October, time for my annual sharing of the recent beauty I found in the woods.
I’m clearly not the only one preoccupied with mushrooms at this time of year. This coming Saturday, October 19th, Stevenson, WA offers its inaugural Mushroom Festival. In their words: “Whether you’re a seasoned mycologists, blossoming enthusiast or simply fungi-curious, don’t miss this unforgettable weekend in Stevenson, Washington.”
Loved that. Call me Fungi-curious!
There will be culinary attractions, lots of vendors for all things mycological, and workshops and demonstrations, including plenty of kid activities. Details here.
With perfect timing, the Columbia Gorge Museum opens its doors to the community once again with particularly interesting offers. Currently on exhibit is artist Julie Beeler, with works directly and indirectly driven by her passion for mycology. Symbiosis features, according to the exhibition announcement, “immersive ‘tree totems’ showcasing the vibrant hues derived from regional fungi, alongside textile pieces, mono prints, and photographs that illustrate their connection to the environment.”
Photo Credit Columbia Gorge Museum
Beeler derives dyes from mushrooms, forty varieties of fungi to create 825 vibrant natural pigments, dyes, and paints by some count, and creates sometimes wondrous textile configuration that capture the essence of the PNW landscape colors and configuration.
In addition, she conveys all that knowledge in a recent published book, illustrated by Yuli Gates, The Mushroom Color Atlas. The interactive feature on the link allows you to pick any specific color and then learn which mushroom provides that kind of dye. The book, overall, teaches us about the mycological world, drawing people into exploration of our natural environment.
The artist will be giving a hands-on pigments, paints and inks demonstration at the museum on Saturday. Columbia Gorge Museum | 990 SW Rock Creek Drive | 1pm – 2pm.
It will be followed, at 3:30 pm by Mycophilia In This Now, a presentation by mycology educator and facilitator Jordan Weiss. The educator will feature spectacular mushroom photography and explore the emerging use of technology for fungi as well as information about psilocybin. Weiss has been sharing his knowledge of fungi for decades, working with groups such as the Oregon State University Extension Master Gardener program and Telluride Mushroom Festival as well as mushroom clubs in Salem, Estacada and Bend.
If you can’t make it out to the Columbia Gorge Museum (it is a 50 minutes, beautiful drive, with easy parking, but I get it…) there is another opportunity to dive into the world of mushrooms. The Oregon Mycological Society offers its annual Mushroom Show at the World Forestry Center in PDX on October 27th, from 12 – 5 pm.
Photocredit: OMS website
Yours truly will seek the pleasure of the solitary (photographic) mushroom hunt instead. Blissfully ignorant about their classification, usage, or poison power, just attracted to their spectacular visual beauty, iPhone in hand, composing the next photo montage in my head.
Music today is the latest installment of DJ Farina’sMushroom Jazz, compilations started many years ago. One more delightful than the next.
Fall has arrived at Portland Japanese Garden. Yellowing leaves and needles shine golden when touched by the sun, moss glows chartreuse in the cracks of the stones where it prefers to settle, accentuating the imperfections of the otherwise smooth surfaces. I cannot imagine a more appropriate setting for the exhibition currently on show at the garden’s Pavilion Gallery and Tanabe Gallery.
Kintsugi: The Restorative Art of Naoko Fukumaru is mirroring the sights from the fall garden – attention-grabbing gold and an openness to blemishes rather than perfection of any given object. In addition, the artist offers us much more, introducing general ideas about Japanese philosophy as well as universal approaches to healing, so direly needed in a world torn apart by division and war, in desperate want of mending.
Kin means gold in Japanese, and Tsugi refers to the joining of parts. Fukumaru takes broken vessels or other damaged objects and restores their original shape as much as possible. Rather than hiding the restorative efforts, the contours of the breaks are accentuated with gold dust, now shimmering veins traversing the pottery. The mending consists of a multi-step, time-consuming procedure, applying multiple layers of the Japanese lacquer urushi, a highly allergenic resin derived from the urushi tree, mixing it with powdered gold or silver, and eventual polishing the joined surfaces at the seam.
Some say that Kintsugi can be traced back to Ashikaga Yoshimasa, a shogun of the 15th century. He sent a favorite broken Chinese tea bowl back to China for repair and did not like the outcome at all. Japanese artisans were instructed to develop a more aesthetically pleasing way to restore broken ceramics. The result was Kintsugi.
The essence of the approach is to convey the history of a given object and the beauty found in its imperfection. Mending reconstitutes what has been broken, with visible scars a reminder of the care we extend to what has suffered, and our belief that underneath it is still whole, now even more beautiful. The technique is clearly in line with a more general Japanese philosophy, that of Wabi Sabi. In the most basic form (admittedly my level of understanding), it acknowledges three simple realities:
Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.
Wabi refers to the essence of simplification, of cutting down the things to that which is important, whereas Sabi refers to the passage of time, and more specifically to the fact that the core of something remains the same, even though the facade or surface may change over time (Ref.).
Blue Moon (2023)
Samanid Empire, Nishapur pottery, ca. 10th -12th C. – Repaired with resin, calcium carbonate, 24K gold.
Fukumaru grew up in a third-generation antiques dealer family in Kyoto, Japan. She trained as a restoration expert for glass and ceramics in England and is in high international demand by elite institutions and museums to bring blemished pieces back to perfection. Her turn to Kintsugi happened by chance some 5 years ago, during an exceedingly difficult period in her personal life. She is now counted among the masters of the art form. Creating art that focussed on a narrative of resilience had a therapeutic effect. This is obviously true for all good therapies: we establish meaning through a close look at our history, we focus on what has been overcome, rather than what was harmed, and in the process nourish hope and emphasize strength simultaneously.
