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Art

Giant Trolls

Somehow the trolls escaped their storage in one of the boxes full of the boys’ childhood toys. They emerged in February, popped up in ever changing locations, the perfect enticement to walk through the house to find them, which provided post-surgery exercise and cheer at the same time. Sometimes they were easily visible, sometimes you chanced upon them when opening the fridge or a drawer, at times they even ventured onto the windowsill, the laundry line or balcony railings outside. It was just a sweet game, a playful distraction during hard months, one of the ever-loving gestures of my beloved.

Their gigantic cousins, not plastic casts made-in-China, but hand-crafted wooden sculptures with individualized personalities and features, can be found across the world in various parks and natural locations, from Puerto Rico to South Korea. The Danish sculptor Thomas Dambo even provides a troll map so you can locate individual sites during your travels. (If you open the map and click on any X it will pop up a drawing; if you click on that you get location and photos.) The closest to us here in Oregon is a site in Colorado and a recent one in Wyoming; my readers overseas have plenty of choices in Denmark in particular.

Sculpture Mama Mimi, Jackson Hole, US – 2021

They are huge, they are whimsical, and they are probably perfect magnets to get the kids to walk in the woods. Made of recycled wood they are placed to encourage interaction, yet always in cooperation with park administrations to avoid sensitive land destruction. Here is a fun clip how the recycle artist, marooned in Denmark by the pandemic, bereft of all of his international assignments, decided to create a covid-19- proof treasure hunt all across parks in the small country, with 10 sculptures to be found by people in general lockdown.

“The way I trolled Covid-19,” were his words describing the project, words that alerted me to the fact that trolling has become a verb. It is an expression that we most often encounter in the context of internet exchanges that are hurtful and vicious towards a variety of chosen targets.

Sculpture called Isak Heartstone, Breckenridge, CO – 2018. Some 3000 visitors daily had neighbors so angry that the sculpture had to be removed

According to the Urban Dictionary, trolling “is the deliberate act…of making random, unsolicited and/or controversial comments on various internet forums with the intent to provoke an emotional knee jerk reaction from unsuspecting readers to engage in a fight or argument.” It is defined as a malicious online behaviour, characterised by aggressive and deliberate provocation of others. “Trolls” seek to provoke, upset and harm others via inflammatory messages and posts.

The consequences range from rolling your eyes and blocking the offensive party, to depression, social anxiety, loss in self-esteem and even suicide. In fact there are internet forums geared toward publicly provoking self-harming behavior and live watching the results of their sadism. But generally, the insults just appear on your own twitter or other social media handle.

“Online abusers can cause hurt to others, and do so repetitively, without interruption and all the while are protected by the safety that anonymity provides in cyberspace. Studies suggest that they might be driven by their own past trauma as a victim of similar behaviour, or simply to satisfy the needs created by their narcissistic psychopathic personality traits. Either way, the research behind online trolling or abusive behaviour is in its infancy, much like the existence of these sites. Research on criminal narratives, if a sample of abusers could be accessed, would build on this emerging area of study, and provide insight into the roles that these abusers see themselves playing.”

Bernheim Forest Giants, Kentucky, US – 2019

Studies show that the on-line harassment has also economic consequences. In Australia, for example, they estimated in 2019 that online harassment and cyberhate had cost an estimated total of $3.7 billion dollars in health costs and lost income. If anything, things have gotten more frequent and intense since then, with the Olympics creating a fire storm for online trolls. Female athletes were harassed by anti-feminist trolls for their hair styles, under-performing athletes were insulted, and nationalism had a field-day slinging insults at foreign athletes. Can you imagine the pressure you are under to perform in an event like this and then come home to thousand of insult dragging you through the mud? If not, talk to LeBron James – he is claimed to be the most trolled athlete in the world.

One of the worst form of trolling is called doxing, having personal details published to intimidate the recipient or impersonating someone. This has become a relevant factor in our current political landscape, where people post home and workplace addresses of those they want to hurt, with enough crazies with weapons out there now enabled to act out on perceived “traitors.” It is not just famous people who have become targets, like Dr. Fauci who needs security personnel; it is also done to people on local levels who have spoken out against conspiracy theories or in favor of controversial policies, as public health officials, election officials, on school boards, or in community forums. Sickening.

Sculpture Hans Hulehand, Odense, Denmark – 2020

So what can one do when faced with trolling? DO NOT FEED them, first of all, never respond to the hate, even with logic or by changing your own comments that triggered their outbursts. You can also report or flag trolls with administrators of social media; that might at least lead to those comments being hidden, if not to banning the troll outright. Talk to other people you trust, your friends, colleagues or people in mental health professions, if you your reactions overwhelm you and you find yourself unable to shrug the hate off, taking it personal. Take a break from social media – recommended highly even if you were never exposed to trolling – to get away from a world that sustains and fosters misery and hate.

If all else fails, make trolls your personal adventure in real life – the little ones are perfect for that, the giant ones even better should they move you to travel and be distracted by the beauty of the world. Well, worth a try.

Music is Grieg’s March of the trolls, surprisingly fast.

If you are in the mood for the full Peer Gynt Suite, go here.

