Herb & Dorothy 50×50

When I led tours at the Delaware Art Museum as a docent, we received a gift of 50 conceptual and minimalist works collected by Herb and Dorothy Vogel.  A beautiful documentary about Herb and Dorothy told the story of how a postal worker and Brooklyn public librarian were able to amass a world famous art collection.  If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you rush to it.  So inspiring!

Poster 50X50

 

 

 

Now a follow up documentary is being released.  It looks at the gift the Vogels made to each of the 50 states.  50 Works for 50 states.  One museum in each state got the gift.  In this trailer for the new film, you’ll hear my voice about 22 seconds in and then see a glimpse of my public tour they filmed.  Apparently, more is in the film.

I hope you’ll catch a screening–opening at New York’s IFC Center on September 13 and Real Art Ways in Hartford on October 4!  I can hardly wait.

“Oh, how she schoons!”

2013-08-25 12.42.34On this beautiful August day, I sailed with the Quinnipiack Schooner in New Haven Harbor.  It was a very laid back Sunday morning, when even the wind couldn’t be bothered out of its lethargy.  So the two-masted schooner lazed along in the harbor, even as tug boats helped two commercial tankers transverse the harbor while we lingered.

 

We did get a history of the working New Haven harbor and its ancillary businesses like the 2013-08-25 10.30.30ropemaker and sailmaker and other services for a maritime center.  Now all gone.  New Haven is now mostly a “fuel terminal” for sand and salt.  The water of Long Island Sound is actually pretty clean, although the mud apparently has absorbed the decades of pollution.

More upbeat was learning about the schooner itself.  The word comes from ‘schoon’, pronounced shoon, and refers to the way the boat moves through the water.  The apocryphal story goes that a very fine lady on shore remarked about one of the boats, “oh, how she schoons!”

2013-08-25 10.57.18Schooners are designed to take wind from the side for a fast and comfortable sail.  This in contrast to oyster boats designed to run aground, so the oysters can be harvested.  These boats are called New Haven Sharpies and are still built and sailed today.

Sailing information for you.  The difference between ‘true’ wind and ‘apparent wind’: true wind is the direction and speed of the wind determined by reading the flags on board;  apparent wind is the wind generated by the vessel itself, plus the true wind.  Now you know.

Our sail was pretty calm, with basically no true wind, and therefore without much movement.  We did watch a sailboat churning along under engine power, seemingly saiingl right toward a tanker.  “Huh?”we all wondered.  At the last minute, it swerved away.  Weird.

And either the Coast Guard or one of the tanker security people called the Quinnipiac, in other words us, “troublemakers.”  I think that was in jest, even though boats operating under their own sail have the right of way.  So our little schooner could have made the tankers wait on us.  “Etiquette,” explained Becca, the mate, “plays a role, too.  They’re doing business.  We’re just happy to stay out of the way.”

2013-08-25 11.06.22

Check out this geometries , which really caught my eye.  See more in the slide show below.

 

 

 

 

Clang, clang, Go to the Art Colony

“Clang, clang, clang went the trolley…”

Actually only two clangs are needed to say “let’s go” on the trolley.  I learned that today at 2013-08-23 13.57.13the Shoreline Trolley Museum.  From 1900 on, the trolley ran from the New Haven Green to Shore Beach, for just a nickel.  Over time, the trolleys all over the state, including to the “electric park” for the rides.

The electric trolley grew out of the horse-drawn car, but was a whole lot cleaner.  (By the way, the term “teamster” comes from driving a team of horses.)  Through the years, the trolley car developed, not looking so much like a stage coach any more.  The sides were straightened out and sides were closed off to help endure the winter.  In the summer, the car had removable side panels for the breezes.  And the conductor finally got a windshield!

2013-08-23 13.56.33

Imagine my surprise when our trolley car was called “Desire.”  Yes, that Streetcar named Desire.  Same line.  Our car was retired about 1959 and brought from New Orleans for this museum.  An enormous key is needed to start the trolley and then some muscle power to 2013-08-23 13.46.23shift the gears, as I learned in the museum.  We rode the trolley three miles through the marshes not too far from the shore, speeding up to 25 mph, although friction allowed us to coast a lot, too.  You can imagine why some cities are considering reviving their trolleys–efficient and fun.

2013-08-23 14.07.22

 

When we reached the end of the line, me humming along with Judy Garland in my mind, we all got up and pulled our seats back to face the other way, and we were ready to return.

At the car barn, we saw all kinds of trolley cars, many damaged in Hurricane Sandy, so needing restoration.  The corporate car, which was used to check the lines around the state, but also for boondoggles, was pretty impressive.  Note the stained glass windows.  It even is outfitted with a kitchen and bath–bigger than some New York apartments.