The very idea that scars can be beautiful and proud emblems of survival is empowering during times when hope is hard. However changed, the essence of us moves on.
The ceramics on display come from various parts of the world, different cultures and different time periods, all broken in one way or another, discarded from quotidian use, and now restored.
Dreaming in The Blue (2023) (detail)
Kashan Persian earthenware, ca. 11th – mid 1 4th C – Repaired with resin, calcium carbonate, urushi, and 24K gold.
Each vessel has its own story to tell, often helped by explanatory titles. The artist put some back together with added beauty,
combined others with found objects,
Born This Way – Driftwood (2023) Imari porcelain, ca. 1820-1860
Born This Way – Unwanted (2023)
Imari porcelain, ca. 1820-1860 Repaired with resin, urushi, and 24K gold
“Naturally degraded over time, unusually shaped driftwood interacts with human-made ceramics deformed from the extreme heat of the kiln. Both have undergone a journey of transformation, exhibiting an unintentional beauty forged beyond human control. Fukumaru’s Born This Way series looks into the harmony between human and nature’s creations, conveying arguments for what true beauty is in our modern world.” (Display Signage)
and experimented with more ceramic embellishments for a third grouping, adding elements of sculpture.
Beautiful Trauma – Persian Jug (2023) Persian terracotta jug, ca. 1200 – 800 BCE – Repaired with resin, urushi, 24K gold, and plaster “Crystals require high heat, pressure, and time to form. Fukumaru’s motivation behind this piece was transforming negative experiences into something empowering. Conserving the ancient and porous ceramic fragments of the Persian jug was delicate and time-consuming work to which she added dozens of individually cast crystal forms that were carefully refined, assembled, and attached. Created over many months, the process took on meaning: for each scar that heals, a crystal forms as evidence of surmounting hardship.” (Display Signage.)
Her art challenges the viewer to find meaning – as all good art does. The artist herself stresses the therapeutic value of retroactively working through trauma, and coming up healed on the other end. I could not agree more: her work exemplifies resilience. The aesthetics of scar visibility also reminded me of a related approach that we have started to see amongst survivors of surgical trauma, in particular breast cancer. Many women these days opt not for reconstructive surgery, but put striking tattoos over their mastectomy scars, a sign of acceptance of a new kind of beauty born from fear and pain that is overcome. My own relationship with scars, perhaps explaining my intense affinity to Fukumaru’s work, started early. Two symmetrical, L-shaped scars from lung surgery on my 16 years-old back were eventually accepted rather than self-consciously loathed through the beauty of healing words: a friend dryly commented, “I see, that’s where they cut off your wings.” Not that an angelic existence beckoned, but I never had problems with scars again. Embellished acknowledgment healed.
The possibility of reemergence from existential destruction is, of course, particularly poignant for a nation who lived through the horrors of Hiroshima and the 3.11 catastrophe, when on March 11, 2011, an earthquake struck off the coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of residents of the Tohoku region in the northeastern part of the country, which in turn caused a partial meltdown of one of the reactors of the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima Prefecture. Various forms of art revealed the perseverance of the Japanese people working through trauma. Tanka poetry proliferated, describing ordinary people’s reactions and approaches to healing. Filmmakers captured the determination to overcome disaster. Here is my favorite short by Isamu Hirabayashi, a brilliant monologue of a cicada that survived the 66 years between the two disasters. It acknowledges that nothing lasts forever in face of catastrophe, but that forward movement is required to the very last moment.
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We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people’s bodies, from communities, as if there’s no limit, as if there’s no consequence to how we’re taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people’s bodies are breaking. We are taking too much. – Naomi KleinThis changes everything (2014)
Back to the art on hand: the Kintsugi process does not just alert to the retroactive implications of healing, but also the proactive value of mending: preserving something in a world that is bent on overconsumption, the lure of the ever new.
Whether it is fashion or the production of cheap household goods, these days we encounter cycles of fast creation and quick discarding. We are caught in a mode of linear production. The line goes from extraction of the resources needed to manufacture a good, to production, to distribution, to consumption, and finally, to disposal. Eventually the resources we extract will run out and disposal of the evermore accumulating waste existentially harms the planet’s health.
What Fukumaru does for ceramics, many fabric artists do for those things that we consume and discard the most, clothing: rather than throwing things out, they are visibly elevated to works of art, by embroidery or other forms of visible mending. In fact the visible mending movement (the link provides multiple examples of the art form) often employs golden threads, and consciously refers to Kintsugi as a model for restoration. The Dutch fashion collective Painted Series, for example, started a non-profit clothing brand called GOLDEN JOINERY, where people were invited to repair garments with golden thread, showing the rips instead of hiding them. These fabric arts are also closely related to another gift Japanese crafters gave to the world: Sashiko, a Japanese mending technique involving a running stitch and geometric patterns.
Melting Sun (2021)
Excavated stoneware by Michael Henry, ca. 1970s – Repaired with textile, threads, and resin
“Sashiko, a traditional Japanese technique that uses embroidery to functionally reinforce fabric, inspired this piece. Fukumaru fused thousands of her hand stitches with a recovered bowl by Canadian potter, Mick (Michael)Henry. The stitches represent the manmade tension and strains on our world in contrast to the rustic clay bowl.” (Display Signage)
What we are really talking about here is a form of upcycling, when we change a linear system to a circular one, by reclaiming what already exists, and refashioning it into something that has more value: upcycling discarded clothes into new ones, or into different objects, or incorporating them into art. Upcycling broken pottery into restored vessels, or into different configurations, works of art. Fukumaru’s creative output, in other words, does not solely affect our concept of resilience, but also reminds us of the importance of sustainability.
