Today I went to the Reynolda House in Winston-Salem to see the exhibit The Artist's Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement (1887-1920) before it closes on January 3. What a stunning exhibit! I was, however, disappointed when I saw an icon of a camera with a slash through it at the entrance to the exhibit, Absolutely No Photographs, full stop, as I was hoping to put together a little illustrated essay about the exhibit.
The unpleasant surprise of no photographs was counterbalanced by the pleasant surprise of walking into the next-to-last room of the exhibit and seeing an oil of irises in shades of blue and purple, white and yellow, nestled among deep-green spears of leaves. Before I could stop myself, I gave an audible gasp and exclaimed, "I know that!" Reading the object label posted on the wall, I saw it was Iris at Dawn by Maria Oakey Dewing, a favorite of mine from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, a collection I have visited a number of times. Favorite works of art are like old friends, and I was delighted that this one had traveled to North Carolina to visit me. I shall content myself with a reproduction from the public domain:
It turns out that Maria Oakey Dewing and her artist husband Thomas (a younger man who she did not marry until she was 36) spent many summers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the artists' colony in Cornish, New Hampshire, where she cultivated a large garden that served as inspiration for many of her paintings. Here is one from the Smithsonian called Garden in May.
A Bed of Poppies, below, lives at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts (the gallery being a part of tony prep school Phillips Andover, not to be confused with tony prep school Phillips Exeter).
Delicious. I love the Smithsonian's description of Garden in May, which seems applicable to all three paintings:
"Dewing places the viewer among the living stems and blossoms that she knew so well. She has cropped a section from the larger bed for intense study, as if she had held a frame in front of the garden and painted only what fit in the rectangle."
I staggered out of the exhibit, art-drunk, watched the video about the history of Reynolda AGAIN (I'm obsessed with the Reynolda House, Gardens, and Village, as well as RJ and Katharine Smith Reynolds, but that is for another day), and went into the main house for a while to see it decorated for the holidays, lingering in RJ's study and the lake breakfast porch.
On the way out I treated myself to something from the gift shop, a long, heavy string of pearls that can be doubled -- very Coco Chanel -- once I overheard the stylish manager (today she was wearing a chic turquoise wool pencil skirt) say to someone else, "This is the best value in the store! Hand-knotted, cultured pearls!" I can hardly wait for the Ansel Adams exhibit to arrive in the spring.
With time running out on my New Year's resolution for 2015, to start blogging, my son Quentin and his fiancée Mary helped set up this blog as their Christmas gift to me, less than a week away from the new year. What did I want to call the blog, they asked me? For inspiration in making this decision I turned to my commonplace book.
Commonplace books, which have been used for centuries (Marcus Aurelius apparently kept one) are simply personal compilations of quotes and notes and thoughts, perhaps pictures and images too. I started mine in back in 1976, in an undistinguished blank book I picked up at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire. Although some people use their commonplace books for their own words and thoughts, I use mine mostly for quotes and passages from my reading, both poetry and prose, sometimes written in longhand, sometimes typed and pasted in its pages, supplemented with articles tucked into the front and back covers. Forty years later, my Dartmouth book is a treasure whose precious contents I have read and reread many times over.
Leafing through my book, I scribbled down ideas on scratch paper, only to reject them, until I came upon a passage from Thoreau's Walden that I had not read in a long time:
Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and
the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring. . .
I learned to love lilacs in Vermont as a child, and have always missed them terribly over the years since moving south. My husband and I were fortunate to be in Vermont this very year during lilac season, and I was enchanted anew with their "sweet-scented" aroma, their purple and white flowers. We even visited Walden Pond this summer together for the first time. Thoreau's meditative words on time and transience, embodied in the lilac itself and energized by the word vivacious, resonated with me. The next thing I knew Quentin and I were scanning the web for images of lilacs to use on the title page.
I also liked the idea of a pithy quote underneath the blog's title, and I knew immediately what I wanted, a quote from Muriel Rukeyser that I have committed to memory:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
This, too, I had recorded in my commonplace book, and to make sure I had remembered it correctly (I had, as it turned out) I searched again through the book until I found the place I had written it down. According to Wikipedia -- and I have no qualms about relying on Wiki for this sort of thing -- Rukeyser was "an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism." All quite auspicious as far as I am concerned.
So here I start, thinking about the lilacs of New England on a Christmas night in North Carolina, listening to the wind as it gently moves the blossoming flowers and the heart-shaped leaves.
