Newsletter April 2012

Greetings from the mountains of western Maine!

Spring is at its showiest and best now, earlier than ever.  New flowers are opening every day, fiddleheads are unrolling, and birds are singing.  The mountains are beginning to show a delicate green here and there.  The hermit thrushes have returned; I heard one tuning up early this morning.

I went out yesterday to look at the bloodroot patch.  I had been thinking that I should just go and sit and soak in their beauty, since I am working on a painting about bloodroot now.  I was really disappointed.  They were finished blooming already.  A rainstorm had knocked the petals down, and all that was left was a patch of green leaves and flower stalks with tiny seed pods.  But I sat down to look at them for a while anyway, and I learned something.

Flowers are flashy and attention-getting, a joy to the senses.  But those simple stalks with seed pods developing on them had a grace and beauty all their own.  Flowers are here today and gone tomorrow.  But the life of the plant goes on in the seed, from generation to generation.  Flowering is eye-catching, but fruit-bearing has a deeper, more elemental beauty.  The seed pods are small and insignificant-looking, but inside them new life is growing.  I went looking for flowers, and came away in awe of the miracle of a seed.

I discovered again that the subtle things, the small things, the hidden things, can be beautiful, too.  The secret world of a seed developing is as much a part of nature’s beauty as the more obvious things.  My painting as it stands right now is all about the flowers.  I see now that I need to incorporate more of the bloodroot’s nature and life process into it, somehow, including the seeds.

What I learned from the bloodroot this week seems to be a metaphor for my own life, too.  A few years ago I was managing an art gallery and going to college.  I was blossoming and growing in those days, learning new things, being in the public eye.  Now I am hidden away in my studio, pursuing the dreams that I was dreaming then.  This is a much more private time for me, but also much more fruitful.

The gallery, Pennacook Art Center, has disappeared and reappeared in a changed form, too.  It is no longer a commercial gallery, but has metamorphosed into a small grassroots cooperative.  The storefront on Congress Street in Rumford was showy, like an ephemeral bloodroot flower.  But what we are doing now is self-supporting and sustainable.  And I believe that in the long run it will be much more fruitful.  (To see what some of our artists have been doing, you take a look at our Fine Art America website: http://pennacook-art-center.artistwebsites.com .)

I ran across this quote from George Santayana this week: To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.  I think that I would like best to be interested in the changing seasons, and hopelessly in love with each one of them in turn, as they change.  I sincerely hope that you are enjoying your spring season this year.

My gift to you this month is going to put me out on a limb.  If you would like to try growing bloodroot from seed, I will attempt to collect some seeds when they are ready, and send them to you.  They need to be planted immediately, and kept moist.  They will not sprout until next spring, or possibly the spring after.  Let me know if you are interested, and I will send you information about how to plant them.  Bloodroot grows best under deciduous trees; our biggest patch of them is in a small stand of maple and birch.

For more information on “Swift River Treasures,” my artmaking process, classes, or recent work, or to check out my blog, see my website at http://www.betsygraybell.com.  Here you can buy original artwork, or order prints of my work from Fine Art America.  You can also find links to the Moments of Transcendence book and my online stores for shirts, mugs, and housewares featuring my art.

Thanks for joining me in the journey.  I hope that you enjoy looking at the art as much as I have enjoyed making it!  I would love to hear from you, too, so please do reply with comments.

Newsletter March 2012

NEWSLETTER March 2012

Greetings from the mountains of western Maine!

The first day of spring really looked and felt like a spring day this year, for the first time since I have lived in Maine. But the Winter That Wasn’t has been followed by a spastic spring, jerking us from winter to summer and back again. I don’t know yet if the warm weather lasted long enough to coax out any plants or animals that would be seriously injured by a return to the cold.

I even saw a tattered mourning cloak butterfly two weeks ago when the thermometer hit eighty degrees. The bloodroot plants in the backyard started to show above ground at least three weeks ahead of schedule. But two days later the temperatures dropped back almost to zero. The butterfly disappeared, the bloodroot stopped growing, and the forsythia bush halted in mid-bloom. Everything here has gone on hold, awaiting warmer weather again and the melting of this week’s snow.

I have continued my work on the bloodroot painting, slowly feeling my way through the process. The biggest oil painting I have done in the past five years was three inches across, so this is a real stretch! The first step was the composition, which I worked out on the computer.