And here is a gem – a 1946 radio staging of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (the folktale play that forms the basis for Grieg’s Suite), with Laurence Olivier as the troll king and Grieg’s music. Do yourself a favor and listen at least to the first 5 minutes, (fast)language at its best once the play starts.

Sculpture Simon & Anine, Aarhus, Denmark – 2016
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Giant Contrasts

I had hoped to post something refreshing today, a day where we yet again reach temperatures above the 100 degree mark. Maybe art installed below the surface of the sea would do the trick. Seeing the sculptures suspended in that green/ blue element might indeed have a cooling effect when imagining yourself among them. In contrast, thinking about those sculptures, as the artist intended, might make you hot all over again, since they tackle ocean preservation, the perils of climate change and the refugee crisis in ways that impress on us the dire facts we are facing.

Crossing the Rubicon, 2017, 41 life-sized sculptures and a wall, Lanzarote, Canary Islands.

I found Jason deCaires Taylor‘s work on a site called ArtworksforChange which addresses environmental issues and has a particularly nifty link: featured tours of selected art projects by environmental organizations like Earthday Network, Oceana, Global Footprint Network, World Wildlife Fund and The Natural Resources Defense Council. (I’ve linked to their tour as just one example.)

DeCaires Taylor, trained at the London School of Arts, has lived, worked and installed his sculptures made of marine concrete (pH neutral cement, fibers and aggregates) across the world, in different oceans. Whether executed in Mexico, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, Cyprus or Australia, the work is designed for impact on many different levels.

Jason deCaires Taylor Sculpture, 2021, at Museum Park Aiya Napa, Cyprus

It engages communities who live by and from the ocean and brings them (and their ecological plight after hurricanes, for example) attention as well as tourism $$.

Jason deCaires Taylor, Sculptures of 90 fishermen and women, 2009,  Isla Mujeres, Cancun, Mexico

It provides new habitat for marine life, from surfaces that encourage coral and sponge growth to spacing that helps aggregate fish to constellations that provide sheltered homes for crustaceans.

2009, Cancun, Mexico

And, importantly, it lures divers away from sensitive coral reefs to dive at these underwater museum parks instead.

Jason deCaires Taylor, Ring of Children 2006, Grenada, Caribbean

Here is a short clip where he explains his approach and offers visual footage of the process.

To rebuild natural habitats and mitigate damage caused by tourism to at-risk underwater areas, the sculptor engages in a collaborative process between scientists and other experts which helps him build up a knowledge of materials and conservation that defines his work. He also collaborates with local communities (to the tune of 850 life sized sculptures by now, encompassing everyone from yoga instructors and fishermen to nuns and a two-year old boy,) which gives them a sense of ownership of the reefs. His philosophy as expressed in an Podcast from the Modern Met:

“I think artists have a moral obligation,” he explains to us. “We’re really important for helping to shape people’s feelings and emotions and inspire people and warn people about what’s happening. And I think scientists are very good at producing the data that supports it. But I think what’s really important is to be able to emotionally connect to people to help inspire social change. And I think that’s where we come in.”

His newest project has just been launched off the coast of the resort city of Ayia Napa in Cyprus, featuring over 90 figurative and nature-inspired sculptures installed at the seabed of a marine protected area. Here is a sampling of many of the new sculptures from his website.

Cyprus is an example of the threats to our natural world in more ways than one. The island, like so many of the neighboring regions in the Mediterranean, has faced incredible loss through fires, human life above all. We know what pollutes the oceans. We also know what contributes to wild fires. But in this particular case there is a nasty twist. A lot of the houses with large yards on the island are owned by British people or other Europeans able to afford an island getaway (Cyprus has an intense night life and party scene as well.) Many of these absentee owners have not traveled there for almost 2 years due to risks of Covid-19 with the consequence that their yards, usually tended before or upon arrival, sprouted large amounts of high and drying grasses or other weeds – all fueling the fires in ways that never happened when owners were present. In reverse, many Cypriots usually leave Cyprus during the hot summers. Because of the pandemic they stayed home, and subsequently grilling, barbecues or careless cigarettes have caused multiple incendiary incidents. (Ref.)

It is obviously a conflagration of dire events. And we are reminded, AGAIN, by this week’s UN Climate Science Report that theoretically we could do something, but that time is running out and the current inertia leaves no grounds for optimism. This NYT article speaks to the history and the potential future.

Jason deCaires Taylor MUSAN – Museum of Underwater Sculpture Aiya Napa, 2021

Giant contrasts between fires, floods, rising oceans, but they all have destructive power in common. Maybe we’ll join those underwater sculpture populations soon whether we’d like to or not – now there is a freezing thought.

Photographs are of natural maritime sculptures, the only one this non-diver has access to.

Music today is from Cyprus, with both Greek and Turkish artists united.

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From Micro to Cosmic Scale

Let’s end this week with a smile and a frown given my eternal attempts at balanced reporting.

(Photographs, since the topics range from small/close to huge/far, are of things in-between – the clouds I photographed this week.)

