Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 61

Bonjour, Summer!

The first local berries.

On a recent weekend we made our first foray to the Jean-Talon market with friends (she writes the blog Passage des Perles, he is one of the best and most knowledgeable cooks we've met in Montreal.) Thought you might like to see the colors and beauty too.

Enchanted mushroom forests.

Considering the wild asparagus.

 

Artisanal breads at Joe le Croute.

 

Foxglove plants, wanting to go home with me (they didn't.)

Radishes that did.

Are you starting to shop at farmers' markets or get deliveries of a CSA basket, or harvesting some produce and flowers of your own? I'm curious if the variety, freshness, and local availability of produce and local food products (honey, cheese, yogurt, etc.) have improved in your region in the last decade. It's a simple way we can all help the earth, support local agriculture and the local economy, as well as improve our own health and state of mind. What could be better than that? Bon été, bon appétit!

 

Related articles

An After-Market Dinner
Late Harvest

Bougainvilla

Bougainvilla, hexagonal tile and chased copper bowl. Pen on paper, 9" x 12".

I've been wanting to buy a bougainvilla for years but they're a) expensive and b) hard to grow and winter-over in the north. Mexico City put me over the top, though, so when I saw some first-year seedling plants thsi spring at one of the flower kiosks near a metro station, I picked one up...and once you pick up the pot, you're done for. The proprietor was knowledgeable and I asked him some questions about wintering the plant over - he said he and his partner do it every year, and so long as there's enough sun and you don't over-water, it will be OK. What the hell, I figured -- this wasn't a $40 hanging basket. I've had good luck with lantanas at our studio, where the winter light is quite strong and constant and I can keep a good eye on the plants - I cut them back pretty ruthlessly when they get leggy and pale, and they come back every year. Have any of you tried this with a bougainvilla?

Anyway, I want to paint it before I put it in its permanent pot, so today it got sketched. The flower bracts are strange, kind of like poinsettias, very much like a different kind of leaf - and they are an odd shape - a set of three petals that almost form a cube or square. Like a dog that has to circle around its tail three times before lying down, I seem to have to study plants by drawing them before I can do anything else, certainly not the simplification that will be necessary here. Of course the color is the main thing, but I like the plant's sturdy gangliness too.

My father-in-law's birthday was a few days ago, and I've been thinking about him -- he would have been 105. Through his stories, bougainvilla also makes me think of the Middle East, so I added a chased copper bowl that is part of a set from J.'s family, and am thinking about some other characters who could play a part in a still life. The bowl worked a whole lot better when I turned it upside down.

Jonathan with a bougainvilla in all its glory, at the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadelupe, Mexico City.

Experiments on the Via Negativa

Lemon Lily and Lupine, approx 6"x 9", acrylic on paper.

I've been staring at a vase of flowers for several days - it had the aforementioned two types of flowers in it but also some ornamental clover on thin red stalks, and some bright green peony leaves. I couldn't take my eyes off the combination of that intense red and green, for which the lemon-yellow lily and purple lupine seemed like perfect foils. I wasn't sure what to do with it, but yesterday I picked a similar bouquet at the garden and took it up to the studio. The light there was very different, much more diffuse and softer, and the colors didn't have the same jolt, but when I viewed the bouquet from above, I saw more possibilities. So I decided to try to simplify it within a fairly abstract setting, and this was the result. I started with the "chair" on which the flowers were resting - my original intention was for it to be dark, with this reddish-brown underpainting, but I liked the color and everything else sort of evolved from there.

The reason I mentioned "via negativa" is that the process seemed so subtractive. During the painting I simplified the leaves a great deal and painted the lupines with a sort of shorthand. That was only possible because of the previous, detailed drawings I had done, during which the forms had become kind of imprinted in my head. It fascinates me how "line" becomes "form;" there's some sort of subtle shift in the brain that allows all that detail to be distilled and reduced to its essence.

By the same token, while I'm still far from feeling really comfortable with acrylics, all the paintings over the past few weeks helped me in this one. It's very different for me to work with opaque media (except for oils, whose unique challenges and advantages do not include working quickly in layers) -- and I'm finding that it opens up a lot of possibilities.

Anyway, I hope to be able to build on what happened here.

Related articles

Lupine

Peonies

Peonies. Fountain pen on paper, 6" x 9".

 

Peonies, letter, and honeypot. Pen on paper, 6" x 9".

The fields of home, and some slow reading

Cornfields, Paris Hill, New York. 5" x 12", acrylic on paper

Speaking of landscapes, as I was a few posts back -- this is what it looks like where I grew up. While living all those years in Vermont, I could never get used to the field of vision being entirely taken up with mountains covered with trees, and very little sky. I liked that too, but I always missed the pastoral landscape of central New York, broken up into a living quilt of fields and hedgerows, streams and winding roads.