Nothing lasts. Nothing is finished. Nothing is perfect.
Yet we can buy time, extend the life span, change our perspective on the value of imperfection. We can trust that some core will remain constant, even in the face of appearance change. This is true for pottery, for our emergence from trauma and loss, for the ravages of aging.
And it is particularly true for gardens: seasons and their respective offerings don’t last. No work is ever finished. All striving for perfection a futile exercise. Yet they are the very model of resilience and sustainability if we take care to restore them, nurture them, make the changing beauty visible for all to apprehend.
Just my luck. The randomly picked day for a visit to the Giustina Gallery at Oregon State University in Corvallis turned out to be move-in day for the students. Go Beavers! And their parents! And about every car in Oregon clogging the streets and making parking near impossible to find. No regrets, though. I soon left the chaos and the cacophony of competing marching band practices behind, entering a world that transported me quickly to a very different place.
Erik Sandgren Wreck of the Peter Iredale and Cape Disappointment Fort Stevens State Park 2014
On display until October 25, 2024 is an extravagant collection of works by numerous artists all centered around imagery found along the length of the Oregon Coast: Pacific Threshold: Sandgren & Sandgren- Painting the Oregon Coast with Friends 1978-2023. The selected paintings, watercolors and charcoals emerged from over 40 years of summer painting sessions at the coast, organized by Nelson Sandgren, a painter and printmaker who taught at Oregon State University for thirty-eight years, from 1948 until 1986. He was joined by his son, Erik Sandgren, who continued to keep the PaintOuts alive and kicking, while he taught art at college level and established a track record as one of Oregon’s most noted and collected painters in his own right.
Dee Vadnais Ecola Arch Ecola State Park 2019
I had written about the experience of being at a PaintOut previously; Sandgren opens a window into that world in more detail here. It is worthwhile reading his description either before or after you visit the exhibition, because it puts a context around the presented art that will make it easier to grasp the variety of works on display. Some are at the threshold of notable artworks, others have long crossed that line. Some capture the threshold between land and sea, others focus on a threshold where visual objects are translated into psychological experiences, (for both painter and this viewer, I should add.)
Anthony James Cotham Driftwood Shelter at Seal Rock Seal Rock State Park 2009
Curated around the geographical locations defining the coast, the salon-style – hung works allow you to peruse familiar and unfamiliar vistas, depending on your travel habits. Much joy in recognizing familiar scenery. The fact that different media are bunched together, diversity further emphasized by individual framing choices that eventually blend together in a lively fashion, sharpens the sense that we encounter here a collective at work. They all hone in on the way nature shapes the coast, shapes our perceptions, and informs ways of expression that need not be literal, although representationalism is the most frequent mode in this show.
Here is a helpful list of those artists exhibiting as well as of participants in the annual workshops. Those showing were invited to maximize the range of styles on display. As Sandgren told me, the goal was to present all possible styles, from abstract to expressionist to impressionist and California neoimpressionist approaches, all tackling a unified subject matter. The only regret of the exposition was the lighting – the rather dark rooms have plenty of spot lights directed at the art work. Since most of it is behind glass, as aquarelle and charcoals must be, the glare is a nuisance.
That said, there are interesting observations of how the styles of the teachers influenced those of the participating students and colleagues in some cases, and how others found quite independent voices while still adhering to the shared value: the connection to, appreciation of, and love for nature. I should add that there are also a number of perceptive nods to the fishing industry,
Nelson Sandgren Summer Harboring Depoe Bay Motif Depoe Bay
Carol Norton Yates Coos Bay Boat Repair Charleston 1985 — Susan Trueblood Stuart Yaquina Harbor Newport 1985
Erik Sandgren On the Hard at Port Orford Port Orford 2017
or the visual beauty of structures that define the coastal regions, bridges and light houses.
Bets Cole Yaquina Light Yaquina Head
Netson Sandgren Cape Blanco Light Cape Blanco — Erik Sandgren Visionary Light at Cape Blanco Cape Blanco 2017
In fact, there was barely a seascape that did not have some structural element prominently in view, rather than solely waves and water. Contrast helps visual definition, I guess. Who knows, maybe there will be soon another J.M. Turner in the making…. those unmatched seascapes that transferred the threshold between land and water into that of water and sky.
Erik Sandgren Barview Jetty Tillamook Bay 2010
Nelson Sandgren Florence Dunes Honeyman State Park 2000
I was particularly drawn to the many and varied depictions of trees. The rainforests along the coast have some of the toughest conditions of survival, battered by winds, salt water and rapidly changing temperatures. Artists captured the defiant nature of these gnarly giants well.
Debby Sundbaum-Sommers Sea Dragon Shore Acres State Park 2019
Susan DeRosa Overlapping, In the Woods Neptune State Scenic Viewpoint 2017— Gretchen Vadnais Big Spruce Newport
Cynthia Jacobi Grove at Neptune State Park Neptune State Scenic Vewpoint 2023 —Sally Bolton Resting Spot Cape Perpetua 2023
Threshold is often defined as beginning, and the PaintOut gatherings were certainly something new and obviously very desirable. They gathered a community of like-minded artists, with the shared commitment likely pushing individual participants over their own thresholds of insecurity regarding their art, or their threshold of willingness to get up regularly and defy the weather, something much harder when it is just yourself out there.