Smiles first. A flourishing of miniature scale art offerings is delivered to your neighborhood, or theoretically could be, by Free Little Art Galleries . FLAGs are found in numerous cities across the nation since 2017, many added during the pandemic. Modeled after the free little libraries where used books are offered at cute boxes on our streets, these FLAGs offer tiny pieces of art to be exchanged for your one creations or simply taken home. Or admired. Or smiled at.

These galleries can be spotted in Atlanta,GA, Oakland, Calif., Phoenix,AZ, Hyattsville, Md., and in Eugene,OR, to name a few. One of the most prominent ones was started by artist Stacey Milrany and is located in Seattle, WA. The box contains tiny props like gallery furniture and patrons in addition to constantly changing art, of a quality that regularly goes beyond laypeople’s creative urgings.

That said, I think one of the biggest achievements of these share sites is the invitation it gives to all of us, artists, lay people and children alike, to BE creative. They beckon you in, mostly without quality expectation or control, the small size making access easier than having to paint or draw large works. What encouragement if you see your art has been picked up by someone, a regular occurrence with free offerings.

Of course, not all of them are free. Here in Portland we have a mini gallery at Morrison Street that features small scale works by local artists for sale, exchanged monthly. June was planned for needlework cacti.

And not all of them are found on the street. Miniature art works by notable artists will be exhibited later this month in more traditional surrounds as well. Pallant House Art Gallery in England is curating a major show featuring 80 artists. No trade-in for your own works, I’m afraid….

“Staged in a less than five-foot-long display case, Masterpieces in Miniature: The 2021 Model Art Gallery, will make its debut on 26 June at the English gallery. It will feature new works by high-profile artists like Damien Hirst, Magdalene Odundo, Fiona Rae, Pablo Bronstein and Rachel Whiteread, created over the past year using a variety of mediums, including sculpture, ceramics, photography and painting. Filling an entire room of the model will be a miniature installation by John Akomfrah.”(Ref.)

So why go big if you can go small? Or, and this is the part where the frowning starts, why go cosmic, when the cost attached to that could provide solutions for so many sources of suffering here on earth? I am, of course, talking about the news that Jeff Bezos and his invited brother are going into space for 11 minutes later this summer. He built his space flight company Blue Origin over the last 20 years, and will be on its inaugural flight. You can personally bid (in excess of $ 3.000.000) if you want to join them in July. You’d be among 6000 other bidders of whom we know so far, hailing from 143 countries.

Generally, people can visit the NASA space station (which has cost us tax payers in excess of $ 100 billion,)if you can spare $10 million for each private astronaut mission — for crew time to support flights to the space station, mission planning and communications. It also charges other, smaller fees, including $2,000 a day per person for food. Must get hungry, up there in space. That’s down from $55 million that early space visitors laid down.

So much wealth. So much waste.

I join in Gil Scott Heron’s assessment expressed below:

Bezos &Co. are of course more likely to pump this Whitaker piece through the rocket loudspeakers…

But they are unlikely to take the kind of luggage that their wealthy predecessors had schlepped by the help. A new book delves into the Louis Vuitton archives to describe a history of early travel by the 1 %… little has changed about privilege, I guess, other than the speed and distance covered. Because you can.

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Large Scale

I’ll let you in on a well-guarded secret (and don’t you ever tell.) I read New York Magazine’s Madame Clairvoyant’s Horoscopes on occasion, not for the prediction (I don’t believe in astrology, case closed) but for her ingenious ways of formulating things vaguely and psychological astute enough that they can be a projection screen for whatever is likely going on in anyone’s life. Below is last week’s example.

Lately, it feels hard to carve out the space you need for yourself. Everyone else asks for so much care and attention from you that by the end of the day, it feels like there’s no time left for yourself, no energy left for dreaming. So this week, reserve some time — even if it’s only a few minutes — to be alone, free from anyone else’s wants, free from being seen at all. There’s a wonderful, vital luxury in these temporary moments of escape. You can rediscover your own inner landscape and the secret beauty it holds.

Who couldn’t relate?? Who wouldn’t agree? It felt particularly fitting since “space” is the blog topic of the week. However, upon inspection my inner landscape did not reveal some secret beauty. It did offer a sacrilegious thought, though, that the work that I am introducing today, is comparable to horoscopes. Create something sufficiently malleable and supersede it with a disambiguating interpretation or label, and before you know it everyone discovers the applied parallels.

1.78 BORÅS, SWEDEN, 2021 Photograph from website

Janet Echelman works with nets and light, created on a LARGE scale, originally described as capturing a sense of place, or site-specific history. They are eye candy. Which is not to say that they don’t impress some with the considerations, craft and technology that goes into producing them. Their story of origin is almost too perfect. Young artist sent to tropical climes to teach painting to the locals, tools and materials never arrive; walk on the beach exposes fishermen drying their nets in the winds, sculptural configurations that lead to stand-in use of nets as medium, in ever larger dimensions and sophistication. No longer young artist is now teaching at Ivy Leage institutions and in incredible international demand, both for temporary exhibitions and permanent installations.