(detail)

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I'm always interested in matters of art and culture: what's happening, and how and why we interact with it as a society and as individuals. Clothing is one particularly fascinating aspect of that; visual art another. In the past couple of days I've come across several good articles on these subjects and wanted to share the links with you.

Via @Berfrois, here's a thought-provoking interview about art, style, clothing, and the consumerization of non-conformity. In it, the Russian artist Margarita Tupitsyn talks about the evolution of her own personal style, and the liberation she felt when first discovering the non-gender-specific clothing of Japense designers. The Art of Style: An Interview Between Margarita and Masha Tupitsyn.

"For Japanese designers, clothing was about expressing who you are through clothing, not simply signaling cues of desirability...Today, everyone, artists included, aspire to be part of the mainstream. There is no alternative culture anymore. --Margarita Tupitsyn

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Archaeology meets life in this essay by Elizabeth Mosier that moves from putting together pieces of colonial china to sorting a fabric stash left by her deceased mother-in-law.

"Memories are my material; writing is the way I keep myself from shattering...

My point is that we value objects (or not) according to the personal meaning that we bestow. Perhaps it’s sacrilegious to say it, but in the months since the sauceboat’s discovery, I’ve often wondered if the pristine Bonnin and Morris pickle stand on exhibit at the art museum escaped the privy pit not because it was treasured, but because it is absurd. In life as in memory, what we don’t use is preserved intact. But the archaeological record is often created in crisis, with emotion guiding what we take with us and what we leave behind." -- Elizabeth Mosier

Having just come back from my family home, which always leaves me full of thoughts about objects and places, time and attachments, this piece resonated -- but so did a quote from Martin Buber sent to me by my friend V., with whom I had discussed my emotional reaction to that recent trip. I recognized myself in the writing of much-younger Mosier, but realize I am heading much more now -- sometimes reluctantly, sometimes gratefully -- into the territory Buber describes:

"Insofar as a human being makes do with the things that [he/she] experiences and uses, [he/she] lives in the past, and [his/her] moment has no presence. [He/She] has nothing but objects, but objects consist in having been.

"Presence is not what is evanescent and passes, but what confront us, waiting and enduring.  And the object is not duration but standing still, ceasing, breaking off, becoming rigid, standing out, the lack of relation, the lack of presence."
-- Martin Buber, I and Thou

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Finally, I've long been fascinated by the work of performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose most recent piece is "512 hours" at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Unlike her celebrated and controversial "residence" at MoMa, where, for eight hours a day for three months, Abramovic sat silently across a table from visitors who queued for the privilege, in London 160 visitors at a time are allowed into a bare gallery after leaving all their electronic devices in lockers. Abramovic "places" them in the space and tells them what to do, which forms yet another comment on our participation with art and the role of the artist in controlling not only herself but her public, and thus confronting both "normal" society and its tendency toward conformity. This review in the London Telegraph deals with those issues head-on (the first part is descriptive; you'll need to read to the end to get the full commentary by this reviewer.)

In appearance Abramovic looks like a cross between Clytemnestra and an Earth Mother. Her beauty is inseparable from a personality so powerful that she can silence a room just by entering it...

Everyone in the gallery seemed blissfully happy but what I was seeing is what I imagine the open ward of a mental hospital in which the inmates have been heavily sedated must be like. The combination of the long wait in the queue and the atmosphere of soporific peace and quiet presided over by the commanding mother figure, had reduced everyone I saw to happy zombies.

Except me. It took me exactly 30 seconds to realise that I live in a parallel universe to all the people around me. Whenever I’m on a train or aeroplane and the captain tells us all to sit back and relax I long to reply that I’ve spent my entire life trying not to relax and I’m not about to start now. I hated every second I spent in this show. I longed to escape and can’t tell you what relief I felt on emerging from it into a world of light and air where people walked and talked normally, where they checked their iPhone, raced for the bus and had deadlines to meet.

Yet even as my mind raced with all these thoughts I was perfectly aware that of all the people who visited that show I was the one who most needed to be there. The important thing about Abramovic’s work is not what your reaction to it is, but that you react to it at all. -- Richard Dorment

I'd love to hear from any readers who actually attended one of Abramovic's performances in London and/or New York. Even more specifically, what do you think about the provocative statement in the first article, "Today, everyone, artists included, aspire to be part of the mainstream. There is no alternative culture anymore." ?

