Light Up the Night!

Parks and gardens are among some of my favorite things; I prefer the overgrown, unruly kind, the kind that suggests that if you wander long enough you might discover SECRETS... like a castle with a Sleeping Beauty still immured deep within its walls, or plump, scarlet-capped mushrooms with white gills like lace around their pale stalks and hallucinations leaking from their centers, or glistening snails slithering over green shrubbery like liquid pearls, or robin's nest full of warm, turquoise eggs. It could be enchantment... or toads. It could be anything. All you have to do is pick a meandering path and follow it and keep your eyes open and ready to see.

 

Gardens at dusk are a thing of dreams, full of hidden magic, of fey, of shadowy, twilight beauty. And at night they are a world of mystery, of looming trees, of sweeping inkiness, of unseen nocturnal creatures known only by their call. Have you ever explored the woods in the dark? Have you ever felt the excitement and awe of wandering in the warm summer shadows? It's amazing! Amazing!

Summer nights ARE mysterious, and if you add glowing garlands, twinkling lights strung between the trees, candles flickering on the empty wooden barrels, paper-shaded lamps suspended from the boughs you find yourself immersed in Midsummer Night's Dream. It's wonderful. Spellbinding.

 

Last Saturday at the Light Up the Night: a benefit for Descanso Gardens, Troy and I walked the lantern lit trails, heard coyotes sing in the nearby bushes, picked our way through the smoky blackness by the moonlight, listened to owls deftly pluck their prey from the whispering creak, shivered at the night-sounds we couldn't begin to guess and danced to our flashlights. It made us feel young, adventurous and silly. It made us think of druids and ancient rites, starlit dances and pagan festivals. It inspired us to transform our own backyard into a place of enchantment and sit there in the candlelight-pricked dark, talking to each other and touching and laughing and watching the branches like black lace overhead.

It struck me how much the adults need the mystery and romance of a little Fairy-Tale, how delicious it is to talk in whispers, how beautiful it is to hold your loved one's hand in the almost-dark and watch the shadows dance over each other's faces. All it took was a few LED candles and a string of warm, clear lights.

 Descanso Gardens at dusk...

 

...and at night!

 

 

 

 

Thank You, Bees!

 

A few years ago, when Troy and I first moved into our house, we surveyed the backyard and to our delight found not only a tiny, sun-yellow shed that became my beloved painting studio, but also several pluot, pomegranate and fig trees scattered around it wild and untended. I looked at them and saw mouth-watering visions of pies, cobblers, homemade preserves and other goodly savories. The visions were too sweet to ignore. Besides, my mother-in-law, Judy, lives on a farm and makes growing large, beautiful plums seem as easy as eating them. How hard could it really be? I thought. The pies beckoned. I stocked up on gardening tips, tools and fertilizer and went to work watering and pruning and feeding, feeding and watering and pruning. Nothing. I tried coaxing, tricking and even shaming the trees into behaving like a proper orchard and bearing fruit. Not a single pluot. Eventually I gave up, admitted my pluot-rearing incompetence and went back to buying pies at our neighborhood bakery. Imagine my surprise when last Sunday Troy came to the kitchen carrying a BOXFULL of vibrant, gem-colored fruits he had just picked off our trees, ripe and perfect. The pluots had brilliant garnet centers and sweet citrusy flavor. Really pretty to look at and too delicious for words.

 

 

 

We ran outside to marvel at the heavy, fruit-laden branches and wondered why all of a sudden the trees decided to gift us with a harvest. Was it warmer weather? More rain? (It rained TWICE this spring). Sun flares? Some kind of foreignland air vitamins brought over from across the Pacific? When we heard a low, thrumming noise overhead, the mystery solved itself. Bees. Lots and lots of bees. A whole hive tucked under the beams of my studio -- buzzing and matching sun-bright yellow and very, very lively. We owed the health of our trees, the plentiful gorgeous fruit and the many delicious concoctions-to-come to bees.

 

Once we saw the hive, it was amazing to realize how much it had transformed our backyard; the trees thrived, the flowers bloomed, everything seemed so much more vibrant and colorful and lush than before, flush with vitality, humming with life. It was also humbling to see the delicacy of the system holding everything in balance: bees, trees, fruit, people, like a very fine scale. One tiny change, one imperceptible shift and the whole thing would collapse, fall over, break. A sobering thought. A little frightening, too.  

 

Now I share the studio with my bees; me -- inside, them --  out. So far, the arrangement has worked pretty well. When I paint, I can hear the steady hum of the hive, and it's reassuring and soothing and wonderful, kind of like the roll of the ocean or the pulse of a heartbeat.

 

 

As for my visions of pies and preserves, they came to pass and there was deliciousness all around. Troy went on a jam-making-marathon resulting in a heavenly concoction that is ambrosia, amrita and nectar all rolled into one. It's finger-licking-good and quite possibly addictive.

And I baked a cake! 

 

 

And then another!

Thank you, bees! 

