Age shouldn't mean a single thing when considered against the backdrop of the ever-widening trajectory of all time and space. But the symbolic age of 33 will haunt me from now till I reach the eternal space, as I today I have moved past it. As Sean reminded me, the "Death Threat"/Jesus Year Birthday Card, is still appropriate (an image of a black cross, presented through the mail to him on his 33rd birthday, from the monks of Portsmouth Abbey, where he spent several years when half that sacred age). But isn't every age we all experience sacred? Who am I to have dwelt on 27, because of all the musical geniuses who left us at that age, and who am I to compare myself to the Son of Man, who spent thirty-three years in a physical body, to teach us how to love? It's a stretch.
I am finishing up a body of 33 small paintings, done over the course of this past year, which taken altogether was a extraordinary one. From the land of the rising sun to the ninth ward, from a spiritual shipwreck to the conception of a new life, this year was good, so good, more than good, and I'm praying to hold onto the threads of it and to weave them like seeds of life and light, into the fabric of the next. The one that starts today.
A week in Virginia: the ice has crunched and melted, a calf has been born, the sliver of the moon has grown round and will soon eclipse, seeds have been sown+sewn, artifacts found, thoughts lost, art made, time reinvented, friendships begun, stories told, plans laid, stars shrouded, snow tempted, life remembered, horses considered, hope regained. 
It has not been so long (a mere four months) since the last time I left town to make art. East Haddam turned into my muse, or, well, I should say it was the Willies and their secrets hanging in the trees, their shards cracking beneath my footsteps, their headstones staring out too innocently. No, here was the real muse, growing up out of the clearing as if it were a regional plant species, known only to the Devil's Hopyard:
So now I go again, to leave the Broken Land for the rolling hills of Virginia, for two brief winter weeks, and I can only hope there are thousands of trees with millions of branches, and that the wind is crisp. I'm taking no oils for the journey, and only one necklace, The Moon, from my dear boy. Paring down for the winter when winter has already been here and gone. I will arrive to a blank slate, four walls, waiting for something to be created within them. New stories to map, new woods to explore, new spaces to breathe.
