I spent the afternoon sitting in one of these Adirondack chairs looking out on the water. Stonington is a busy working harbor, so you wake to the voices of lobster men calling good morning to each other and the sound of work; different sized boat motors, hauling lobster cages, boaters ferrying people around. And lots of work going on - on shore.

Dinner

so tomorrow I have a 7:30 flight out of national - with a change in Boston, I'll be in Maine by 11:30. Barbara picking me up. She is writing a driving tour for the local paper, so we will be doing some site seeing on the way to her apt. Can't wait! Don't know what my internet situation will be, I know she has emailed me from Maine... So we will see. Worst case - I'll be taking plenty of pictures, doing watercolors, kayaking, reading, and the blog will resurface when I'm back aug 8.

finished the installation of the Longwood show at USBG. Here is the wonderful snapping turtle marquette ....

crowds and crowds of people

I'm learning to use two new digital cameras and working like crazy at projects that are coming to a head just as I'm leaving. I saw so many blog-worthy images today on this construction site but left my camera in the car. I'm hoping this smaller casio I'll be able to carry with me more often. Also a little pentax underwater camera.

How nice it would have been to spend the morning photographing at the USBG, but too much to do at NIH. We are installing a lovely little exhibit - drawings and a sculpture from the Longwood gardens.

LINES ON PAPER: HOW FANTASY BECOMES A GARDEN -- Opens Saturday. Through Jan. 15. See the work that goes into planned gardens with drawings, sketches and photos that look at the design and process behind the creation of the fanciful Children's Garden at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Penn. The show's highlights are the beautiful concept drawings of some of the garden's famous characters, including the Drooling Dragon, Spitting Fish, Pelican, Turtle and Hummingbird. U.S. Botanic Garden, 100 Maryland Ave. SW. Free. 202-225-8333.
This from the Washington Post.

more details from the Arlington Art Center show

Arlington Art Center

I loved this piece by Stephen St. Amant - Routine
It was enchanting and quirky.


This is by Victoria Farr - Doc's Johnson's Bakery. It is a silkscreen on Tracing Paper. I LOVED it! very Indian-print-skirt-like at first glance but so interesting once you start looking at the imagery. Victoria is studying at AU. I'm hoping we can talk to her about exhibiting at Smith Farm and creating a site specific work at NIH.

well I was all set to post about Arlington Art Center but blogger won't upload my photos and I've got to get to work. Hopefully later...

another weekend of going to the farmer's market making Gazpacho and grilling out. More Kayaking lessons today and I'm sore like I haven't been since quitting crew. Today we learned to do a bow rescue, and I only flipped once accidentally, right near the instructor and thankfully not near any rocks - so he just flipped me right back over. Liquid Adventures is awesome; wonderful instruction, beautiful on the river, nice, interesting people in our group. I recommend it highly! web site here

I have to say it has been an extremely difficult week. Problems that I could not have imagined have surfaced. What happened to those lazy crazy days of summer, spent lollygagging at the pool? I do have some wonderful things to post this weekend. a great visit to the AAC and wonderful schedule of shows at the Smith Farm.

Lots and Lots going on... loose ends to tie up before I leave for Maine next weekend. Yesterday we gave a tour for the Institute on Aging and talked about projects we might work on together. Last night I went to Buck's camping & fishing for dinner with Peggy and Mark. So fun to see them and just an amazing meal, Gazpacho to start. But it wasn't a soup it was those grape tomatoes, basel, corn, and beets. So sweet and fresh. And then for the entree I had a salad - fresh mozzarella, basel and a pear half that had been pickled. Really inventive and totally delicious. Today we are taking our dear Katie B. out to lunch, she's leaving NIH - we will totally miss her cheerful sweet self. Tomorrow I'm meeting Paula and Gay at the NEA Big Read ceremony and then the three of us will have lunch.

