Glass mosaic, 1.25 inches by Margaret Almon, $59. SOLD.
I have been experimenting with photographing my pendants on a white background to help the colors shine. I love my old windowsill, but sometimes the patterning in the wood competes with something small like a pendant. One of my favorite aspects of mosaic is that it changes with the light, and yet it makes for photographing challenges. I am always so happy that people say the work is even better in person. For the shop, I also tried out the FotoFuze app which makes the background practically a lightbox in its intensity.
New Day Mandala(Early Bird and the Night Owl) by Nutmeg Designs. Glass on wood, 10 inches, $258.
I love how Stratoz describes our collaboration on this New Day Mandala(Early Bird and the Night Owl):
Orange and Blue are opposites that complement each other in this mandala to greet a new day. As refreshing as a night of rest this glass mosaic is a circle of hope for being renewed with the rising sun. Designed and started by a blue early bird and detailed by an orange night owl. . . “I like the sunrise ’cause it brings a new day, I like a new day, it brings new hope …”(Duke Ellington/Mitchell Parish) A sign that announces to the world that gravity will not weigh you down, hope is perched on your soul.
I am not a morning person, but the sunrise brings this Kurt Elling version of the jazz standard into my head and heart. Elling interweaves a Rumi poem in Mitchell Parish’s lyrics. Take a moment to read the poem and listen to this beautiful tune.
“Where Everything Is Music” (trans. Coleman Barks)
“Don’t worry about saving this music / or be scared
if the singing ends
or the piano breaks a string / for we have fallen to a place
where everything is music and singing /
everything is recovered and new / ever new and musical
and even if the whole world’s harp should burn up /
there would still be hidden there
the spirit of song there to linger on /
and even if a candle’s blown out by wind
the fire smolders on in an ember and then sparks again /
the singing is a drop / just a drop in oceans of seas /
grace keeps it moving through bodies like these
and the sound of a life sends an echoing out /
the poem sings willingly in each newborn’s crying shout /
but it’s growing slowly / and keeps many secrets /
stop the words and listen / feel the echo of it starting /
open a space in the center of your beating heart
and let spirits fly in and out . . .”
Chihuly-Steinway Concert “D” Piano(2002) at the Philadelphia Flower Show. Photo by Wayne Stratz(2009).
September is National Piano Month. This piano immediately caught my eye when Stratoz and I went to the Philadelphia Flower Show in 2009. The theme was jazz, and featured this amazing Steinway with orange keys and an art glass top created by Dale Chihuly. Witnessing glass art was one of the reasons I became an artist.
Chihuly-Steinway Concert “D” Piano(2002) at the Philadelphia Flower Show. Photo by Wayne Stratz(2009).
On a whim I searched for “orange piano” and the Orange Piano Tour appeared. German musician Stefan Aaron takes an orange upright piano to a different country each year, from the Great Wall of China, the Swiss Alps, the Munich airport in Germany, and the top of the Landmark Tower in Yokohama, Japan in 2015. Check out the Munich Airport Soca and the Magic Carpet.
Detail of Equinox II by Elizabeth Osborne(2009), oil on canvas. Veils of Color Exhibit at the James Michener Art Museum. Photo by Wayne Stratz.
To get a postcard about a show entitled Veils of Color ensures I will be wanting to go. Elizabeth Osborne‘s oil paintings are on display until November 15, 2015 at the James Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA. In University of Pennsylvania alumni profile, the author quotes Philadelphia Inquirer critic Edward J. Sozanski’s praise for Osborne’s “Dionysian commitment to vibrant, saturated color.” Yes, vibrant, saturated color. I felt like I was stepping into sunshine, and in fact, some versions of these paintings have figurative versions, with a woman sitting at a window.
Detail of Equinox II by Elizabeth Osborne(2009), oil on canvas. Veils of Color Exhibit at the James Michener Art Museum. Photo by Wayne Stratz.
She was born in 1936, and grew up in Lansdale, where I now live. I was taken with the fact that she taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts(PAFA) from 1963-2011, teaching into her 70’s. She recorded an oral history interview with the Senior Artists Initiative, and organization that heartens me by its existence. In addition to oil painting, she has work in watercolor and printmaking.
I realized that I had seen her work at both the Woodmere and the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinius. I like to imagine that her veils of color saturating the Philadelphia area, appearing all around me, and that her legacy of teaching will continue to move outward.
Walter Emerson Baum (1884-1956) South Side, Easton (Industrial Scene, Easton) c. 1940 Oil on Canvas. James Michener Art Museum, Photo by Wayne Stratz(2015).