Nelson Sandgren Rocky Creek Rocky Creek Scenic Viewpoint: 2000 — Humberto Gonzales Rocky Creek Rocky Creek Scenic Viewpoint: 2007
Threshold is also the point where a psychological effect emerges, if certain variables all come together. The accumulation of paintings, so many all in one spot, really enhanced rather than detracted from the appreciation of any individual one. Just like the coast surrounds you with multiple varied stimuli, the light, noise, smells and sensory experience of the wind and rain, the depictions congregated into a representational landscape of their own.
Robin Berry Tide Tossed Seal Rock State Park
Jim Shull Elephant Rock 2 Seal Rock State Park 2005
Congregation, come to think of it, is an applicable term for the community of artists who, summer after summer, spend time together painting, critiquing, encouraging and learning from each other. Not a religious fervor, but a fervor nonetheless for capturing nature, pushing an individual’s experience across a threshold into artistic depiction. Makes one jealous in a world ever more bent on isolation.
Leland John Nelson and Friends at Bandon Bandon 2002
Here they were, some time ago, painting together, and each other. I photographed subsequent generations two years ago.
At least we can share the output. If you can’t make it to Corvallis to visit and explore this treasure trove, there is a book that serves as the catalogue for the exhibition. It is available on site or can be ordered here.
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Pacific Threshold: Sandgren & Sandgren- Painting the Oregon Coast with Friends 1978-2023
Exhibit Dates: Monday, September 9, 2024 to Friday, October 25, 2024
The Giustina Gallery: 875 SW 26th St., Corvallis, Oregon, 97331.
GALLERY HOURS:
The LaSells Stewart Center, Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., unless in private event use.
Please confirm your date and hours to ensure access.
Susan Rudisill Conversation on the Cobbles Neptune State Scenic Viewpoint 2016
Title image : Erik Sandgren Drift Log Fort Seal Rock State Park 2023
Sometimes you wonder – prominent art website announces fall line up for “art adjacent” events in NYC.
What is mentioned? Dance at the Whitney. Edges of Ailey will include over 90 live dance performances, classes, and engaging talks held in the museum’s third-floor theater, honoring the legacy of the legendary choreographer. Here is a blurb from the museum website about one of the performances I would no doubt want to see, if I still went into theaters…
DEATHBED: Trajal Harrell remembers the African American choreographer, dancer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham (1909–2006), who toured the world in the 1940s and ’50s and developed a technique based on dances from African and Afro-Caribbean cultures as well as Vodun, ballet, jazz, and modern dance. Harrell wonders about Dunham’s relationship to the Japanese choreographer and dancer Tatsumi Hijikata (1928–1986), who is known today as one of the founders of the postwar Japanese dance Butoh and has been a major influence on Harrell’s work.
Art or Art adjacent: Dance?
Images from the Whitney terrace where Ailey’s work will be performed.
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Next up: a Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity, organized by the photographer, performance artist and 2023 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient María Magdalena Campos-Pons, will happen on September 20. Artists and the public will walk through Manhattan with stops at sites significant to Black, Cuban, and Cuban American communities, ending at Madison Square Park with a concert by Daymé Arocena. Here is a clip of her singing in Havana, Cuba, and here a longer concert from 5 years ago, best listened to without looking at the screen I find, too distracting a background. She has a phenomenal voice. Lots of poets performing during this march as well, so I ask:
Art or Art adjacent: Poetry?
Images from the African Burial National Monument on Duane St. As I have written elsewhere about this site that memorializes the dead slaves of NY, the second larges slave holding city after Charleston, SC:
15,000 to 20,000 in a “Negroes Burial Ground” then, and what do you see now? A strange little memorial, that does not really evoke the horrors of slavery and untimely death (scientists analyzed the bones of the 400 + skeletons they unearthed and found severe malnutrition, wounds from violence and for women childbirth to be the grim reaper. ) What was evoked for me, instead, was disgust when contrasting the modesty of this site with the close-by extravaganza of the 9/11 memorial. The burial ground plaza feels cowering under the surrounding buildings with an artificial quietness as if it does not want to complain loudly. The use of very reflective materials means that the present day world imprints itself on the monument speckling it with harsh light and reflections, as if full blackness cannot be tolerated. But at least the fight for declaring coveted Manhattan real estate as a National Monument was won.
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Last but not least: Film scores played live by the New York Philharmonic, while the movies are shown – John Williams, of course, wouldn’t you’ve guessed it? Jaws will attract plenty of visitors keen on reliving the blockbusters of their youth, as will The Empire strikes Back. Lure with the familiar, rather than truly amazing unfamiliar music made for films that never had the impact as those blockbusters. They could have chosen Ennio Morricone’s score for the 1986 film The Mission, here played by Yo-Yo Ma. Ok, I’m a fan of Morricone. What about The Power of the Dog? Here’s the soundtrack, composed by (Radiohead’s) Johnny Greenwood, with clear echoes of his fascination with Krzysztof Penderecki. Beautiful music. Disquieting too, like so much in that film. (I reviewed the film here.)
Art or Art adjacent: Music?
Images from Harlem, with various theaters and the Langston Hughes House.
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And to top it off: in the middle of Art Net’s fall recommendations pops up a shout out for a soon to be opened bakery on 1, Ludlow St: Elbow Bread.
Art adjacent: pastries!
In any case, lots of exciting things coming up. Photographs from my old haunts relevant to some of the communities called upon to participate in the Procession. Wish I could be there with my friends.
Using mundane, found objects as canvases for painting seems to be a trend right now. Some do it better than others, among them David Cass. Tins, cardboard boxes, beer coasters, old nautical maps and antique pulleys serve him well.
