Thursday, July 4, 2013

An Artist Paints With Flowers


Gardeners run the full gamut of aesthetic inclinations, no subset more so than artists.  Monet gardened to paint, Jim Sullivan gardens in stone, Robert Dash gardens with painted doors and gates, Sarah Draney deploys rustic salvage and found objects. Only Linda Stillman grows flowers for their pigments alone. 

Linda Stillman With Flowers
I first saw her work at The Gallery at R&F in Kingston, housed within the factory producing R&F Handmade Paints.  I’ve seen endless photographs of flowers, and paintings of flowers, but I had never seen actual flower pigments used in the making of art.  Her interest in the direct use of pigments evolved from an early land installation, August Garden, a planting of annuals laid out in the form of a calendar for the month of August.  The garden was photographed daily from above and the passage of time documented by observations and drawings. The exhibition then moved on to a series of works on paper using colors derived directly from the flowers onto the paper.

Choosing Pigments 
Linda was not always focused on the ephemeral.  “1998 was the official start of my switching careers from commercial to fine art,” Linda says.“  I had been trained as a commercial artist and worked as a graphic designer and an art director.  At 50 I shifted gears, and earned an MFA in the Visual Arts from the Vermont College of College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.” 

From the beginning her work was centered on space, time and memory.  As she became more deeply involved in her art she worried about how she would find time to garden.  “That’s when I decided to plant for the August Garden land installation.  I converted my old vegetable garden into a planting of annuals in the form of a calendar for the month of August.”  She photographed the garden at various stages of growth, and then transformed her observation into art, abstracting the essence by creating the rubbings from the very plant materials she had been growing.

From there she moved away from the representational calendar and on to greater abstraction, using the petals from flowers and rubbing their pigment directly into paper.  Only freshly cut flowers would do; dried flowers would not produce the effect she is after.  The main concern in her art is how to remember.  “I select the flowers and rub the colors directly onto the paper as a way of remembering. Traces of plant matter often remain.”

A Typical Harvest Ready for Work  
I visited Linda in her beautiful garden and studio in a rural town in  Columbia County, NY.  She works out of a serene studio in one of pair of handsome barns.  There is a strong sense of calm; it’s hard to imagine interruptions. 

The flower drawings are only a small part of her concentration on ephemera, on the intersection of time, memory and nature.  She executes small sky paintings as seen from her the studio, from the same window in exactly the same spot, every day of the year.  “The idea, she says, “was to capture something ordinary and make art out of it.”  In 2008-9 she exhibited skylines by month at the Arts Club of Chicago

Studio View for Sky Paintings 
During a recent residency at Wave Hill, Linda made drawings using flower and plant specimen, and continued her Sky series by executing a small painting every day, but from a new location.  Her aesthetic is simple and austere; daily paintings are important if you are to capture time and memory.

Her garden is anything but austere, but it is composed with a painterly eye.  The vegetable garden is robust and immaculately organized.  The rows are meticulously maintained.  The flowers are clear and vivid, as is her body of work using plants.

Vegetable Garden
Everything grown can be utilized in a work of art, but there are problems still to be solved.  What is the life span of a pigment derived directly from plant materials?  Are fixatives necessary?  Will they change the character of the finished work?  Or is the whole point that the work is as ephemeral as the flowers themselves, and perhaps that is just as it should be.

A Flower-Stain Technique Demonstration 



Monday, June 17, 2013

A Late Start


From time to time, most of us grind to a halt.  Sometimes with good reason, often with none.  In October I moved yet again, this time just up the street in Rhinebeck.  After a summer in a backyard shared with various tenants and dogs that precluded a garden, a rental house became available with its own deep garden and extra room for guests.

Moving sucks up all the air available for breathing and almost all the available time.  Eventually, everything settles in place and it’s possible to focus on work again.  Fortunately, I’m not too far from the Catskills garden and the season is not too far ahead of me. 

Perennial Border Before Thinning
That garden is now well established and we are doing more removal and resettling than planting.  The climbing hydrangea has taken over a frame outbuilding and will have to be relocated.  The perennial border has been thinned and rethought. The baptisia was taking more than its fair share of space and has been reduced from three to two. The Siberian iris in the Peony Walk will be divided once again.  As a result of tree removal, the porch garden, once a haven for shade plants, is now in the sun. 

The new Rhinebeck garden is a different story.  It is a clean slate:  a long, deep, neglected garden typical of 1850’s village houses. A. J. Dowling in Victorian Cottage Residences (1842) lays out in detail how these properties should be used, accompanied by planting plans and maintenance expectations of family members.  In its day, the ornamental part of the garden would lie in front of planted trellises, with the working garden discretely in the rear. The latter would include a kitchen garden, fruit trees, berries, grape vines.  Varieties to be planted were specified and duly noted, while more routine vegetables could be purchased in the village. 

Dowling, 1842 Edition
All traces of that early garden are gone and now it is a plateau of lawn – a few shrubs on the perimeter, the brick outline of beds long abandoned to the easiest of plants to grow, hostas and daylilies. Tall trees, black walnuts and maples, are located on the neighbors’ side of the perimeter fence and pruned high.  The dappled shade is ideal for sitting quietly, but not best for planting.  No roses, perennials or vegetables here, or anything susceptible to black walnut toxicity.

As for the house itself, the first time I walked in it was immediately familiar.  It is an 1856 side hall cottage, identical in layout to a house I owned years ago in Roslyn, NY.  Coincidentally, I have a dollhouse made from the original plans for the Roslyn house, now in the Livingston Street living room.

There is light from all four sides, something you don’t miss in a city apartment until you have it again somewhere else. This house felt right from the very beginning, which does not happen that often.  

We’ve started our planting with the front of the house – the editorial “we” being Natalka and I.  You will remember her from earlier posts as the critical success factor in the Catskills garden.  Natalka cleaned out the bed, emptying it of desiccated boxwood, ubiquitous green/white hosta and a few oddities.  After soil testing and amending, we planted this week. 
71 Livingston Street, before
I dithered, as usual.  I started with a bold idea, a strict yew hedge centered on a jazzy ornamental something – an urn, an armillary, giant canna, but settled on a more neighborhood-friendly configuration.  At the same time, Natalka tried to avoid repeating what we see all around us and yet remain harmonious.  We settled on Carolina rhododendron, dwarf ‘Bombshell” hydrangeas (the people responsible for naming hydrangeas is a another conversation), ferns (probably Christmas or Ghost), a cimicifuga or two tucked in for surprise, and clematis for a little color on the porch railing.
71 Livingston Street, after

I share a semi-sunny property line with a neighbor and plan to mirror her perennial plantings and perhaps expand the palette somewhat.  This is a very neighborly neighborhood.  When winter is finally over, everyone emerges from confinement and stands about outdoors chatting. Neighborhood news and garden tips are freely exchanged, invitations proffered and accepted.

I think you can tell I’m smitten.