 

 bee pictures via Pinterst

 

 

 

 

 

A-Z of Unusual Words

When my brother and I were little, we used to play a game where we would open our parents' large, leather-bound dictionary at random and hunt for words -- the odd, occasionally giggle-inducing words used so seldom that we wondered who invented them and why. We rifled through smooth, heavy pages and shouted our prizes to each other at the top of our lungs. Whoever found the strangest or the funniest word won. As an adult, sometimes I still catch myself obsessing over these curious, obscure words, words like cacography (bad handwriting) and autolatry (the worship of one's self), whiskerando (whiskered person) and mabsoot (happy), nelipot (someone who walks without shoes) and wanweird (an unhappy fate), yuke (to itch) and -- love this one! -- strikhedonia (the pleasure of being able to say 'to hell with it').

The Project Twins, also known as James and Michael Fitzgerald -- a seriously talented Irish graphic arts duo, have come up with a series of illustrations that visually represent rarely spoken and heard of words. 'A-Z of Unusual Words' defines the meaning of such words as imaginative, whimsical graphics.

Some of these words are veritable tongue-twisters, but they are also chock-full of awesome and so are the illustrations. Look! Look!!

ACERSECOMIC -- A person whose hair has never been cut.

 

CACODEMONOMANIA -- The pathological belief that one is inhabited by an evil spirit.

 

FANFARONADE -- Swaggering; empty boasting; blustering manner or behavior;
ostentatious display.

 

HAMARTIA -- The character flaw or error of a tragic hero that leads to his downfall.

 

JETTATURRA -- The casting of an evil eye.

 

MONTIVIGANT -- Wandering over hills and Mountains.

 

OSTENTIFEROUS--Bringing omens or unnatural or supernatural manifestations.

 

POGONOTROPHY -- The act of cultivating, or growing and grooming, a mustache,
beard, sideburns or other facial hair.

QUOCKERWODGER -- A rare nineteenth-century word for a wooden toy which briefly
became a political insult.

 

SCRIPTURIENT -- Possessing a violent desire to write.

TARANTISM -- a disorder characterized by an uncontrollable urge to dance.

  

ULTRACREPIDARIAN -- A person who gives opinions and advice on matters
outside of one's knowledge.

 

VERNALAGNIA -- A romantic mood brought on by Spring.

 

 YONDERLY -- Mentally or emotionally distant; absent-minded.

 

ZUGSWANG -- A position in which any decision or move will result in problems.

 

 

Streetside Art

  

As children, most of us used to color sidewalks with soft, crumbly chalks. That need to grab a stick of color and start marking our surroundings, that joy from self-expression is something we might've inherited from the distant, murky time of caves and cave dwellers. As children we loved the powdery feel of chalk under our palms, and the lines that flowed from under our fingertips like silk from a spider, we used to revel in the sensation, we used to feel so much pleasure in the simple act of drawing on the pavement... But as we grew up, we also grew out of our childhood fantasies and, often, out of our childhood joys. Street painting festivals let us recapture that forgotten feeling of abandon, of freedom, of once again being a kid with rainbow-smeared hands and pure, overflowing joy of drawing from one's imagination.

Modern street painting hails from Europe. In Britain, pavement artists were called "screevers" from the writing style (often Copperplate) that accompanied the works of pavement artists since the 1700s. The works of screevers were accompanied by poems and proverbs, lessons on morality and political commentary on the day’s events. They appealed to both the working people of many, who (on the whole) could not read or write, but understood the visual images; and to the educated members of the middle-classes who appreciated the moral lessons and comments.

In Italy, such painters were called Madonnari. Madonarri were often poor soldiers returning from the military campaigns, who wished to express gratitude for their safe return by recreating images of the Madonna in front of the churches. Madonarri  were also itinerant artists who worked on the cathedrals and often recreated the paintings from the churches on the pavement in the hopes to earn a few coins from their audience or attract wealthy patrons. For centuries, many Madonnari were folk artists, reproducing simple images with crude materials such as tiles, coal, and chalk. Others, such as El Greco, would go on to become household names. In Germany, the artists were called a more prosaic Strassenmaler, literally -- street painter.

 

Pasadena Chalk Festival organized by the fantastic Light Bringer Project (a Pasadena-based non-profit organization dedicated to "building a community through the power of the arts and education." How awesome is that?) attracted over 500 Madonarri, screevers, Strassenmalers, chalk painters, in short -- versatile, original, wildly imaginative folk who used sidewalk as their canvas. It was wonderful to see the tradition of street painting alive and thriving, so many artists choosing to interpret something as boring and uninspired as pavement into colorful, joyful pieces of art. I saw adults and children alike get excited about the art -- from chatting with the painters to photographing their chalk masterpieces. Nice.

 

 

 

Troy and I decided to join the fun -- a term that can be only very loosely applied to standing on hands and knees in a sweltering sun! on a melting asphalt! -- and create pavement art of our own. We chose the cover for The Land of Joy and Sorrow as our piece and spent the next two days bringing it to life. It was a challenge, a grueling work, an incredible bonding experience, and, surprisingly, heaps and heaps of fun. When all was said and done; our faces sunburned and our bodies hurting in places we never suspected had muscle, this is what we created.

Our own sidewalk "masterpiece"...

 

 

 

Troy hard at work...  

   

Best partner/husband ever...

...and here are some works by wonderfully, scary-talented chalk artists...