David Cass Ask (2023) egg tempera, watercolour & pencil on photo mount
David Cass Refuse (2024) oil on wooden box lid
David Cass Commit (2022-2023) oil on bus blind on board
David Cass Work in progress for ‘Where Once the Waters.’
David Cass “Pulley I – Rockport, ME” (2023-24), oil on marine pulley
His depictions of light on water are appealing, focussed on the structure and utility of water, rather than some etherial glow that uplifts traditional seascapes. According to reviews he is also concerned with climate change and pollution of the oceans, but that cannot easily be deducted from the paintings – at least not by me. (I also, admittedly, always wonder if we all, I am not excluding my own work, need to push an agenda, offer something that has “meaning”, rather than just focus on depicting the beauty that is. A topic for a different day.)
Cass is currently exhibited at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. I wish I could see the show. From the images of the gallery walls, it seems that seeing the work in bulk, many paintings next to each other, helps to get a sense of representation, rather than abstraction – a curious mix in each individual painting, with abstraction dominating for me while looking at individual work.
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I tried to think if that combination was familiar to me from famous paintings of water. Of course, Turner comes to mind:
J. M. W. Turner Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842.)
Or looking only at the water in Monet’s depiction (but there you are too distracted by the whole scene.)
Contemporary efforts:
Carina Francioso The Ionian Shimmers (2019) Oil on wood panel
In any case, it all reminds me of the fact that I have not been at the ocean once this summer, despite living so close to it. That tells you all you need to know about how my summer has gone…. the energy reservoir too depleted. Luckily there are the archives, allowing visual remembrance. Here, then, light not on but above the water, from previous excursions.
Well, I really meant to write bioaesthetics, but since today’s musings relate entirely to bees, we might as well go with bee aesthetics. Bioaesthetics is the scientific field that seeks to understand how humans develop an appreciation of art, derived from their interaction with the environment. Bees have been a large part of these explorations, with scientists particularly interested in the fact that humans depicted bees since art’s beginnings, long before we all became so worried about their potential extinction.
Most of what I am presenting today I learned from an international team of ecologists led by an Australian researcher who calls her self Bee Babette – how can you not love that name…. Kit S. Prendergast and her colleagues looked at representations of all kinds of bees and bumblebees across history, starting with cave drawings, and ending with contemporary film and video games, with everything in between.
They, like so many of us, are concerned with the fact that bees are on the decline due to a variety of factors including natural habitat fragmentation, urbanization, climate change, and pesticide use in agriculture. But they also observed that bee’s gifts to humanity – their pollination, their honey, their wax, made them important throughout the ages. I will leave out the discussions of “neuro-aesthetic appreciation of art in a biologically plausible evolutionary framework … (researchers) thus evaluate how early forms of meaningful communication may utilise existing neural mechanisms and enable contemporary aesthetic art appreciation.” Instead I’ll focus on forms of representation, interspersed with the photographs of (bumble)bees I took in the fields. (You’re welcome….)
The importance of bees is clearly in evidence cross-culturally, and found its way into the arts of many diverse population groups across time. You see bees in 8000-year-old Egyptian hieroglyphs, in European cave art in Spain and on ancient Greek coins, and in religious or spiritual representations across the globe. Bees were symbolized in the Americas long before the colonialists arrived, integrated into Mayan ceremonies. First Nations people in Australia have used the motif of bees for over 65.000 years, found in their oral histories, ceremonies and construction of didgeridoos and their rock art. Bees became an important design feature during the Napoleon era in France, the imperial bee symbolizing the higher-level hardworking goals Napoleon wanted the republic to achieve. Jewelry across the world has represented bees in various configurations.
You find paintings of bees in China even before the Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644. Architecture has used the structure of the beehive from domed Celtic huts, south African Bantu dwellings, Gaudi’s parabolic arches, to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna-Honeycomb House. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes are modeled after bee habitats and found hexagonal heirs in the Eden Project Biomes by Grimshaw Architects (Cornwall, England; 2000–2001), and the world’s largest open air geodesic dome which serves as the headquarters of the American Society for Metals (ASM) International by John Terrence Kelly (Ohio; 1958). (Again, all this can be found in incredible detail with image sources here.)
Renaissance painters used the bee motif in landscape and religious paintings ubiquitously. Fast forward to the 20th century, Joseph Beuys was an ardent admirer of bees and incorporated them into his art practice in multiple ways, using bees wax as well as honey for his paintings and installations. In his wake, multiple artists across Europe started interactive installations with live bees and sculpture combined. One of the most integrated shows is now on view in Liverpool’s World Museum. Wolfgang Buttress’ Bees: A Story of Survival. The video clip show some of the audio-visual experiences that takes you right into the sight and sounds of the bees’ world. One of his previous installations, The Hive at Kew Gardens, is a favorite of mine.
The Hive’s mesh frame is constructed from 170,000 aluminium parts and 1,000 LED lights, which light up according to the vibrations of the bees in the surrounding wildflower meadows. In turn, it activates musical notes in the key of C – the key bees buzz in – with you standing inside this 17 meters high structure, as if in a hive. Check it out, next you visit! It’s awe- inspiring.
And if you can’t travel, the beauty of bees is all around you – easily observed in the late summer fields.
Music today is Schubert’s bee. And for good measure my favorite flight of the bumble bee version from the movie Shine.
Two nights ago I heard a fox bark in our garden. There had been sightings according to our neighbor’s gardener, but I was skeptical. With so many coyotes around, maybe they just saw a young one, still small? But this sound was identifiably “fox” when I went to Google to check against my memories.