Today it was beautiful out! Ray and I took our first kayak lesson in preparation for my trip to Maine. Entertaining instructor, and nice small class size, another married couple - he is a record producer - and two brothers. I really felt confident on the water, it was similar to rowing in a single shell. We paddled around in the canal and then went out on the Potomac where Nathan (I think that was his name) had us learn how to roll under the water and then get out of the kayak. We crossed the river right near Lowes' Island where I did the art for their country club and then did a little rapids on the way back. Feeling sooo confident I decided to do this last tricky maneuver and ended up face to face with the river bed. One fat lip later I'm frankly relieved to have all of my teeth still in my head. Over confidence - its a killer.

with 10 hours and 51 minutes to go...

an unbelievable $710.00 for this gorgeous painting. See Duane's blog here

Anne Massoni

We had a wonderful portfolio review with Anne Massoni, she is a fascinating artist, beautifully thoughtful. She approached us after being in a study at NIH, she said the art in the hospital gave her a sense of hope and respected how vulnerable she was feeling. It was lovely to have someone as sensitive as Anne describe our collection exactly as we do. We will be exhibiting some beautiful antique photographs with burnished aluminum and the series "traces" which are wax based. She also has a very powerful series which I am hoping we can exhibit at Smith Farm and Washington Cancer Institute.

the series “traces” is rooted in both familial and fabricated truths and memories. it speaks to the residue of people forgotten – either sender or receiver no longer here to put meaning to time and place of text and image. on the one hand i am utilizing the postcards that my great-grandfather’s company produced and on the other i am using images and correspondence which are only connected by my own invention. postcards are the sound-bites or snapshots of the written language… “wish you were here”, “many happy returns of the day”, “missing you”. though postcards communicate, they don’t speak to the depth of substance to perhaps anyone but the writer or recipient. however, when interlaced with imagery, the fragmented text takes on new and convoluted meanings with only our imagination to cap its possibilities. by utilizing the fragmented image as a way to step beyond those photographed to a more empathetic read, the forgotten relics of one’s life begin to resonate as the “traces” of all of our lives. Anne's web site here

Anne Massoni continued...

the body of work i have pursued for my thesis is about inherited illness. more specifically, the illness of endometriosis that has been passed down from mother to daughter in my family for at least three generations. endometriosis is a “silent” chronic illness that affects millions of women. it is considered “silent” because it has no outward signs, no visible indications of illness and because endometriosis can come and go. the reason why it happens is not fully known and it varies in degree depending on a long list of factors. millions of women suffer silently because it is hard to diagnosis (with little medical relief), is often misdiagnosed, or they are told the illness is in their head. this illness has affected almost every woman in my family and yet until i started sending my images to my family over the internet, i didn’t know about their illness and they had no idea about mine.

illness related to female reproductive organs is often not talked about at all; it is for many women something of which to be ashamed or secretive. in my family, my grandmother died of ovarian cancer at 56 (i was three), my mother in an effort to avoid ovarian cancer had a complete hysterectomy at the age of 35 (i was eight) and i, at 26, was diagnosed with the same fibroids my mother and grandmother had and which left untreated could result in ovarian/uterine cancer. being part of this medical pattern is daunting and yet i find myself unable to express extreme emotions of anger or frustration because of my familial relationship to my mother and grandmother. perhaps it is not the burden of possible illness and current illness but rather the significance of a seemingly cyclical pattern that not only is the source of this work but the connection that most frightens me.

the work i am doing for my thesis involves several factors: inheritance, illness, silence and the unease of illness and pain. the work stems from the own emotional and physical pain of dealing with my endometriosis, as well as the connection that i share with my mother and my grandmother. the images are built, through computer manipulation using found snapshots of my mother, grandmother and me. each image also contains medical information in the form of medical diagrams, drawings or photographs. the snapshot, a type of image with which we are all familiar with, serves as a point of identification with the viewer and speaks of history and fragmented memory. the repeated faces of these three women at different ages help to identify for the viewer the notion of inherited family traits passed on from one generation to the next. on the other hand, the snapshots are cropped and manipulated to such a degree that a sense of discomfort develops as the viewer, at times, can only make out the idea or glimpse of a person. layered medical diagrams illustrate the notion of a subtext beyond an inheritance of features alone. the mood and tone of the images both hint at familiarity and discomfort.

