Plants

impromptu

studio still lives
hilma postcards
pigment processes
morning quick collages
harris tweed color considerations

Join me this Saturday 20 September at Fruitlands Museum (Harvard, MA) from 11am-3pm for a drop-in dye demonstration —indigo, madder & goldenrod.  

I’ll be outside the former Shaker office, where you can view my installation ‘anything but drab’ inside.

an excerpt below of my poem ‘any color they could dye’ using dye names from historic dye books—



any color they could dye
 
reds of--
pink with French plums
cochineal and crimson
rose pink to peachwood
reds of pink paleness
pink white primroses
barnwood red with beetroot
scarlet berries with geranium
 
oranges
golden
turmeric
orange
 
yellows
of bark
of gold 
of brown
of yellow green
 
greens
wood green and yellow green
invisible and deep green
chem bottle and deep grass green
olive and pea and myrtle green
slate and blue green
 
blues
a Spanish fly
a blue fawn
a magazine blue
a chemical magazine
a royal a slate and a Prussian blue
a bluesoblack
a bluesodrab
 
drabs
drab drab drabs
reddish red
sandy
silver 
sage
salmon and dove
beavers and gloves
drab drab drab
 
purples
puce purple and crimson
deep purple deep maroon
logwood lavender lilac
fast purple fast maroon
 
browns
a very fast fawn brown
olive with claret brown
coffee chocolate cinnamon brown
damson

blacks
dutch black
imperial weighted
 
greys
of bark
of liver
of dark smoke
and batwings
and doves

indigo | goldenrod | madder | installation view photograph by Kate Wool

Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Road, Harvard, MA 01451 | 978.456.3924

yellow yellow blue blue  shiny
 
 
what does blue sound like
and chrome egg yolk yellow
or a pink mourning cloud
 
dark indigo weft
maximized to shimmer
jars your eyes
 
an ethereal
euphoric
emphasis
 
embodied into 
extraordinary
reverie

images: goldenrod at dawn, Mary Gartside’s Yellow colour blot, Polly Jane Reed’s Spiritual Map, The Holy City and chrome yellow in situ at the brick dwelling

tumeric lichen
pink sands
celadon lichen
turquoise sea
yellow gorse
silver sea
black rock

gathering gold—

glistening glittering mica chips
dandelion rainbow strands
molten orange M initialed
pleated dress of worship & work
golden orbed dawn
palest lemon goldenrod tuft
waves frozen, seedhead
mighty morning orb

five summers ago
harvested dahlias
stuck between sheets of paper
simmered, steamed
 
stacks of silhouettes, waited
suddenly, this summer,
their sense seeped in
 
was it seeing the blots of
Mary Gartside, seeking
flower essence through color?
 
fifty seven washed with
gouaches and watercolors
Inks of—daffodils, pine cones,
black walnuts, marigolds

Thanks to Alexandra Loske for alerting me to Gartside.

Her book, Mary Gartside:
Abstract Visions of Color at Thomas Heneage Books

Thanks to Naumkeag for the Artist Residency in 2019
where the dahlias were gathered.

plants as prints as watercolors as thoughts as sky as poetry
.
‘Verbal creation, he [Seamus Heaney] writes,
 is an archaeological dig, 
“a dig for finds that end up being plants.” ‘

From Elaine Scarry’s book, Dreaming by the Book 
and Heaney's  book Feeling Into Words: Selected Prose 1968-78

Caretaker Farm CSA flowers and summer ‘dahlia series’
plant inks and gouache on dahlia mono print

started a summer series with
Mary Gartside’s colour blots
as inspiration


dahlia prints from Naumkeag Artist residency
daffodil ink from Suzi Banks Baum 
pinecone ink from Hancock

studio work table #workinprogress 
summer 2024 dahlia series
.

[second image, Gartside Yellow and Orange blots found in ‘Mary Gartside c. 1755-1819: Abstract Visions of Colour’ written by Alexandra Loske and published by Thomas Heneage Art Books]

endangered species

recently, a friend reminded me of 
a temporary art work I made for 
“Clean Out Your Files Week”

materials:
gently used file folders
print shop off-cuts.
items destined for the dumpster

each folder acquired a new label,
a long strand of paper with either —
a bird, crustacea, fish, insect, spider,
mammal, mussel, snail, plant, reptile
.or amphibian—printed on it

endangered species names from 
The National Geographic Society
Book, ‘The Company We Keep’
by Douglas H. Chadwick &Joel Sartore, 1995

Commissioned by The Department of 
Environmental Services and Arlington
Cultural Affairs, Arlington County, VA.
The 1998 installation was in the lobby
of the Bozman Government Center.

And, when finished, all materials were 
either reused or recycled. 

Thanks to Angela Adams for inviting me
to be part of Clean Out Your Files Week.

[photos by Jason Horowitz]

is just blue, or azure sky blue?
red or scarlet poppy red?
pink or carnation pink?

In her 1898 book,
“The Use of Color in the Verse of
English Romantic Poets,” Alice Edwards Pratt 
delves deep into the poets 
“descriptive, discriminative, dramatic, aesthetic”
words of color
such as—
“pinky-silver’
“autumnal leaf like-red”
“purple-hectic”
“rose-ensanquined ivory”
and charts each poet’s color
by terms for--
“mountains and hills”
“sky, cloud and air”
“deep waters”


Happily I found Pratt whilst reading
Nicholas Gaskill’s essay, ‘Language and Psychology’
in the ‘A Cultural History of Color: 
In the Age of Industry’
edited by Alexandra Loske.

.

in celebration of
dandelions
dickinson
poetry month
pollinators


…………………………….


The Dandelion’s pallid tube
Astonishes the Grass,
And Winter instantly becomes
An infinite Alas—

The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower,—
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o’er.


………………..

Dickinson wrote this poem as a letter to her friend Mrs. Edward Tuckerman and included an additional line, “Vinne told me.”

Celebrating  Harvard University Press new edition The Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Cristianne Miller and Domhnall Miller.

Dickinson’s letter to Tuckerman is in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA)

snow on fields

stitched onto cloth

and written into this poem

unfurled a field, a sea of snow grasping onto goldenrod
filling cups aplenty, double dotting punctuation
 
seeing scarlet swatches of bitten bittersweet berries 
 
grapevines curlicue up trees, squirrel nest spaces
unfurling, falling, flouncing onto the forest floor
 
oak, aspen, maple leaves carried into spaces
intervals interlaced into fullness
 
unentangle someone else’s scrawled 
no-sense sentences unto snow’s solaced silence

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

stitched work from the winter field series exhibited at 2017 Norte Maar in a solo show, bewildered


winterfield stalks and stems, silk/cotton thread on damask, 16 x 15 1/2”


winterfield dots and dashes, silk/cotton thread on damask, 16 x 15 1/2”