 

Rainy Montreal Morning

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had an early morning dental appointment, and came up from the metro into one of the downtown shopping centers -- this was a glitzy one that hasn't done too well; when it opened there was a piano player on one of the upper floors, and a lot of upscale boutiques. I like the building though, and walked through before going out onto Bldv. St. Catherine. Sephora was still asleep, but the early morning beer deliveries were in full swing, even if the lights for danse contact, behind, weren't quite on yet...Montreal fans are switching from hockey to the World Cup: a real sign that spring -- maybe even summer --has finally arrived.

 

Lupine

 

And some of their cousins, in my garden. Lupines are definitely what's happening right now, along with iris of various sorts. I worked in the garden Friday and Saturday mornings (I was wrong about the veggie gardeners, it's all fine) and got a lot done, as well as getting very sweaty. Feels good...and oh, the sunshine!

 

My Father's War

My father was a tank driver in WWII. He and his unit were part of the Normandy invasion, crossing the channel the day after D-Day, which is why I'm posting this today rather than yesterday. He went on to fight under Patton in the European theatre, including the Battle of the Bulge, and spent a long time in a hospital in Belgium for injuries suffered in a jeep accident. Obviously he survived and came home to marry my mother and become the father of a baby girl a few years later.

To this day, my dad won't talk about the war. He is a peace-loving, tender-hearted person who didn't even like to fish when I was growing up. He has never considered himself a hero. Earlier this year, he was invited to take part in an Honor Flight to Washington D.C. to see the various war memorials. It was an emotional day for him, mostly because he was surprised and moved by the outpouring of gratitude for his service by the people who attend and support these events for veterans, but it didn't seem to change his attitude at all. He went to war as a naive minister's kid from a small town in upstate New York and came home having seen things  -- from deaths of comrades at close hand to the liberation of a concentration camp -- that no one should ever have to experience. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think he would sum it up by saying "War is hell; we did what we had to do and I'm one of the lucky ones who came home."

Being sixty years old myself and seeing how -- no matter what the rhetoric -- no war is ever the one to end all others, I'verealized more and more that the story that becomes "history" is quite different from reality, and depends entirely on which side you are on. I mistrust any glorification of war; all you have to do is read Herodotus or Thucydides, or the Bible for that matter, to see how long that narrative has been embraced.

Is there such a thing as a just war? Watching the excellent BBC series "Foyle's War" last winter, which presents the war from the British perspective, made me ponder that question even more than before because it showed how much pacifism and conscientious objection actually existed, and also how much controversy there was about "appeasement" vs. fighting -- a story we don't hear much in the U.S.  From my own visits to Britain, it's been clear to me how much the American effort mattered then and still matters now. Europe under Hitler would have been a terrible thing, and who knows what would have happened in the Pacific, Africa, and elsewhere? What did happen - the dropping of the atomic bomb, the dividing of eastern and western Europe, the partitioning of the Middle East and the establishment of Israel, the Cold War, the legacy of Stalin and spread of communism, the rise of America as a superpower, and so many other post-war effects - have also had huge impacts not only on subsequent political history but millions and millions of individual lives, both for good and for ill. It's not simple.

So for me, it's a sober time, and I resist the tendency toward glorification and celebration. Of course I am very proud of my father but his own humility and reticence about WWII, and his increasingly dubious view of subsequent wars and political events, were the greater legacy he gave me. I've never been able to watch movies about the Normandy invasion, and looking at photographs like these always makes me cry. For me it's personal: someone I love was there, in that nightmare, in the waves and the blood and the noise. He lived to come home and make me and bring me up with a tender love that never contained violence, hate, or fear, while other young fathers and fathers-to-be, on all sides, not to mention mothers and children, have died and continue to die because of the ambitions and delusions of political and religious leaders who skillfully exploit a population's tribal instincts, fears, and hatreds, or coerce them by force and threat to gain power and wealth for a few. Once the megolomaniacs have gained power, the choices are extremely limited. That is how it was, and how it has always been; we seem unable to learn.

Symbols: lilies-of-the-valley -- two more from this spring

Lilies-of-the-valley with stoneware jug and animal skull, pen and ink, May 2014

 

Lilies-of-the-valley with majolica pitcher and animal skull, pen and ink, May 2014

 

Related articles

Daily Drawing, May 23
Symbols: lilies-of-the-valley

Symbols: lilies-of-the-valley

One more photo from the lake: my mom's lilies-of-the-valley, blooming away - a whole bank of them - and last year's drawings.

Still life with lilies-of-the-valley in a wedgewod pot and a Palestinian purse.

Still life with lilies-of-the-valley, wedgewood pot, and animal skull, in two versions and line weights.