It felt like an affirmation of my – long debated – decision to include the image of a fox into a montage about The Cunning Little Vixen, an opera by Leo Janàcek. I hesitate to be too literal, but I also have a fascination with plucky characters, and if there ever was one, it is the fox heroine in this piece of music. She does deserve place of honor, or at least some visibility.
Janàcek’s opera is a romp, composed late in life, daringly taking a newspaper serial/comic strip as a basis for the libretto that includes all kinds of animal characters featuring nature’s life cycle and humans’ ties to it, in good and bad ways. The score is gorgeous, influenced by Czech folk music and language, animal sounds that the composer ardently recorded, and the fluidity of the Moravian landscape, its pine forests and lakes. It is also about the lives and interactions of generations, one’s place in a chain alternating between life and death.
Janàcek lost his son at age two, and his wife took his daughter away from him after separating, the girl subsequently died at age 20. The opera can be seen as one way of trying to come to terms with the legacy left through one’s children, literally and symbolically. I got to know the music in intimate detail when I sat through the rehearsals of the Portland Opera Production in 1999. I was no longer doing the super-text calls during actual performances, which also required rehearsal attendance. Instead I was accompanying my then eleven-year old who had been selected for a solo performance of one of the young fox roles, and the chorus of fox cubs. The mix of parental pride and anxiety was intense.
As parents we were intent on not pushing our children into activities, or force them to excel, or make their days endlessly structured outside of school, with little room for exploration and/or boredom (which I consider an important part of creative development, in many ways.) Years of adolescent time spent in front of computer games, without sports or social contacts, were quite worrying, yet we did not change our approach. We offered options, and any time some interest emerged, a passion for theatre camp, a new hobby of rock climbing, or the like, we had the privilege to enable them to participate, schlepp them there, funding equipment and the like. We also had the privilege of school choice – whether we chose the right one, who knows. But the boys did end up, eventually, with an education that suited their interests and talents, now doing meaningful work, these two amazingly cool human beings. With partners the same!
I have been thinking about Michelle Obama’s DNC speech which included a quip about “the affirmative action of generational wealth.” It is not just about parent’s money. It is about the time they are willing and, importantly, able to invest, the education that they themselves received and that now opens doors for their children, whether directly passed on around the dinner table, or linked to networking in academic communities and the like. It is about the willingness and ability to move into a good school district even if it means leaving a neighborhood you love, or stretching your funds beyond comfort level. It is about access.
It is about access to education at all – just look at the mind boggling numbers, newly published, that show how state-provided bikes for girls has impacted the rates of attending and finishing high school in rural areas around the world. Cycling, rather than walking miles on end, empowered female students.
It is about access to the education you wish to receive. In the context of voucher scams and political reemergence of publicly rooting for segregated schools, it becomes a burning issues connected to racism. (Here is an informative essay about school choice published this week in ProPublica.)
It is about access to education that is tailored to the needs of the disability community. We are not just talking about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a conservative administration. It includes the elimination the Department of Education altogether and drastically cuts federal funds for schools. The plan includes proposals to phase out the $16 billion Title I funding program over the next 10 years, convert the $13 billion IDEA program for students with disabilities to block grants or a private school choice offering. This means that students with disabilities no longer have the protections during public school education imposed by law. Vouchers for private schools? Does not include the cost of transportation, schools can throw them out at will, with no oversight, these schools are not accountable for outcomes, and they can reject students whose disabilities are particularly severe. (Ref.) Note that these are not just future possibilities. Last May House Republicans proposed to “Reduce Support for Students with Disabilities.” Under the proposal, as many as 7.5 million children with disabilities would face reduced supports—a cut equivalent to removing more than 48,000 teachers and related services providers from the classroom.
The montage is based on a photograph of a pine forestc like those in Bohemia, reflected in an icy lake, with several pale suns traversing the horizon to indicate the change of seasons. The vixen is peeking through the tree trunks, their pattern of repeated bars reminiscent of a cage (one she escapes in due course in the opera, as kids escape into adulthood.) Whether we continue to erect barriers like this towards equal opportunity education for all remains to be seen. Vote accordingly!
Here is the Orchestral Suite that gives you a glimpse of the music.
Five years ago I hiked in the Bandelier National Monument in Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico (a previous report on my adventure with lots of photographs is in the link.)
It is an incredible place, a plateau formed by volcanic eruptions, with steep rocks made of volcanic ash, their crevices enlarged and inhabited by the Ancestral Pueblo People living there over 10.000 years ago, grid farming at the bottom of the canyon and adjacent mesas.
The canyon is bisected by a small creek, carrying scant water for most of the year. On occasion it brings death: when wildfires destroy the upper watershed, as happened in 2011 and, worse, 2013, flash floods ensue and take out entire parts of the extant vegetation, the last remnants of old forest included. The devastation was visible everywhere when I visited, but so was new life, small pines that had survived and young cotton trees in verdant green that radiated against the grey, pink and white of the tuff rocks. Swallows and ravens flew overhead, I saw quail along the path and woodpeckers were busy.
I don’t know if it was the quail running – I suddenly thought of Mozart’s Papageno, the bird catcher in Mozart’s opera TheMagic Flute. One of his arias (Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm!) has the same speed and staccato feel as the passing quail did. (The name Papageno actually comes from Papagei, the German word for parrot.) In any case, the opera is about how things in life never unfold in a straight line, how trials and tribulations need to be weathered with persistence, courage and fortitude to arrive at a satisfactory (or happy, if you’re lucky) ending. Nature in front of me contained both, downfall and renewal. The music in my head – its beauty as breathtaking as the canyon around me, as filigree as the fresh greenery on the saplings – was tightly linked to the same alternations in my own life.