I'm not feeling too well so came home early, am very sorry to be missing an ArtTable event tonight, a tour of the American Art Musem w/my buddy Paula. Two fascinating porftolio reviews in the last two days at NIH, which I'll blog later.

this in from Sharon Burton

Image: Fat Dreams by Nzaba

BEGINNINGS: A Charity Art AuctionSponsored by Creative Artisans

Co-sponsored by Authentic Art Consulting,
Visual Echoes and Brown Sugar Restaurant

Smith Farm Center for the Healing Arts

1623 U Street, NWWashington, DCWednesday, July 19, 20066:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m.

Free and open to the public
Join us for this special evening as we feature a retrospective of jazz inspired paintings and portraits created by Robert “Nzaba” Richardson, a cancer patient needing medical care, over the course of his 30 year artistic career. There will be a silent auction from 6:30 p.m. until 7:45 p.m. followed by a lively auction presided by Marie Johns, D.C. Mayoral Candidate. Live bidding will begin at 8:00 p.m.

As a tribute to Nzaba’s love for jazz, there will be a musical performance by Melvin Rogers.

For more information, call Creative Artisans at (301) 681-4575.

busy day today now that the festivities are all over. I'll be at NIH and then SAH conference calls in the afternoon.

beautiful girls out in the uknow

Raph's friends celebrating his 18th bday. Stephen is trying not to look bleary-eyed after the post reporter observed him as such.

getting ready for Raph's 18th bday party and the world cup

Stonington Maine

well my dear friend Barbara Southworth has invited me to visit her in Stonington Maine, so I used some frequent flyer miles and I'll be leaving July 30 - August 8. I've been doing some research on the web - they seem to have a very active arts community. One of the most interesting galleries/studios I've seen is Pitcher Masters Gallery
there web site here

I saw this city paper article on scenic artisan's blog...

Down to Earth
Sculptor Margaret Boozer finds inspiration under her feet.
By Kriston Capps

In a sedimental mood: Boozer collects her raw materials on construction sitesMargaret Boozer’s ample Ford F-150 pummels the loose gravel near South Dakota Avenue and Bladensburg Road NE as she prowls a construction site. Bringing her pickup to a halt, she hops down, selecting a footlong, sand-colored rock. Boozer pronounces it iron ore. “If I ground this up, it’d make a really nice glaze,” she says.
It’s not obviously ferrous—or even distinguishable from the rocks around it—but Boozer turns it over in her hands before tossing it into the bed of the truck. She puts the engine in drive again, circling the lot and stopping every 100 yards or so to scrape clay from a backhoe-dug trench, pluck marble from drainage-rock piles, and otherwise scour the land for worthy artistic harvests.
Boozer, 40, patrols this unborn lofts development specifically for clay—her medium. An Alabama native, the Brentwood-based artist creates soil-centric artworks that have as much basis in the last century of painting as they do in the last millennium of pottery. She is the founder and director of Red Dirt Studio in Mount Rainier, Md., a warehouse space that for 10 years has housed artists working, however tangentially, in a ceramics tradition.
To the bemusement of area hardhats, Boozer gathers media on-site, driving into construction grounds as if she were a foreman. That’s not to say she’s above shelling out for good material: At the Vulcan quarry in Warrenton, Va., she spends $9 for as much basalt as she can haul in her truck. There she has the additional resource of Vulcan’s dungy puddles, from which she scoops slime.
“There’s a fine dust suspended in the sludge,” she explains. “It’s like a ready-made glaze.”
Boozer’s artworks tend to reflect whatever vein of earth she’s currently mining. Her output has taken a turn from “paintings” of dried, cracked clay dotted with ceramic shards and broken pottery toward floor-installed arrays of powdered dirt. “Some of this stuff I’ve tried firing I end up using for drawings on the floor, because the colors change when you fire it,” she says, referring to a rich raspberry clay that turns a dull sienna in the kiln. “So why fire it?”
Boozer received her MFA in ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, where, inspired by the area’s Alabama-esque red clay, she began to work with nontraditional techniques. She and her Red Studio colleagues continue the experiment. In 2005, Conner Contemporary Art featured a performance by Jenna McCracken in which a team of lab-coated assistants bottled freshly made ceramics in preservatives. Laurel Lukaszewski’s agglomerations of porcelain and stoneware coils opened at Project 4 in June, garnering the artist a comparison to Dale Chihuly from one critic. Boozer’s fans have often likened her to another artist.
“People are always like, ‘That’s like Andy Goldsworthy,’ ” she says. “Well, no. It’s just like the ground.”
Well, the ground tilted 90 degrees, as is often the case. After visiting an archeological dig in China several years ago, Boozer decided to make her own wall-mounted historical dig site, 2000’s Eight Red Bowls. “[S]he replicated what she saw by making ceramic bowls and dropping them against a tray filled with a sludge of clay slip,” says Eleanor Harvey, chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which owns the piece. “Dried and framed and hanging on a wall, the piece is like a painted still life, showing pottery clattering in slow motion to the floor or mud-covered relics recovered after rains.”
Earlier this year, Boozer was appointed to the James Renwick Alliance board. She’s now busy proposing a massive, 20-by-40-foot commission for a site in New York. But these inroads into the contemporary art market don’t seem to tantalize Boozer as much as those roads that lead her to exposed earth.
“It’s interesting to see what’s under the ground at all these sites in the neighborhood,” she says. “Some guys were fixing a water main out in front of my house. They dug a huge hole and I was like, ‘Can I get in there?’ ” CP margaret's web site here