I started by opening files of my best bloodroot drawings in Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is the program I still use for basic image manipulation. I moved them around until I had an arrangement that was pleasing to me and interesting to look at. I decided right away that the overall shape of the canvas needed to be a golden rectangle, landscape orientation (wider than it is tall). Someday I will expound at length on the golden mean, the golden rectangle, and their mathematical relationship to art and nature, but that would be too much of a digression for this month.

Suffice it to say that once I had the drawings arranged, I superimposed a golden spiral on top of them and found that it was a perfect fit. I didn’t plan it that way on purpose. I had just instinctively arranged the bloodroot images to fit in the spiral that springs from the golden mean. It is the same spiral that describes the form of a chambered nautilus and a spiral galaxy, the pattern of the bracts on a pine cone, and the path of a fly as it approaches an object. Not every artist is as in love with the geometry of nature as I am. But that is a glimpse for you into the workings of my mind as I am laying out a painting.

I was planning on stretching the canvas for this painting myself. Since heavy duty stretcher bars for large paintings only come in a limited number of sizes, I had to compromise a little on my golden rectangle’s proportions. I altered the composition to fit a canvas that is three feet high and five feet wide. After that, I put a grid on the composition with lines that were six inches apart, to help me transfer it to the canvas. The last step was to print a half-size copy of it on paper (it took eight sheets, which I taped together).

If you haven’t guessed by now, this is a labor of love. It’s my lot in life to find such simple, childlike joy in the natural world around me. A bloodroot plant is worthy of this much attention, don’t you think? You can’t see the flowers in my backyard. But if I can draw and paint them for you, you might be able to see what I see and get some joy out of it, too.

My gift to you this month is a file of the bloodroot plant emerging. You have my permission to use it as you wish. I find it an encouraging drawing at this time of year. Winter may be reluctant to loose its grip on us, but spring will come.

For those of you who are local, I will be offering two mat-cutting classes this spring through our Region 9 adult education program, one for beginners and one for more experienced framers. (You can find more information on the “Classes” page of my website at http://betsygraybell.com/classes/.) I am also open to teaching classes here at Swift River Studio if you are interested, and they are listed on that page as well.

The forest is speaking to us all the time. (Paul Rezendes, Tracking and the Art of Seeing)

Thanks for joining me in the journey. I hope that you enjoy looking at the art as much as I have enjoyed making it! I would love to hear from you, too, so please do reply with comments.

Newsletter Feb. 2012

Newsletter February 2012  The birth of a painting

Greetings from the mountains of western Maine!

Old-time tradition in this part of Maine says that Groundhog Day is winter’s halfway point. You check your woodpile and your canned goods to be sure you still have half your supplies left. No self-respecting groundhog would be out and about, that is for sure. Maine groundhogs are all still asleep in the near-death of hibernation, waiting quietly for spring.

For me, February has been a month for quiet reflection, and the birth of a painting. In this newsletter I want to give you a glimpse into where this painting came from. Hopefully it will inspire you, too. Let’s review it from the top.

I have the joy of living in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Art-making is a way for me to capture bits of the beauty that is all around me and share them with you.

Here is the process: I go for long rambling walks in the woods and fields around my home. Something catches my eye, some treasure of nature. I photograph it, and bring home a specimen for my museum if it is an abundant species. I take notes and write about it in my blog. I learn all I can about it from my nature books and resources on the internet. I draw it carefully, over and over, investigating its structure and admiring its beauty. After I know it by heart, then I am ready to make a painting about it, recombining its forms into a larger composition that presents and interprets it in a fresh way.

The painting that I am working on right now is about the bloodroot plant. It has been more than ten years in the making, preceded by countless drawings and paintings that explored the territory and paved the way. I think that the most pivotal drawing was one that I did for a college drawing class in 2004, even though the subject is quite different. The assignment was to draw an insect, recombining the shapes of its different parts into an interesting composition. I did not have a bug at hand, but I did have a crab shell in my little museum of natural treasures. Here is the finished drawing.

This is an 18” by 24” graphite pencil drawing. You can see that I drew the crab from more than one point of view, and repeated the shape of the claws and shell. The idea of taking the forms and recombining them into new patterns stuck with me from then on.

I love to make careful illustrative drawings that describe a flower or a leaf literally in all its perfection. But I also have an interpretive streak in me. I find myself wanting to play with the forms, the color, and the presentation in ways that make you look at the object from a brand new vantage point. In Swift River Treasures, the colored pencil drawings are the illustrations. And the paintings are going to be the interpretations, where I get to cut loose.