Janet Echelman projects across the last decade, https://www.echelman.com

Critics that used to hedge their bets, (“giving crafts a coolly conceptual edge,” NYT in 2015) are now glowing, just like the installations they revere. A meteoric career.

My horoscope analogy of multi-layered interpretation was originally triggered by a work close to home, an installation at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Titled Impatient Optimist (perhaps in anticipation of the legal approach of divorce lawyers) the sculpture is meant to express the spirit of the Foundation’s work and mission.

Janet Echelman Impatient Optimist – Photograph from website

The shape of the sculpture is derived from color data of the Seattle sky, photographed evers 5 minuted across a 24 hour interval, analyzed and graphed radially to generate the form. At night, lighting is added that echoes, in real time, the sun rises of the foundation’s office locations around the globe. “This connects the work happening in the campus to the tangible services being delivered to people around the world.…The sculpture net is a physical manifestation of connectedness. The number of knots alludes to the notion that the work of a single person can affect a million lives. When a single element of the sculpture moves, every other element is affected.” (Ref.)

Note, there is a lot of thought and specific detail going into the creation. For the uninformed viewer, though, so many alternative interpretations are possible. Glass bowl came to mind for this one, given Seattle’s famous glass blowing studios, or drag net, given the Pacific Fishing Industries base in Seattle, or – well, you can probably come up with some additional interpretations without much effort.

The same struck me to be likely for an installation in Greensboro, North Carolina, titled “Where We Met”. Made up of over 35 miles of technical twine woven into 242,800 knots, the sculpture was inspired by Greensboro’s history as a railroad and textile hub. “When I was asked to give visual form to the history of Greensboro and the textile tradition of North Carolina, I began with research,” explains Janet Echelman. “I discovered that Greensboro was nicknamed the “Gateway City” because six railroad lines intersected there, and I started tracing the railway lines and marking the historic textile mills that dotted the routes.

Railroad convergence? Tulips? Brightly colored tissue wrappings of a birthday gift? Does it actually matter? Don’t we always imbue a piece of art or craft with our own interpretation? As we do horoscopes? Isn’t it about the psychological kernel of truths that serve as guiding reminders for the latter, or the aesthetic experience that shapes the appreciation of the former? So why do I not take to this work? Is it a generalized aversion to size on steroids, or a reactivity to unavoidable exposure – you cannot not see them and their alteration of space. There are also environmental concerns for bird safety. Echelman claims no bird was ever caught and hurt in those nets, but that does not take into account what light pollution does, particularly for migrating species.

Some of Echelman’s works are less tied to a sense of place and more to global events, with the added bonus that it allows for the sculptures to be more applicable across the exhibition circuit in diverse locations. One of a series of sculptures corresponds to a map of the energy released across the Pacific Ocean during the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, one of the most devastating natural disasters in recorded history. The event was so powerful it shifted the earth on its axis and shortened the day, March 11, 2011, by 1.8 millionths of a second, lending work below its title. The sculpture’s form was inspired by data sets of the tsunami’s wave heights rippling across the entire Pacific Ocean. “The artwork delves into content related to our complex interdependencies with larger cycles of time and our physical world.”

Janet Echelman 1.8 Photograph from website

The photograph was taken in London; the installation was also shown in a group show some time earlier at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. SAAM’s exhibition included Jennifer Angus, Chakaia Booker, Gabriel Dawe, Tara Donovan, Patrick Dougherty, Janet Echelman, John Grade, Maya Lin, and Leo Villareal.

From the museum blurb: “They are connected by their interest in creating large-scale installations from unexpected materials. Index cards, marbles, strips of wood—all objects so commonplace and ordinary we often overlook them—were assembled, massed, and juxtaposed to utterly transform spaces and engage us in the most surprising ways. The works are expressions of process, labor, and materials that are grounded in our everyday world, but that combine to produce awe-inspiring results.” The title? Artists of Wonder.

I do wonder.

No music found for fishing nets, but two pieces about large scale water displays, Ravel inspired by Liszt.

Photographs accordingly, large scale trick fountains (also affected by wind and manipulated by lighting at night like the installations) in Longwood Gardens.

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Small Scale

The neighborhood where I have now lived for 35 years is utterly familiar, yet also undergoing constant change. On a larger scale, there are endless trees cut for sub-divisions or single housing, people leaving, people moving in. Families with young children are a welcome addition, and you now hear other languages than plain English on your walks. On a smaller scale, my garden surprises me every year with unpredictable change. This year there’s nary a blueberry on the bush that bent over with them last year, tons of foxgloves have self-seeded, brought in by the wind or the deer, attracting a plethora of bees. The daisies have finally outnumbered the buttercups in the lawn, which took only about 5 years, and the fuchsias have decided to become trees, in full bloom already. It all provides a sense of place.

Italy

It is much harder to get a true sense of place if you only visit, and that for short amounts of time. What will define it when you travel? Your visual impressions? Your interaction with the locals? The landscape that defines the surrounds or the climate? The history that you read up on, maybe? Are you a better able to “get” a place, if you have widely traveled and so can make comparisons? If you go in utterly naive or geared by expectations based on external introductions? Will coincidences play a role, an aversive experience at the hotel, or an unanticipated encounter with the nicest people? These latter events might shape, perhaps, whether you like a place or not, which is different from having a sense of place.