C'ville

beautiful weather and the 30th Anniversary of the pedestrian mall in Charlottesville - so lots of people, street musicians, very fun. I walked down from the Omni and met Susan at Rapture then walked back to her office. We purchased a lovely mobile for MJH and Isabel dropped off her commission. Today we are changing the exhibits, doing odds and ends then I'm heading home. Unfortunately I didn't bring my charger and I'm out of batteries on my camera, so posting will be light.

Come to an opening Friday night!

Opening Reception
Friday, July 7, 2006 6-8 P.M.
NIH Clinical Center (Building 10)
1st floor between the two galleries

Exhibit Dates: June 24 - September 9, 2006

Gallery Hours: Weekdays 9 A.M. to 7 P.M.
This exhibit was curated by Lillian Fitzgerald of Fitzgerald Fine Arts. Members of the NIH Camera Club were asked to submit images fitting the theme of "Our World: Through the Lenses of the NIH Camera Club" and suitable for a hospital environment. Ms. Fitzgerald selected 36 images from 12 different photographers that were appropriate and of high quality.
The photographs are offered for sale, with 20% of the proceeds going to the
NIH Patient Emergency Fund.
Featured Photographers
Vickie Allin
Carl Baker
Margaret Bodurka
Linda Cook
Suzanne Taylor Dater
Mary Ann Daly
Brenda Hanning
Harvey Kupferberg
Chris Lanczycki
Cathrine Sasek
Margaret Sprott
Richard Sprott
For over thirty years, the NIH Camera Club has been a place where photographers can get together to learn from each other and improve their photography. The club meets on the second Tuesday of every month from September through June. We have guest speakers, as well as monthly competitions. The club started out at NIH, and has many members from the NIH community. However, we have broadened our membership to include people from throughout the Washington, D.C. metro area. We are proud that over the years, many of our members have progressed, through training, experience and competition, to the level of Master of Photography. This exhibition showcases the work of twelve club members who run the gamut from newer members to Master Photographers. All are united, however, in their love for the creative vision that is photography.

