Autumn Leaves

Viewing Autumn Leaves

This bright treasure
scattered with a generous hand-
I bow and reach

Mystery Dish

Calzone or Stromboli?
I made my first calzone a few days ago, or perhaps it was a stromboli? I'm pretty confused by the different definitions. I remember eating stromboli for the first time when I was 18, thanks to the Penn food services. I found it to be a delicious novelty of thin dough, sauce, cheese and pepperoni, rolled up like a jelly roll: yum yum!

Now at our local pizzeria, we often order what they call a calzone: something like a folded over pizza, crimped at the edges, filled with a variety of different options, but always including sauce.

However, the definition of calzone on Wikipedia says:
Although most strombolis are rolled, strombolis have also been known to be prepared like a calzone, where the only difference is that a stromboli has the sauce inside of the folded crust, where the calzone is served with dipping sauce on the side.

This concoction I made is folded, not rolled, but it does indeed have sauce (and other goodies) inside of it. Perhaps it is a new hybrid: Calzoli?

Friend Friday

Several friends of mine have been busy recently, and I thought I'd boast a little about their achievements. Above you see my friend Katie, also known as Dr. Katharine Beals, who just had a book come out two weeks ago. Since I've watched the whole book birthing process from idea to drafts to re-writes to actual published volume I feel like a proud auntie. The book is called Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World and is published by Shambhala books. Congratulations my friend!



Beth Randall is an old friend with whom I had lost touch till she showed up taking one of my classes at the Main Line Art Center a year or so ago. What a pleasure to renew our acquaintance, and to watch Beth's prodigious talent flowering. Not that I had much to do with it, but nonetheless I was very proud to attend the reception of her very first solo show a couple of weeks ago: the work looks great! If you live on the main line you really should stop in and take a look:
Oil Paintings by Beth Randall
Oct. 2 -- Nov. 1, 2009
Milkboy Coffee
824 West Lancaster Avenue
Bryn Mawr, PA



Blush Roses, Frances Galante, oil on linen, 12 x 19

My friend Frances Galante is having a one-person show too, in Old City Philadelphia. I unfortunately missed the opening reception but I went to see the show last week. The work has a beautiful clarity and freshness that speaks straight to the heart!
Recent Work
September 30 to November 1, 2009
Artists' House Gallery
57 North Second Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106

BEAUTY

I took this shot last weekend at Beaver Farm. For anyone who doesn't know, I have been helping organize a plein air event to benefit my son Henry's wonderful special needs school: Camphill Special School. The main painting day in August was sort of amazing (so much so that mention of Plein Air at Beaver Farm has gotten into several national and regional magazines!) However, some artists wanted to come back to finish up a piece or two, and a couple of people could not make the big day for various reasons, so we held a make-up day this past weekend. The skies were astonishing!

When I shot this I was intending possibly to work from it later to make a painting, but now that I've seen it on the screen there is something so complete about it that I think whatever I saw and loved is already fully expressed. So no need for me to go further with it...which is what I guess I am usually doing when I make a painting: expressing something further about reality. But sometimes the reality is enough.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

~e.e.cummings

Hospital Haze

Henry has been visiting lots of big white cold boring places that smell funny lately! He is so patient. After hanging out getting some tests in three hospitals in three weeks he ended up getting (walking) pneumonia! Fortunately, he is responding beautifully to the antibiotics and is well on the way to recovery. I love his look of calm resignation to fate...what a role model he is for his unresigned mama...

Red and Green

Illumination-
the descending sun shining
through wet cloth



Note: our clothesline has seen a lot more use this year than ever before, and I bet other people are doing the same. Check out Clotheslines Across America for further inspiration.

Plein Air at Beaver Farm in American Artist

Wow!
Many thanks to Steve Doherty and the other folks at American Artist magazine for giving this wonderful shout-out to Plein Air at Beaver Farm. I love the way they arranged the many photos (and am thrilled to see Garth's photo of me painting the pigs made it in!) As always, if you want to zoom in and read the text, click pix to enlarge.



American Artist
November 2009
page 8
Photo credits: Carol Goetz, Garth Herrick and Nancy Bea Miller

Short but Sweet

Painting Like the Wind

I was on Monhegan Island painting a few days ago...an annual week-long trip with a group of painter friends. We rent a cottage together, share meals and crits: it's a wonderful thing. However this year one of the group fell ill, and there is no medical care on island (unless you count the sparse rack of Benadryl and Tylenol at the Monhegan Store!) After a few days with no improvement it became obvious that some of us were going to have to take her all the way back home. I, with one other friend, performed that service. It's a very long trip involving packing, walking, taking a ferry and then capped by a ten hour drive...too far to turn right around and go back for the sake of just one more day (although I certainly thought about it!)

Anyway, yesterday I was slowly and glumly unpacking my gear, glad to have done the right thing by my friend but also wishing at the same time that I was still back on Monhegan. I felt a little disoriented, along the lines of "What am I doing here?" I had been so set, so ready, so primed, to be on my favorite island and now I was back home, a little too abruptly for my inner sense of balance. But my sick friend was grateful, my family thrilled to have me home early, and it's not the end of the world. The afternoon sun was brilliant and hot and so I decided to let the wet paintings from the trip catch a few rays (this helps them dry faster.) When I unpacked them and laid them out I was absolutely stunned to find that in the few short days on Monhegan I'd painted nine panels en plein air!

On Monhegan one of my friends commented that I was painting like I was on fire, and apparently she was right. The sense of urgency was so all-encompassing that I had not even realized how many I pieces I'd begun. Of course, they are small pieces, and unfinished, but nonetheless a happy surprise. I'll complete some of the more finished ones up from photos and memory and save the rest for next year's Monhegan trip and finish them up then (if the fates allow!)

Overhead

A busy summer beach, and nobody seems to notice the approaching helicopter except two boys...

Two books reviewed in...

A Tale of Two Art Books
I was surprised and delighted to find that the magazine kept my somewhat facetious working title as the print title for this review! Had I been really following the Dickens formula I would have begun the review with "It was the best of books, it was the worst of books..." but in fact both books are wonderful! Very different from each other, but each is excellent in its own way. Classical Painting Atelier by Juliette Aristides and Alla Prima by Al Gury



This just came out in Fine Art Connoisseur, October 2009, page 38.