Belgium
Holland

Here is the cause for these musings: Anastasia Savinova, a Ukrainian artist based in Sweden, has generated some creative photo collages, trying to extract a sense of place – Genius Loci – from a large scale entity, a city or rural area, and then injecting it into a small scale object, a building. Guided by architectural cues, visual details, a good sense for local prevalence of certain colors, she constructed these buildings into formations that capture the shapes or ornamentation or idiosyncrasies of places like Paris, Bruxelles, Berlin, and cities in Italy and Holland. I had immediate recognition, before reading the labels for most cities, from my own travels which are guided by visual exploration more than anything else, which meant she really captured something that is specific to each place. Pretty nifty.

Paris
Berlin

The most successful montages, less compressed and calmer, are, in my opinion, the ones that depict places in her geographic vicinity, the Scandinavian countries she lives in or has often visited. Perhaps longstanding exposure. living in a place, leads to true familiarity. This in turn allows you to distill an essence after all, not just a jumbling of multitudinous elements that caught your attention on the road, no matter how much they are part of the reality of those cities. Whatever one thinks of the printed works – they might speak more to those who have the lovely jolt of recognition – the idea itself is creative.

Will I ever travel again? Will the experience change after this eternal time of confinement? Why can my desire to roam not be stilled, even when I have the perfect model right in front of me, a wonderfully snippy ode to small scale familiarity by Billy Collins?

                                            
                 A Sense of Place


If things had happened differently,
Maine or upper Michigan
might have given me a sense of place–

a topic that now consumes 87%
of all commentary on American literature.

I might have run naked by a bayou
or been beaten near a shrouded cove on a coastline.

Arizona could have raised me.
Even New York’s Westchester County
with its stone walls scurrying up into the woods
could have been the spot to drop a couple of roots.

But as it is, the only thing that gives me
a sense of place is this upholstered chair
with its dark brown covers,
angled into a room near a corner window.

I am the native son of only this wingback seat
standing dutifully on four squat legs,
its two arms open in welcome,

illuminated by a swan-neck lamp
and accompanied by a dog-like hassock,
the closest thing a chair has to a pet.

This is my landscape–
a tobacco-colored room,
the ceiling with its river-like crack,
the pond of a mirror on one wall
a pen and ink drawing of a snarling fish on another.

And behind me, a long porch
from which the sky may be viewed,
sometimes stippled with high clouds,
and crossed now and then by a passing bird–
little courier with someplace to go–

other days crowded with thunderheads,
the light turning an alarming green,
the air stirred by the nostrils of apocalyptic horses,
and me slumped in my chair, my back to it all.

by       Billy Collins

Photographs were chosen to add life to the depicted places – people I photographed in the cities captured in the collages.

Music will stretch our brain a bit, a beautiful performance by the Kronos Quartett. I figured a focus on the planet is needed to balance out a focus on an armchair….

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Scents and Sensibility

When you catch me reading Popular Mechanics you know something is off. Well, you should know if you are a regular reader. In fact, all of today’s musings came about because something was off: my (insensible) assumption that irises have no smell. From flowers to a popular mechanics article – it’s been an interesting ride. Let me drag you along.

I have been photographing irises in my neighborhood across the last week, thinking I might do a bit on painters who were drawn to these showy plants. Along the way I was wondering why some flowers smell and others don’t, believing that the latter was true for irises. It turns out they do smell, if faintly, as long as you stick your nose into the blossom. It also seems to be the case that the rarest of perfume ingredients is delivered by irises, although by their roots – orris roots. The reason the stuff is so precious has to do with the fact that when you harvest the rhizomes you have to store them (insect- and fungus-proof) for 3 to 4 years in order for them to develop some scent.

My general question about smell vs no smell had a pretty straightforward answer: if plants are pollinated by birds (wildflowers, hibiscus and many other tropical plants, for example) then scent is unnecessary since birds don’t have an olfactory sense. If plants need insect pollinators, then they want to smell good to guide bees or other critters to the blossoms. And here it gets truly interesting: there is an insane calibration going on between what insects are around, when they are around, and how the plants maximize their attractiveness in idiosyncratic ways. (I was told across the dinner table that all that is taught in 5th grade – well, I must have played hooky…)

Let’s start with time: flowers who are pollinated by moths or bats smell the strongest in the evening into the night. Others prefer morning or afternoon, depending on who is most active during those times, bees and butterflies included. The period before blossoms open widely, and when they are almost spent and have been already sufficiently pollinated, matter as well. During these times the plant produces few volatiles (as the scent molecules are called in science speak), sparing their pollinators effort without reward.

Each scent sends specific signals, often across long distances, attracting those who are the best match. Species pollinated by bees and flies have sweet scents, while those pollinated by beetles have strong musty, spicy, or fruity smells. Successful pollination is of course essential to agricultural crops and fruit-bearing trees, so maximizing your chances of getting the right insect to the right plant is what scent is all about.