2013-08-23 14.44.54

 

Pretty fancy for a trolley car!

 

 

 

 

 

I went on, not by trolley, but by car on I95 (ugh), to the Florence Griswold Museum to see the “Animal/Vegetable/Mineral” exhibit, which was good.  But I swept away by the Griswold house and it story.  Daughter of a ship captain, “Miss Florence” grew up in the 1817 Old Lyme mansion, but couldn’t swing it financially.

So she turned it into a boarding house, soon attracting New York artist Henry Ward Ranger.  Ranger started bringing his artist friends in the summer, and soon the Old Lyme Art Colony was born.  Most famous were Childe Hassam and Willard Metcalf, but about 200 Tonalist and Impressionist artists worked there over the first decades of the 20th century.

Art is all over the house, where artists also painted panels in the dark wooden doors.  2013-08-23 16.16.08

 

 

Here Ranger painted the moonlight on the right and challenged Henry Rankin Poore to finish the scene, painted on the left.  So sweet!

 

 

 

2013-08-23 16.24.47

 

 

Most remarkable of all is the dining room where over 25 artists worked on panels.  I love the beautiful still life the curators created with the panels and red, red apples.

And then there’s the panoramic painting by Poore, a bit of a satire of the Old Lyme Artist Colony, and a real charmer.  Here’s a portion of it.  Two bottles there.  The bottle of paint or turpentine almost full.  The bottle of liquor, well, almost empty.

2013-08-23 16.29.21

 

 

And I think you can see most of very long, thin painting in the video below.

 

 

By the way, I started my day at the Boat House restaurant on the Quinnipiac River about 5 minutes from my apartment.  What a view!  What a day!

2013-08-23 12.41.582013-08-23 12.42.21

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spare and Elegant

2013-08-17 11.02.53

A room at the Hyde

The Hyde Collection is one of those mansion museums where the owners knew they were forming a museum collection.  The rooms and collection merge in function and display.  Personally, I wouldn’t mind staying in the guest bedroom with the Winslow Homer drawing overhead.

 

Georgia O’Keeffe
Petunias
1924

 

I made the trip to the Adirondack’s to see their Georgia O’Keeffe show.  She and Stieglitz spent a lot of time at Lake George, before it was a tourist trap.  While not a huge fan of hers, I really was taken with this early work.  Through the small exhibit, organized thematically, we see her find a confident voice of abstraction.  A large, extreme close of a jack-in-the-pulpit over the course of four canvasses becomes a line in a plane.

What I was taken with were not the flowers but the leaves.  Stunning studies of line in somber color, spare and elegant.  Her series of trees were evocative, full of personality, that the cell phone tour described a couple of times as cruciform.  I suppose the disappeared chestnut tree is a martyr of sorts.

Modern Nature: Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George

Georgia O’Keeffe
The Chestnut Grey
1924

The landscapes from the early 1920s were simplified into shapes that could be hung vertically and become wholly abstract.  I strongly preferred the “representational” horizontals, moody and stormy and quiet and seasonal.

Georgia O’Keeffe
Lake George
1922

Thinking of O’Keeffe, what’s a woman to do?  Leave Stieglitz and go West, find a different palette, carve her own forms.

What’s a 46 year old star of the New York City Ballet to do?  Have four male choreographers create duets for her.  These four new dances, some moments sublime, others a miss, each from this past year, are premiering at Jacob’s Pillow.

What worked best was the spare and elegant.  No curtain or sets, no elaborate costumes.  Instead the focus was on bodies, space, and music.  I love that!

So Whelan is finding a new vocabulary for her body (contemporary dance vs ballet), one that is a little too grindingly Philip Glass for me.  But power to her.

In a society that all too easily throws away older woman, how healing to witness two women who continually find ways to reinvent.

Lifestyles of the Rich…

On this postcard day, the sky was so blue, it hurt my eyes.  The wind was calm.  The temperature in the 70’s.  A perfect day to get out on the water.

2013-08-11 11.06.01

View of the Thimble Islands from Stony Creek on the mainland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe the tiniest beach in Connecticut

Maybe the tiniest beach in Connecticut

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only 15 minutes from my apartment is the Thimble Island Cruise in Long Island Sound.  A string of 25 tiny, glacier-formed islands named for a berry like a black raspberry, these picturesque islands have been settled since the 1600s.  Now, 100 families summer here.  A handful get power and water from the shore.  The rest make do.  You know, holding tanks for rain water and such.

