Magnificent Asparagus Fountain

The care with which the rain is
wrong and the green is wrong and
the white is wrong, the care with
which there is a chair and
plenty of breathing.  The care with
which there is incredible justice
and likeness, all this makes
a magnificent asparagus, and
also a fountain.

---Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

To be brief, Stein's off-beat allusion to material objects, weather, colors, foods, bodily functions, and domestic work in this ground-breaking collection of poetry conveys the excitement and pleasure of possession in its deepest and most intangible sense. Vitality! 

[Side note:  observe Stein's use of the word care.  See also this entry, HERE]

A Play of Light: The Still Life Paintings of Janet Fish

"When people look at realist paintings, they focus on the objects, which I don't think are the subject at all.  I think the object is one of the tools, like the paint and the brush.  The real subject is the light, movement, and color, and echoes of the objects in one's mind.  All those things are part of what I use to make the painting."

    --Janet Fish, qtd. in the exhibition pamphlet for "The Art of Janet Fish" (October 2, 2009-January 17, 2009, Naples Museum of Art).

Janet Fish is known for her vibrant and colorful paintings which play with light, shape, and texture. Like still-life, many of her works feature glassworks, foodstuffs, cut flowers, and domestic objects--all rendered in jewel-like colors that she suggests are inspired by her island upbringing.  Yet as the curators of this exhibit suggest, Fish is not a "realist" proper, but an artist whose work intersects abstract expressionism with realism to create expansive, bright and "juicy surfaces."   

  As is well-known, the sensory perception of fragrance is closely linked to memory. A familiar fragrance can prompt a mental journey into one's past.  Yet the sensory perception of subtle differences in light similarly draws the mind away from the mundanities of the present and into an alternative dimension.  On my first pass through this exhibition--which was sort of like a domestic coral reef---nothing much caught my eye.  But on my third pass, as I began to linger over certain paintings, I moved into a more meditative state---developing a keener awareness of the possibilities of the present and a heightened interest in the everyday.  The domestic scenery--while exotic--is not unfamiliar.  

 I was most drawn to one painting, "Cracked Eggs and Milk" (2005) featuring some particularly poignantly rendered cantaloupe-orange glass bowls and raw golden yolks set off in morning light.  The preparations of breakfast or brunch (I'm not attuned enough to the subtleties of light to discern the precise hour of the morning that Fish captures but in my mind's eye it is 8 am) appear in freeze-frame---we have no desire to see the ingredients to come together or to watch the meal being consumed.  There is an intense feeling of pleasure in the moment-- taking note of it, being in it. It is a very rare experience to linger over anything, to reflect on anything, to be rather than to do--to experience the luxury of time. Fish's art thwarts our desires to get to the end of things. She captures a familiar reality and yet makes it startlingly unfamiliar in its delicate allusion to what we fail to notice and what we take for granted.    

Hair Part II: Pieces of Me

Today's quote for this multi-part series on Hair  is taken from Helen Sheumaker's fascinating study, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. This study traces the rise and fall of hairwork (hair jewelry, wreaths, portrait miniatures including locks of hair) as an object of sentiment and devotion as the once hand-made fanciwork became increasingly commercialized:

     In the eighteenth century, the sentimental associations of hair were obliquely displayed; by the nineteenth century, hairwork and the sentimentality it conveyed was worn for others to observe. This practice revealed a paradox about sentimentality. While display of one's sentimentality was essential to being regarded as sentimental, that same exhibition could easily be construed as ostentatious, vulgar, and insincere. Fashion was constantly in flux, it was superficial, and it was self-aggrandizing. It opposed the sincerity that women in particular were supposed to possess. Fashion was expressed with goods, and therefore was opposed to the domestic sphere. Thus, those constant fluctuations in styles threatened to undermine the premise of sentimentality itself.
     Even as hairwork revealed the dissonance between genuine emotion and frivolous fashionableness, it attempted a remedy.  Hair's undeniable relationship to an individual asserted a sincerity of character that transcended the hypocrisy that fahionableness implied.  The mid-nineteenth century was the height of the popularity of hairwork perhaps because as fashion was criticized as being particularly hypocritical, hairwork's genuiness was being asserted.  On the one hand, hair jewelry was very much a commodity, buttressed as it was by marketing and salesmanship; on the other hand, it was exactly that which could not be completely commodified.  Hair jewelry provided a way to forestall the apparent effects of fashion in the market and in the social world" (20-21).

--Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, (2007)