Next, leave it to us humans to put a wrench in the works. Flowers smell far less intensely these days than they used to. Selective breeding of flowers has focused on many attributes, all of which seem to have had a detrimental effect on the genetic make-up responsible for odors. Breeders in the cut-flower and ornamental plants market have concentrated on aesthetics (color and shape,)improved vase life and shipping characteristics.So long, scents….

Which finally brings me to Popular Mechanics, where I found, while learning about all this genetic engineering, an article that talks about genetic engineering of scents in reverse order. The plants are no longer among us, but scientists are able to recreate their scent with pretty nifty synthetic chemistry. Scientists from a Boston-based synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, a smell researcher and an artist teamed up to re-create the scents from extinct plants. They got DNA extracted from specimens of three plants stored at Harvard University’s Herbaria, and used synthetic biology to predict and resynthesize gene sequences that might be responsible for the smell. Using Ginkgo’s findings, Sissel Tolaas used her expertise to reconstruct the flowers’ smells in her lab, using identical or comparative smell molecules.

The smells they tried to resurrect were from plants that where killed off by human expansion: Hibiscadelphus wilderianus, a plant from Hawaii last seen in 1912, destroyed by cattle ranching; Orbexilum stipulatum, a scurf pea that was drowned when a dam built in the Ohio River flooded its habitat in 1920; and the Wynberg Conebush, native to South Africa, superseded by vineyards in Cape Town. The collaborative work was eventually made into an interactive art exhibit, Resurrecting the Sublime, which can be visited here, should you want to travel again. The video in this link tells the whole story.

Nature. Science. Art. All you’ve come to expect to read about in this space. Just tell me, how do I fit in the politics?

Music today is from a few centuries apart. Haydn addressing the flower and Ibarrondo perhaps a woman, but we can pretend it’s the flower. Enough flowing ruffles in the composition to match the blossoms….

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Environmental Influence (1)

Today I want to introduce a surrealist painter, Arturo Nathan, who was born into a Jewish family in Trieste, Italy in 1891 and settled there after a youth spent under the command of others – his rich merchant father who made him work in unloved business in London and his army superiors who made him partake in World War I. His family history was complex, the father born in India, lived in China, a British subject (as was his son) married to a wealthy Italian from Trieste. Nathan was a fervent pacifist and spent his time in the British Army doing menial labor, having lied that he was never educated beyond third grade to avoid having to shoot people.

The Ascetic – self portrait, 1926

The trauma of the war led to depression; he turned for help to the very first Italian Psychoanalyst, Eduardo Weiss, who was part of the early Freudian circle, himself trained by Paul Federn and in consultation with Freud across a life time. Weiss suggested that Nathan should explore painting, and he soon made friends with surrealist painters Leonor Fini and eventually Giorgio de Chirico, both of whom highly influenced his choice of subjects and artistic direction in general.

Nathan exhibited throughout the 20’s and 30’s in reputable places, the Venice Biennale included, although he never quite reached the first tier of the famous surrealists. There are only 80 or so paintings that survived. His own life came to halt when he was sent to the Marché, an Italian region that housed many Jewish families around Ancona when the race laws were introduced by Mussolini. He was shipped to Bergen-Belsen and then the concentration camp at Biberach, where he was murdered in 1944. (His analyst, in contrast, was able to emigrate to Chicago after the Anschluss, and had a rich and productive career in this country until his death in 1960.)

NAVE A RIMORCHIO, 1934

When I looked at the few paintings I could find on-line, I was struck by two things: for one, the sense of role play when the artist put himself into the picture, portraying exiles or ascetics, and the like. Mere speculation, but it might have been the influence of his analyst known for contributing to a theory called ego state. The theory assumes that there are various parts of a person that need integration, the assigned roles meant to interact with each other (a precursor to psychodrama approaches.) In symbolic form, a shattered Humpty-Dumpty being put together again. Perhaps we see here the many different states that the artist felt comprised of, but also a continual focus on Self, given the centrality of the figure in the paintings. Look at the painting below: the actor approaching a stage, set with formal symmetry, but where is the entry? Cypresses like stern sentries, wilting plants framing the stage. And is jumping off the little cliff required?

IL POMERIGGIO D’AUTUNNO (Afternoon in the Fall) 1925

Also mere speculation, although a bit more more certain, is my second observation: the choice of color in Nathan’s work. He stands out with his pastels, soft oranges, light greens, unsaturated blues in contrast to the general color use found in Surrealism: strong, saturated, contrast-rich hues (think Dali, de Chirico, Miró.) What was captured here, to perfection, were the light and the colors of his surround, Trieste.

Combinations of orange and white, orange and green, the light blue of the sky or the Adriatic Sea find their way into paintings that seem to depict some other worlds.

Those worlds contain structures also ubiquitous in Trieste, from old Roman ruins with their stales, columns and stonework, to towers regulating the naval traffic. I think it’s a glorious combination, the real and the dream, the softness of color counteracting the inner harsh turmoil.

Il ghiaccio del mare (The ice of the Sea,) 1928

I just hope the creative engagement had some real therapeutic value before the bitter end of being erased by murderous fascism.

L’ABBANDONATO (The abandoned one), 1928

Photographs are all from Trieste in 2018.