Directions: Access the NIH Campus off of Wisconsin Avenue/Rockville Pike at the South Drive/Metro entrance. Proceed straight ahead to the parking lot south of the Clinical Center, Building 10 or park in the underground garage of Building 10. Then make your way through the first floor to the north side of the building where the two galleries are located. Be sure to bring a photo ID and this invitation with you for the security check.

This sounds too tempting to miss!!

INSIDER'S PICK: 2004 JL CHAVE COTES DU RHONE 'MON COEUR'

A few months ago we poured for the Insider's Pick the entry level bottling from Rene Rostaing, one of the Northern Rhone's great producers. Today we up the ante just a little bit more as we taste the Cotes du Rhone from Chave. The family has been involved in winemaking on the hill of Hermitage since the late 1400s, and routinely makes the best wines the region has to offer. Along with Chapoutier and Jaboulet his wines are THE BENCHMARK for the region. The cost to buy them is prohibitive, but luckily their expertise extends all the way through their wines. Their St Joseph drinks better than most produce's Hermitage at ¼ the price, and this 'entry level’ Cotes du Rhone is about as interesting a Syrah as you will find from France for under $25. Often for a Syrah or Shiraz to taste 'big' it usually involves higher alcohol and extracted, even sweet fruit. Not here. When first opened, the aromas are very closed and soft, almost hidden. At first I thought the bottle might have been flawed, expecting a big knockout punch, so I took a sip, and I figured out where all the fruit was. It's hiding under this mass of earthy, dense, tongue-scraping tannin. Man, is this wine built big! So at least now I have to be patient and let the wine open up for a few hours, and when I come back to it, it's as if somebody switches glasses on me. Aromas of blackberries, soil, violets, and tar are readily available, and even though the tannins are still readily apparent, there are lots of complimentary flavors in there as well. This is definitely not a soft bistro wine built for the tourists; this is serious Syrah. But you will also notice the wine doesn't overwhelm your palate the way Aussie Shiraz can. Instead of developing 'palate fatigue' where your mouth is so overwhelmed by alcohol and heaviness it stops registering subtle flavors, the intensity leaves your mouth wanting to come back to it more and more. And for the cost of just ONE bottle of Hermitage, you can own this by the case!

We're offering free tastings as usual, this Thursday, July 6th, 2006, and a 10% discount off the retail price of $20.99 for the Syrah through the duration of the day. Stop by between noon and 7:30pm for a free taste, and take home some delicious wine.

Can't get by for the tasting? Live out of town? Contact us through our online order form at:
http://winewarehouseinc.com/shop.html

Off to C'ville

Changing the shows at Martha Jefferson, putting up Priscilla Whitlocks work... picking up the new work from Isabel, lots to do.

This in from Mark Isaac

A SHOW OF HANDS -- I will be participating in a two-person photography exhibit at A Show of Hands, a local Del Ray gallery, with a special reception on Thursday, July 13, 2006, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. The gallery is located at 2204 Mount Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, VA, in the heart of Del Ray. The show will alsofeature new work by Randall Cherry, a local landscape photographer. Please come out for the reception on the 13th, which promises to be a good time for all. For more information call A Show of Hands at 703-683-2905.

aBSTRACT tHIS! -- Two of my photographs are currently being exhibited at the Del Ray Artisans Gallery, 2704 Mount Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, VA, also near the Braddock Road Metro Station. This juried exhibit, titled aBSTRACT tHIS!, includes abstract art in a variety of media. The gallery is open Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 pm. and on Sundays from noon to 4:00 p.m. For more information contact the gallery at www.TheDelRayArtisans.org, or at 703.838.4827.

JPG MAGAZINE -- One of my photographs is featured in the 5th Edition of a brand new photograpy magazine, JPG. This edition contains photographs selected for the theme, "Photography Is Not A Crime," and features a photograph of a reflection I took at a Washington, DC site just prior to being chased by a bevy of security guards and warned never to return. This excellent issue of the magazine clearly expresses the threat to expression that is increasingly facing photographers in the United States. To obtain a copy of JPG magazine, go to www.jpgmag.com.