Newsletter December 2011

NEWSLETTER   December 2011  Where have all our summer friends gone?

Greetings from the mountains of western Maine!

Short days, cold nights, soup simmering on the woodstove—December is a season for sticking close to hearth and home here.  Our summer residents are long gone, leaving only a few hardy friends behind.

I always wonder where they have all gone, and what adventures they are having.  The robins, vultures, myrtle warbler, and some of the sparrows are wintering down the east coast, in warmer parts of the U.S.  The wood thrush and veery have gone to Central America.  So has the chestnut-sided warbler.  Some of the smallest ones journey the farthest.  The yellowthroat may travel as far as the West Indies, and the brilliantly colored redstart even as far as Brazil.  The tiny ruby-throated hummingbird spends its winters in Mexico or Central America.

The groundhog is deep in the winter sleep of  hibernation, its body processes slowed to a faint shadow of life.  The chipmunk sleeps deeply but does not truly hibernate.  Occasionally he wakes and eats some of the food stored in his underground storeroom.  The raccoons and skunks also sleep, but will be up and about from time to time, foraging for food.  The snow will soon be full of tracks from the deer, foxes, and coyotes, who carry on business regardless of the season, and are ranging far in their search for provisions.

Different species of butterfly handle the winter months in different ways.  The mourning cloak butterfly winters over as an adult.  It is the first large butterfly to appear in the spring, usually looking ragged and worn.  The tiger swallowtail hibernates in its chrysalis, and enters the butterfly procession in June, just in time for the lilacs.  The admirals and viceroys spend the winter as caterpillars, so they appear later in the summer.

Viceroy butterfly (left) and Tiger Swallowtail

And our amazing monarch butterflies journey 2000 miles or more, some even traveling as far as central Mexico.  In the spring the migrants begin the flight home, but they stop in the southern U.S. to mate and lay eggs.  It is their descendents who continue the trip north to leave their brightly striped progeny on our milkweed plants.

The studio work has been of the invisible kind this past month, as befits the season.  My biggest project has been to start building a website for myself.  It will pull together all my print-on-demand sites and provide one landing page for my image gallery and blog.  This has been in the planning stages for a long time, so it is really satisfying to get it underway now.

I have been starting from scratch, learning about the WordPress software and working through all the design and construction issues.  What color background will show off the images best?  How big a header do I want?  And what goes on it?  And what pages will I need?  I want to do the best job I can to showcase what I am doing in my studio on a day to day basis.  And hey, if you have any suggestions or requests, let me know.  After all, this is for you.  Needless to say, I am having a blast doing this.  I love the challenge, and I love the design work.

“Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.” (Edith Sitwell)

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

Newsletter October/November 2011

NEWSLETTER   October/November 2011

Greetings from the mountains of western Maine!

Our mountains have been changing from the deep blue-green of summer to the brilliant patchwork of October, to the somber colors of November.  My life the past month has been a patchwork, too, so this will be a newsletter of bits and pieces.

One of the patchwork pieces was doing a commission for a local businessman.  Another piece was limping around on crutches, giving my body the space to heal from a torn ligament in my foot.  (This made everything go in slow motion, hence the combined October/November newsletter.)

Finishing the Canada lily work with a drawing of a mature seed pod was another piece of the patchwork.  This is a colored pencil drawing, on heavy watercolor paper.

Colored Pencil Drawing of a Canada Lily (lilium canadense)

I have been reading more about growing Lilium canadense from seed.  (A helpful article can be found at http://www.nativeplantnetwork.org.)  It is considered an easy plant to propagate, but this is not a quick process.  If you sow the seed directly outdoors in the fall, the seeds remain dormant until the first growing season.  The first year they produce a small bulb.  The second year the plant grows a single leaf.  The third year a whorl of leaves appears.  Those magnificent blooms in my back yard have been a long time in the making!

Another piece of the patchwork was continuing to work on the bloodroot painting that I am planning.  I have become entranced with Renoir’s color handling and brushwork style, and spent many hours reading all I could find on his working technique.  What attracts me to his work is the brilliant purity of color and the transparency of his paint layers.  I am thinking that this is the direction I want to take in order to actually be able to paint the images I can see inside me.

And another piece of the patchwork was adding new products to my online “Maine Mountain Art” store (http://www.printfection.com/mainemountainart). The Printfection company has come out with some new items, like baseball caps, ceramic ornaments, and laptop and iPad sleeves.  So I spent some time dreaming up ways to use them.

New products from Maine Mountain Art store

And lastly, I have opened a second Printfection store, “Nature’s Mandalas,” to showcase products using the round format work in the Exploration of Natural Design and Moments of Transcendence collections (http://www.printfection.com/naturesmandalas).  Here is where the cucumber slices and cosmic zucchinis come together in practical everyday items like sweatshirts, travel mugs and cutting boards.

New products from Nature's Mandalas store

The basic idea of my art bears repeating: I would rather get my work out where a hundred people can enjoy it than have one painting hanging above someone’s couch.  The whole concept of what I am doing is based on sharing.  It’s about me finding beauty in some everyday bit of nature and saying, “Look at this!  Isn’t it lovely?  What exquisite design!”  I hope that it not only enriches your life, but that the next time you cut up a carrot you will pause and look closely at it and appreciate it all the more.

My gift to you this month is simply to offer you the chance to design any custom items you wish, in either store.  If you have an idea for a product, please share it, with no obligation on your part to buy one.  I just like the cross-pollination of getting other people’s input about what to put in the store.  If you want to order a custom item, I will create and post it at no extra charge, from now until the end of the year.  Custom designs will retail for the same price as similar items already on the site.  You can find the images at http://betsy-bell.artistwebsites.com.

If you take the number of images that I have, and multiply that by the number of products that Printfection offers, the possibilities are virtually endless.  Personally, I find the whole process addictive, kind of like eating potato chips.  How would this bloodroot flower look on a round ceramic ornament?  What if I put a row of three veggies on a tote bag?  (That one was my sister’s idea.)  How can this row of multiple cucumbers slices be formatted to go on a laptop sleeve?  The inspiration goes on and on!  So dream it up and email me your ideas.  Please.

All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travelers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken….  (from the short story “No Door” by Thomas Wolfe)

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

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