Music today is by Jewish composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who was able to flee Italy for the US in 1939. His works was performed at the time by the likes of Walter Gieseking, Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky and Arturo Toscanini.

Bonus music is for my friend Steve T. who needs to practice his guitar!

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Early Smell

Today you have to do your part – I did mine by photographing the lilac bush in the garden and also going back to the archives to pick photographs from a place I would usually visit right now. It is a funky little garden north of here in Washington, planted over a century ago with countless species of lilacs. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use your imagination to provide the smells, some of the most fragrant of all of spring.

Hulda Klager was a German immigrant in the late 1800s, who got her hands on a book about hybridization in 1903. She started hybridizing lilacs two years later and from then on there was no stopping her. Her reputation grew, people ordered, communities vied for being the recipient of the newest annual variety, and she pretty much did it on her own.

Edouarde Manet White Lilacs in a Glass (ca. 1882)

Even the large Columbia River flood of 1948 which basically eradicated her garden was tackled by her with absolute determination: people would return saplings of many of the plants purchased across the years so she could start the garden fresh. She lived to the ripe age of 96 and the garden was eventually taken on by the Woodland Federated Garden Club who founded the Hulda Klager Lilac Society and managed to have the place dedicated as national landmark.

Lawrence Preston Lilac Study #2 (2011)

It is small. It is fragrant. It is weirdly old-fashioned at first sight, the house in some ginger bread way and the garden art leaning towards fairies. It is busy with tourists for exactly two weeks a year, by the busload pre-Covid.

Christiaen van Pol Lilac Blossoms (ca. 1800) – Philly friends you can see this at PMA!

It is also a place of true beauty, capturing the love and skills of a plant enthusiast and the many volunteers in her footsteps who have made preservation possible. I am always amazed at the dedication of people who love plants that bloom for only a microsecond – lilac and peonies among them.

Peter Faes A Marble Vase with Lilac and other Flowers on a Marble Shelf (Undated)

I am truly sad I won’t make it there this year. Maybe next.

Rachmaninoff’s Lilac captures something very specific at the end of the short composition – the way the little parts of each blossom drift down like confetti when the bloom nears the end. I love that piece, here played by the composer himself.

Vincent van Gogh Vase with Lilacs, Daisies and Anemones (1887)

And here is Lilacs by George Walker commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra that won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1996.

Gustave Baumann A Lilac Year (Woodcut 1951)

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Shift in Perceptions

Over the last 2 weeks or so I have occasionally photographed the buds that were sprouting on the pear tree in front of my window. Growing at record speed they finally opened into the most luminous blossoms when the weather turned warm this weekend. Photographs today are in order of dates taken.

When searching for an appropriate poem to go with the images, I came across the words below, by a poet who, I admit, I’d never heard of. Before you yell at me how I dare to offer something that contains an offensive term for the deaf and hard of hearing community in the title, bear with me. The words used have a rhetorical purpose – they activate commonly held negative stereotypes before the poem forces us to completely shift perceptions.

Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree

BY P. K. PAGE (1916 – 2010)

His clumsy body is a golden fruit
pendulous in the pear tree

Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds

Adriatic blue the sky above and through
the forking twigs

Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk
his massive head thick-nobbed with burnished curls
tight-clenched in bud

(Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.)

I watch him prune with silent secateurs

Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight
heavily as oxen in a stall

Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth
a kitten in a box

Pear clippings fall
                            soundlessly on the ground
Spring finches sing
                            soundlessly in the leaves

A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue

Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s
quick springtime pulse

Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears

Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on
his mutely snipping blades

and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta of the day

But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape
sudden and silent in the grass below
uptilt its face to him

then air is kisses, kisses

stone dissolves

his locked throat finds a little door

and through it feathered joy
flies screaming like a jay

From The Glass Air: Selected Poems.– 1985

Deaf and dumb used to be one of the earliest of all the negative associations with those who cannot hear or use spoken language. It was coined by Aristotles, who believed that the absence of hearing implied the absence of learning, leaving the person unable to reason, thus dumb. The phrase was later intended to describe not hearing and not speaking, eventually changed to deaf mute, with identical definition – much to the justified ire of the deaf and hard of hearing community who points out how many ways of communication their members have, including their very own language. The horrid associations for those who live with deafness as being not quite right can be found across cultures and religions – an informative source for historical tidbits can be accessed here, famous rabbis and Martin Luther among the more rabid lunatics when it came to stigmatizing the other.

The poet obviously moves from the introduction in the title to further negative descriptions of the man in the pear tree. His body is slightly misshapen, his fingers stubby, his head massive, his utterances the mewing of a kitten and his movement of the slowness of oxen in the barn – suggesting some chromosomal mishap, if not proximity to animals more than humans.

But then something shifts. He does delicate work with the secateurs, and even though a stone clogs his ears and weighs down his tongue, he has other modes of perceptions, highly sensitive. He feels spring’s life pulse through the tree with his touch, he smells the future in whiffs of sap, and he sees a world of sunlight and blue sky translated into summery panoramas, freely sailing off.