During the seemingly endless years spent in bed with childhood diseases, rubella, mumps, the measles, whooping cough, ear infections and later staph infections, I was allowed to listen to a small radio my mother brought up from the kitchen. There was a program called Schulfunk (school radio) that educated young listeners for an hour or two during the week days. It was started in 1924, but after the war it really took off, with the opening music being Papageno’s first aria. It is probably the only piece of operatic music that every German person of my generation knows by heart.
Everyday, in addition to language, biology, music or physics instruction, there was an episode in this program acted out by famous actors, of some dilemma or social conflict happening in a small village, not unlike the one I lived in. The character in News from Waldhagen (Neues aus Waldhagen)represented all aspects of society, and were as familiar to us as the Sesame Street characters would later be for TV audiences in the U.S. The social studies message was uniformly one of “peace, pals and pancakes” (Friede, Freude, Pfannekuchen) as the German proverb goes: keep the peace, stay in your place, conform and life will be sweet. Moralistic treacle, but dressed up in witty enough garb that we swallowed it line, hook and sinker.
Or did we? I surely was equally drawn to the allure of Papageno, who withstood authority, acted out in strange ways, who had real problems pursuing a straight path of virtue. All these trials, all this non-linear unfolding of a life, made him into a very different person – maybe a better one, maybe just different. Stretches of submissiveness alternating with defiance could be the one sentence-description of my own life, finding myself alone, bursting with happiness, strength and adventure in a New World canyon in my late 60s, a million miles and years away from that little Old World girl in pain, being comforted by listening to Mozart.
He died at age 35. The Magic Flute was the last opera he composed, thrilled that it took off to great appreciation in the two months before he died, even though the tale is internally quite inconsistent, defying logic wherever you inspect it closely. But the music? Eternally thrilling.
35 was the average life expectancy of the Ancestral Pueblo people as well, felled by childbirth and diseases. My generation had vaccinations against polio and small pox, helping us on, my children benefited from inoculation against mumps and measles. Spared much suffering, let me tell you. It is incomprehensible to me how an anti-vax attitude has been able to take root in our current lives. In my darker moments I think it must be a combination of sadistic joy at the suffering of others, mixed with eugenic aspirations. More likely it is caused by forces smartly laid out in this short essay from last year’s Atlantic.
The montage consists of a photograph of the wooded oasis in Frijoles, luminous green matching the exuberance of the music. The superimposed bird catcher was a mural by street artists in Montreal, defying anti-tagging ordinances in solidarity with a non-conformist Papageno. Or so I fantasize.
Here is the full opera, a production by the MET with James Levine. (My favorite version is a 1990 production with the Vienna Philharmonic under Solti, but that is not available for free.)
When I was little, my bedroom was situated right above the room where my mother played the grand piano some evenings. The minute I heard Morning Mood from the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46 by Edvard Grieg, I waited for the piece I really adored, Anitra’s Dance, trying to stay awake through the intervening The Death of Åse. I had no clue how popular this music had become and knew even less about its origins, a dramatic poem by Henrik Ibsen that he made Grieg set to music. I was just taken by the melodies and chords.
Fast forward to 1965, now in boarding school as a 13-year old, at war with an elitist all girls’ world I despise and yet try to find a place in. My piano teacher, she of the permanent bad breath but sensitive understanding of lost souls, complains about my perfunctory performance of the suite – all I can do to stave off my homesickness is hammering the keys mechanically. She hands me a dogeared paperback with Ibsen’s poem translated into German, so I get an idea of what we’re working on. I devour it, like any other book given to me in those years, and don’t have the faintest idea what it really is about – other than having a strong reaction about why a woman would wait and waste all her life to take a narcissistic fraud and con-artist back into her lap after he ditched her. Got my priorities right, early on!
(I also stupidly abandoned my piano teacher to take up the cello – for the sole reason that it allowed me a weekly escape from school into the city where the conservatory was offering lessons. That did not last long, a story for another day.)
The short version of the Peer Gynt poem, now seen through the eyes of an adult, is this: boy tries to be someone, not sure who, and confabulates, lies, tricks and swindles his way through the world, from Norway to Northern Africa and back, with abduction of other people’s brides, intermittent stops in the halls of mythological troll kings, royal interludes in insane asylums and pursuit by the devil. Two women love him, yet see through him and call him on it, his mother, Åse, who dies, and Solveig, who takes him back when he returns broken, unrecognized, still without identity, her love the key to his redemption.
Essential here is Gynt’s search for identity (or the rejection thereof), a trying on of roles, and a desperate avoidance to be cast in fixed form while the searching is so much more exciting. Why be an ordinary person if you can be an adventurer, a rich merchant, a wise man, a king? With the arrival of modernity, predestined class or social organization no longer determines who you are – replaced by a compulsive search for self -determination. Sooooo many options to choose from, why settle on one? And so Peer steals stories from others, trying on their selves, forever non-authentic, as called out by his mother from the very beginning. He runs away from negative feelings with fantasies of omnipotence or flat-out denial, and does not care who gets hurt in the process. No wonder he feels deadened by the end, but then gets miraculously saved by Solveig’s unconditional love.
Young – and – old Heuer: Spare me the romanticism! Give me poetic justice!
In reality, I was probably enraged that in my teenage existence any deviation from “good girl” stereotypes, any trying out of alternative identities would surely be punished – WAS punished – no redemption in sight. Reserved for the boys, as per usual.