Search and discover. Draw and draw and draw. Then paint. The bloodroot plant is the first treasure that I am taking all the way through this process from start to finish. Eventually I would like to have investigated twenty or more local natural treasures in this way, and use that as material for a book. That means Swift River Treasures will ultimately consist of at least twenty sets of drawings, and twenty written essays, twenty large paintings, and a book. (I will be sharing bits of it in my blog and in my print-on-demand stores as I go.) Yes, this is going to take a while. And I am not in a hurry. Welcome to Life in the Slow Lane.

The story of constructing the canvas (a three foot by five foot golden rectangle already on my easel) and laying out the composition will have to wait for another newsletter.

The crab shell drawing is one of my all-time favorites, among all the drawings I have ever done. It is hanging on the wall here in my studio where I can look at it every day. It reminds me of where I am going with my art, and helps me stay on target. My gift to you this month is a file of it to use as you wish.

Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. (Georgia O’Keefe)

Thanks for joining me in the journey. I hope that you enjoy looking at the art as much as I have enjoyed making it! I would love to hear from you, too, so please do reply with comments.

Newsletter September 2011

NEWSLETTER September 2011   Revisiting the Bloodroot plant

Greetings from the mountains of western Maine!

Fall is coming in softly this year, in gentle nudges. We have already had one frost, but many of the days since then have been warm and summer-like. A flock of flickers stopped off for breakfast in our yard this morning, on their way south. It will not be long until the color is behind us and the landscape is all black and white again.

I spent a lot of my studio time in September revisiting an old friend, the bloodroot plant, Sanguinaria canadensis. Working from photos that I took this year, I have been reworking my bloodroot drawings into the format I have chosen for the Swift River Treasures drawings, colored pencil on heavy Arches watercolor paper. Here is the mixed media drawing I did in 2009, and the drawing that I just finished, so you can compare them.

Two drawings of bloodroot unfolding, from 2009 (left) and 2011

The old drawing is on the left, and the new one on the right. I will be going back and redoing the other subjects from my first year of botanical studies, too, like the pine tree and the Canada lily. Then the work will present a cohesive image that I can turn into a fine book.

I have also gone deeper in my research of the bloodroot plant and found out some marvelous things about it. For example, bloodroot plants have a fascinating relationship with the ants that live among their roots. Their seeds carry an appendage called an elaiosome that is a very nutritious food source for the ants. The ants collect the seeds, carry them home, and eat the elaiosomes. Then they discard the rest of the seed, still intact, in their refuse tunnels. This provides ideal conditions for the seeds to germinate and grow, safe from being eaten by other predators. This mutually beneficial relationship between the ants and the plants is called “myrmecochory.” The ants get the food. The bloodroot seeds are preserved, moved away from the parent plants, and given an ideal environment for germination. And this produces more food for the ants. A number of wildflowers are myrmecochorous (for example, trilliums and some violets).

Here is a scan of another page of bloodroot drawings, showing (clockwise, from the top left) a whole flower as seen against the litter of last year’s leaves, the center of the bloom with its stamens, the whole plant with its leaf unfolded, and the seed pod.

Colored pencil studies of bloodroot

Bloodroot is an ephemeral spring star. The blossoms last only about a week. Insects to pollinate the flowers can be scarce in the early spring, but I have found out that this does not matter. For the first two days after the flower opens, the stamens are close to the petals and do not contact the stigma, even at night when the flower is closed. But on the third day, the anthers are positioned upright and the filaments bend inward, so that the plant will self-pollinate if it has not already been pollinated by an insect. I had no idea that the bloodroot was such a marvel of natural design.

I have also started work on a large (three feet by five feet) painting about the bloodroot. I am in the composition stage with it right now, pushing the design elements around on my computer screen. I will keep you up to date on my progress with it over the next few months.

My gift to you this month is a file of the drawing of the bloodroot bloom with the leaf behind it, attached to this newsletter. You may do what you will with it; I give you my permission.

All the big people are simple, as simple as the unexplored wilderness. They love the universal things that are free to everybody. Light and air and food and love and some work are enough. In the varying phases of these cheap and common things, the great lives have found their joy. (Carl Sandburg, in a letter to his wife, as quoted in My Connemara by his granddaughter, Paula Steichen)

Thanks for joining me in the journey. I hope that you enjoy looking at the art as much as I have enjoyed making it! I would love to hear from you, too, so please do reply with comments.

Betsy