2013-08-11 12.00.182013-08-11 11.20.38
But you gotta be rich.  You could get this little rock and hut for $1.9 mil.  Imagine what the 27 bedroom summer home with the formal gardens and swimming pool goes for.

All these rocks you see are granite, and originally, some of the islands were quarries.  No longer.  The land, what there is of it, is just too valuable.  You could feel bad for the owners of the 1885 Wheeler House. They have to dig up their native palm trees every fall and take them to another island to winter over.

The most populated island has 35 homes, and at one time also had a church and post office, like a real town.  It is called, wait for it, Money Island.  I’m not kidding.

 

 

Maybe this is because the most famous person from the area was Captain Kidd.  The pirate.  Here is the hidden harbor of his island, where supposedly treasure like gold and

Captain Kidd's hidden harbor.  It really is hidden.

Captain Kidd’s hidden harbor. It really is hidden.

silver stolen from ships in the Sound was buried.  Apparently most of his loot was found about 30 miles away, when he was captured in 1699.  The Scottish sailor was taken back to England, where he was tried and executed in 1701.

 

 

 

My favorite house is this one, built to withstand the weather, including 100 mph winds.  The wind goes above, around, below, and has left it the house alone for the past 30 years.  Not bad.

2013-08-11 11.37.31

 

 

 

 

 

 

But really, this little houseboat is the ticket.  Forget living on top of a rock, like the seals that 2013-08-11 11.59.08apparently swarm in March.  Forget hovering like a cormorant or white heron, whom we watched dry off on granite baked in the sun and carved by the sea.  Just live in a little houseboat, heaven on day like this, and pack it in for the winter.

 

 

 

A study in blue, dotted by kayakers and one sailboat

A study in blue, dotted by kayakers and one sailboat

Amazing skies

“Art is a subtle essence.  It is not a thing of surfaces, but a moving spirit.”–George Inness

Although I came to the Clark Art Institute for the Winslow Homer exhibit, which is wonderful, I lost my breath in a room of George Inness paintings.  For a fleeting moment, I had the room to myself.

The gallery turned into a meditation on the seasons (see the slide show).  I thought of how a room of Mark Rothko color field paintings now seemed obvious in their appeal to spirit. Here, Inness is quieter.  You have to seek him out.  He doesn’t call out to you, “Notice me!”

autumn-in-montclair-jpg

Image 1 of 6

Instead, I seized the moment to feel his intent.  As a Swedenborgian, Inness believed spirit/god was all around, and “as above, so below.”  Swedenborg was certainly esoteric, but turning my mind off for those few seconds, I got it.

Then in came the other visitors, and the paintings re-entered their frames and hung on the walls again.

The big sky of the new musical Bridges from Madison County also transported me out of  the theater.  The space at the Williamstown Theatre Festival is so huge that the enormity of the Iowa landscape has been captured.  A lone tree against seemingly endless fields and sky that changed with the mood of the story.  The sunset and starry night sky put me right onto that farm porch.

I don’t know how often out-of-town tryouts get a Broadway stage before the tryout has even started, but I get it about this show.  Everything about it is pitch perfect.  The book by Marsha Norman and score by Jason Robert Brown are so tender.  Elena Shaddow is the part of Francesca.   Kelli O’Hara has already been announced for Broadway, and it’s not that she isn’t wonderful.  But she’s more Meryl Streep (from the movie) than Francesca. Stevan Pasquale as Robert is more in his skin than in Far From Heaven.  And their voices worked really well together, turning the histrionics of the book and movie into something more operatic, sensual, and immersive.

How I prefer a simple story about a family and a passion to that of a transvestite wailing about kinky boots.  The end is so quiet, so poignant, so lovely, so memorable.  How could the Broadway show be any better?

Out of the theater, a cold, driving rain soaked me.  Eventually I drove away fromf the storm, and as sun broke through the dark clouds onto the verdant Berkshire hills, a rainbow thickly pushed up from the ground to the sky.

Another transcendent moment in a day of land, clouds, light, voices, and spiritual beauty.

Delicious creativity

How’s this for a fundraiser?  CitySeed, which hosts all the farmer’s markets around the city, had a fundraiser tonight–a Pie Contest.  Colin from Taste of New Haven was one of the judges, for “most beautiful pie.”

Judges judging Colin is on the far end

Judges judging
Colin is on the far end

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2013-08-02 18.16.31

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some pies are pretty.

Some pies are messy.

Some pies are delicious.

Some pies are too sweet.

Some pies are a little burnt.

Some pies are crumbly.

Some pies are seasonal.

Some pies are not.

Some pies are savory.

Some pies are just for fun.

2013-08-02 18.14.572013-08-02 18.15.18

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happily, there was enough for everyone!