Stratoz and I went to see the Iron and Coal, Petroleum and Steel: Industrial Art from the Steidle Collection Exhibit at the James Michener Art Museum(on view until October 25, 2015). I was interested to note the context of this collection, assembled by the Edward Steidle(1887-1977) Dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State. Steidle purchased and commissioned these paintings to as a way to demonstrate the various industrial processes and the critical role of the extractive industries in Pennsylvania to his students. The Industrial Art homage at the Michener is notable for the predominance of flame, with the glowing orange of molten steel. Artists were drawn like moths to a flame, and each had a style that captured the scenes of the furnaces in a different way. The blazing colors are beautiful, and yet ominous in the power to cause injury and in their intense heat.
I’d never seen a steel factory until I moved to Bethlehem, PA, from Canada in 1985. It rose up like a mountain from the South Side, and had produced steel for the Golden Gate bridge and much of the New York skyline. 1985 was at the tail end of the Steel, losing money, cutting workers. When I started college a few years later, I took a class in United States Labor History, and have been drawn to stories like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser who wrote movingly of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.
John Willard Raught (1857-1931) Anthracite Colliery, 1925 Oil on Canvas (Dunmore native). James Michener Art Museum. Photo by Wayne Stratz(2015).
We lived in Dunmore, PA in the early 1990’s. The coal mining industry left its mark with a network of tunnels beneath the town, and the threat of homes and grounds sinking. Subsidence was a new word that I learned in those years, especially when a hole opened up in a friend’s backyard in a neighboring town. I was interested to see that the Michener exhibit had a painting by a Dunmorean, John Willard Raught(1857-1931). He studied art in New York City, and returned home to paint portraits and landscapes of the area. He had an exhibit at a local club in 1915, where most of the paintings appear to be tranquil landscapes rather than the mining scenes. The Michener Museum notes that Raught felt conflicted by the coal industry which while providing jobs for those he knew, also scarred the landscape, and the forboding fears of disaster, and painted many of the anthracite breakers which he called “Black Castles.”
James Siena, Heliopolis, 2004, Woodcut engraving Paper size: 12″ x 10″ Image size: 5″ x 4″ Labyrinthian Structures, Johnson Gallery, Cornell University. Photo by Wayne Stratz (2015).
Stratoz and I went on an excursion to Ithaca, NY, and one of our stops was the Johnson Museum at Cornell University. I was smitten with the James Siena: Labyrinthian Structures exhibit, and the intricate patterns of Siena’s prints. I have walked labyrinths, and the convolutions calm my mind. Siena says he hopes to take the viewer’s eye on a walk with his patterning, and it is a fine walk indeed.
It troubled my librarian heart that I couldn’t find gallery labels for the art, and it didn’t look promising online either, probably because the exhibit wasn’t officially open yet! I didn’t realize this fact until writing this post and saw the start date was September 5th, 2015, and we were there August 25th. I’d like to give a shout-out to Troy McHenry and his James Siena Print List, his wonderful “unofficial online print catalogue raisonné in-progress” (as he terms it). McHenry is a collector of Siena’s work, and any artist would love to have such a labor of love. Go explore it to see many more of Siena’s works.
I came across another Margaret at the Lansdale Arts Festival 2015. I was looking for a basket to hold my keys and wallet and other miscellany, and of course this fabric one in orange caught my eye. Margaret DeCook calls herself The Versaltile Artisan and hails from Allentown, PA.
I wrote a check for my purchase, and she said the only other check she received that day was from another Margaret. We were out in force. I believe she was the one that asked the question I usually pose: Do you go by Margaret? She goes by the whole thing, just like I do. Margaret is a name that has a multitude of nicknames, and people have the tendency to pick one and apply it, but I recognize myself in Marge, Peggy, or Maggie.
Basket by Margaret DeCook. Mosaic Mirror by Margaret Almon.
I love how this fabric coils around in yellow orange from the center, and then incorporates red orange up the sides. It’s called a Centerpiece Bowl, and I will use it to help center me, and keep important objects in one place. I once read a book on organizing where the author said as long as you keep things moving in the right direction, point them on their way, that was good enough: the receipts on the shelf, ready to travel downstairs, the coffee cup from nightstand, to dresser and then downstairs. I still imagine the objects in my house on a journey toward their home place.
A few months ago I read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, where she advocates keeping only those objects that “spark joy” ~ this orange basket has the spark.