The montage is capturing the original childhood joy at hearing the sounds of Morning Mood waft up to my room, the lightness and serenity of the atmosphere mirrored by the sunlit pine sapling. The image also includes two figures in a wishful representation of Peer and Solveig sharing a life as equals rather than foils for each other.
I selected the super-imposed painting, Couple on the Heath, because the woman looks a little bit like my young mother. She often escaped her grief through music and I want to dedicate the image to her, in gratitude of opening the world of art to me from an early age.
The painter, Lotte Laserstein, spearheading the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, was a prominent artist in Weimar era Berlin, where my mother was born and raised. Of Jewish origins, Laserstein fled Germany for Sweden in 1935, anticipating that a particular identity could be a death sentence under the new regime. In an ironic, if horrid, twist, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was adapted by the Nazis and made into a nationalistic heroic tale with Gynt’s Nordic identity absurdly fixed into the fascist cult, with the trolls representing Jews.
Maybe next time when you roll your eyes that Classic FM is playing the old war horse again, you can think about all this complicated stuff associated with the music. As much as Grieg was set on showcasing the folk tunes of his country, or the sensuality of desert princesses, or the grief associated with losing a parent, all musical transcriptions of concrete events in the tale, he nonetheless reminds us that there was a larger narrative behind it all. Worth a re-read, in a time where identity politics, the need for belonging and othering, respectively, continue to play such a poisonous role across a divided world.
Here is Grieg’s Morning Mood as an orchestral version by the Berlin Philharmonic and as a PIANO VERSION.
Robert Pinsky once said that many of the poems by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski are “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel.” (Zagajewsky’s work is intensely copyrighted since his death three years ago, so here is a link to one of his most famous poems, Try to praise the Mutilated World, which encouraged hope and believed in the return of light after darkness.)
I have been thinking that it is certain pieces of music that inject the past into my own, ordinary present, affecting how I feel and see things, a past that was formative in dealing with the history of my own origins and era.
One of the focal points of coming of age in the Germany of the 1960s was, of course, the working through the Holocaust as our responsibility as one of the first post-war generations. There was, at that time, little to go by. Our parents, who had participated in the war and/or the fascist horrors, or had been victimized by either, were shocked into silence by shame or guilt or trauma, or all of the above. The country, at the time, did not want to look backwards, but rather forwards and so institutions did not exactly educate about the history or engage in a memorial culture for the victims. (That has changed in the intervening decades in impressive and encompassing ways, although there is certainly room for doubt how far true remorse and willingness to accept responsibility has come. A topic for another day.)
For those of us growing out of the post-war gloom and rebelling against a society bent on economic achievement, conservative alliances and new wars, protest music became an important tool to learn about the past and envision a future without war and oppression. The music was widely performed, at demonstrations, during gatherings, on May Day and so on. One that lodged deeply in my head was a song created in 1933 by inmates in one of the very first Nazi labor camps, Emsland Lager, filled with political prisoners, mostly socialists, communists and union members.
The Peat Bog Soldiers was written by a miner, Johann Esser, and an actor, Wolfgang Langhoff. Music was composed by Rudi Goguel, and sung through the next decades by Ernst Busch, a famous German musician, and eventually picked up as an anthem by the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. 16 members of a workers’ chorus performed it for the first time in August 1933 in the camp, having over a thousand of the inmates join the chorus, once they picked up the melody. The song describes the harsh labor in the camps, a life where nature has fallen cold and silent, the inevitability of death if you try to escape, and the intense longing for home and loved ones. At the end the performers stuck their spades into the ground, that now looked like a graveyard of crosses.
The very last stanza, though, expresses hope: winter and darkness cannot last forever, and at some point there will be a return to home. I think what registered most for me was the fact that hope could not be eradicated even during the worst of human experiences, a shared sentiment that bonded those thousands of doomed souls. Maybe I locked onto that because it was easier to think about than the despair contained in the remaining stanzas or my association with the perpetrators. Or maybe because I knew that I need to fight a tendency to be fearful, then and now. In any case the song has remained with me through a life time.
Here is the English translation:
Wherever the eye gazes Bog and heath all around, No chirping of birds entertains us. Oaks are standing bare and crooked.
Refrain: We are the peat bog soldiers, And we’re marching with our spade into the bog. We are the peat bog soldiers, And we’re marching with our spade into the bog.
Here inside this barren marshland, the camp is built up. Where we are, far from any joy, stowed away behind barbed wire.
Refrain
In the morning, the columns march towards the moor to work digging under the searing sun. but our mind toward our homeland yearns.
Refrain
Homeward, homeward everyone yearns to the parents, wife and child. Some chests are widened by a sigh, because we are caught in here.
Refrain
Up and down the guards are walking Nobody, nobody can get through. Escape would only cost the life Four fences secure the castle.
Refrain
But for us there is no clamoring, It can’t be an endless winter. One day we’ll say happily: “Homeland you are mine again!”
Refrain
The montagereflecting on this piece of music, from the series Beyond the Tree Line, is primarily based on a photograph I took during sunset in the heath of Lower Saxony, the state where the camp was located, about 2 hours away from my grandparents’ village. I added the cormorants because they are essentially silent birds (the absence of birdsong so prominent in the first stanza), hang out in groups like the inmates, but also represent the guards ensuring no escape – dual roles that can be switched in history in the blink of an eye, with victims becoming perpetrators and vice versa, as we see all too clearly in the wars of 2023/24.
I pierced the cloud, covering the setting sun, in honor of those who still believe in the return of the light, reminding myself to focus on silver linings rather than the darkness that descends.
Here is the German version of the song and here the music in English, song by Paul Robeson.