The joy is multiplied when his wife on the ground tilts her face at him, and his love for her enables an articulated response, pure happiness. He is loving and beloved, the healthiest, most human state of all. How many readers can remember a time at all where we screamed with joy at the closeness of a loved one? What is wrong with US?

There remains one riddle: (Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.) What does that line seek in the poem?

Ivan Generalic was Page’s contemporary, a Croatian farmer and autodidactic painter, among the most famous in the European Primitivist movements. Page was a painter herself, and I wondered if she was drawn to one or another of his paintings that would deliver the template for the imagery. All I could find was a couple underneath a pear tree. Maybe the poetic imagination described what unfolded before that reunion.

Or, alternatively, she is using the coinage of primitivism to have us look at something that is not primitive at all. Generalic’s work was suffused with critical political commentary of farmers’ and workers’ lots, superstitions in rural areas, the burdens of religion and so much more. The analogy of taking a second look behind what is perceived as primitive at first glance, and correcting our assumptions, is a tempting interpretation of the poem as well.

Music from Croatia, across a century.

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Virtual Louvre

When I learned that the Louvre now has an internet platform on which you can peruse 480.000 or so objects of art, I was flooded with memories.

The earliest one was in the 1960s of barely making it through the museum visit before ending up with a horrible case of traveler’s food poisoning, spending two miserable days in a cheap hotel room instead of exploring Paris. Whatever I saw in the museum was displaced by anxious estimates if the next loo was in timely reach…

Another one still has my heart sing – showing Paris to my 13-year old for the first time during the hot summer of 2005. We stayed in a tiny, airless apartment borrowed from friends of friends in the un-touristy 13th arrondissement, plastered with cheap posters showing Louvre paintings. Soon we traced them to the real source, guided by a teenager with unusual patience – art was not really his thing – as long as he was given a chance to get there by Metro. Figuring out a European subway system was joy for this PDX kid who had barely yet taken busses….

That was also the time when I purchased a letter opener – the traditional souvenir for the stay-at-home husband – for an exorbitant price at the Louvre giftshop, only to find a much more interesting one for a fraction of the money at a flea market days later.

Live and learn.

My latest Paris visit was by myself a few years ago, this time much more interested in photographing the building and the people surrounding it than spending a precious day being swiftly carried along by crowds within….

Now we all can choose our own pace for enjoying the art, perusing the website which has a nifty set up, for lay people and researchers alike. On display are not just the exhibits but also objects that are on long term loan to other institutions or in storage. You can search by name of artist or art work, by department, or follow their suggested thematic compilations. There is also an interactive map where you can prepare your tour, room by room, should you ever be so lucky to enter the real thing again.

A woman can dream…..

Music today is a must-watch – visually brilliant and conceptually clever. The artists, Beyonce and Jay Z had private access to the Louvre to film a video for one of their songs on the 2018 album Everything is Love.

The dancing – almost all POC in a place filled with almost all White representations – is choreographed in front of the Mona Lisa, Jacques-Louis David’s the Coronation of Napoleon, and his portrait of Madame Récamier, The Winged Victory of Samothrace sculpture, honoring the goddess Nike, The Great Wings of Thanis, the largest Egyptian sculpture in the museum, the Venus de Milo, Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, and, the one portrait of a Black person painted 6 years after the abolition of slavery, Marie-Guillemine Benoit’s Portrait of a Black Woman (Negress.) These scenes are interspersed with glimpses of normal family life, tranquil domesticity, in front of the famous art.

It’s easy to detect references to current political events (taking a knee, for example,) but you have to dig if you want to understand some of the other reasoning. Here is just one case:

Why, for example, are all of these exclusively black women dancing in front of Napoleon’s coronation, of all pieces? Well, let us consider that Napoleon, at the time when France had colonized much of the Caribbean, started as an “abolitionist”, but within a few years, came out with this gem: “How could I grant freedom to Africans, to utterly uncivilized men who did not even know what a colony was, what France was?”. His friends at the time blamed Josephine, his wife, who grew up in the Caribbean owning slaves. Guess who the woman kneeling directly behind Bey is? Josephine. Guess what ethnicity Beyonce’s mother is? Creole.

 (I found this in the comment section on one of the NY Magazine reviews of the new album.)

Or look at the seminal piece of the French Romantic movement, The Raft of the Medusa, located behind Jay Z who is singing I can’t believe we made it. A reference, by all reports, to the endangered marriage, but also likely commentary on the aftermath of colonialism and slavery, the reminder of the many souls lost at sea during the trade. The real shipwreck, by the way, happened not too long before this painting was created. Géricault even interviewed two of the 15 survivors on this raft that started out with 147 who had survived the shipwreck per se, then drifting for 13 days before the rescue of the few who made it.

And why was the Louvre open to being used as a stage? Here is a spokesperson (not discussing monetary exchange, mind you – )

“Beyoncé and Jay-Z visited the Louvre four times in the last ten years. During their last visit in May 2018, they explained their idea of filming. The deadlines were very tight but the Louvre was quickly convinced because the synopsis showed a real attachment to the museum and its beloved artworks.”

Live and earn…

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