Hey Beautiful People! I have some lovely photos and stories for you today (if I do say so myself.) I have been having some really incredible studio sessions these past few weeks and my body of work is rapidly increasing. (Perhaps the word I should use is procreating.) It's due in part to a big decision I made recently to simply construct pieces for the rest of July. Come August, all new production will stop and I will spend the remainder of the time before the show opens getting the paint surfaces and palette just right. (Not to mention other details like the greenhouse, directory, plant markers, etc.)
I have been working from all my lists and drawings from the past few years to help me amass a rather large group of little sculptures. I love working this way, as you faithful readers already know, as the spontaneous rhythm of assembling forms just works better for me than more methodical means of art making. Here is a shot of my main shelf that's filled with sculptures, and there are two more areas that are also building up a crowd.
This image of Jean Arp has been in my life for several years--I believe came from a past issue of the Smithsonian Magazine. Most of the images on my studio wall are plant forms, but a few pictures are like this one--images with more to say than just showing a piece of art I like. This picture inspires me because it's such an amazing portrait of an artist and his work. I need to get serious some day about having a great image taken of me to use for professional purposes and this is certainly one to aspire to. (I'm curious about how much staging it may have entailed.) Either way, it's a pleasure to be able to see his sculptures so tightly packed because I also feel like I can get a glimpse of his mind and how it thinks about form.
I had an idea for a few Natural Selection pieces I wanted to make that involved multiples of small unique forms, so I decided to use that portrait of Arp for inspiration. I became obsessed with shaping these tiny little pieces all morning--so much so that after being hunched over for more than an hour straight, it took more than a bit of massage, stretching, and movement to recover. My body ain't what it used to be. Sigh.
This piece is based on Hieronymous Bosch's masterpiece
The Garden of Earthly Delights. I know I haven't been talking much about the reading I've been doing to inform this installation, so I hope I can catch up a little in that respect. This is one painting I felt was necessary to pay tribute to in this project, and here's a sneak peek at the form. I really should do an entire blog entry about the things I learned and love about this painting , but that will have to happen later.
The second sculpture that clusters the small Arp-inspired forms is based on an episode of Dan Savage's
Lovecast that I faithfully listen to each week. (You know...for research purposes.....) Someone called in and asked Dan about the etiquette or rules of conduct at a party and I started thinking about how it could manifest itself in a nice sculpture with multiple characters interacting in various ways. After it has been properly glued and painted, I will adjust the stems into their final interactive resting places.
I made an exciting discovery recently when reading about Charles Darwin. Apparently, Darwin's grandfather Erasmus was very interested in the sciences as well and published an encylopaedic poem called The Botanic Garden that was based on
Linnaeus' system of taxonomy. This book is in the public domain, and I was excited to find
an original scanned text in Google Books.
In the second section of this book, titled "The Loves of the Plants," Erasmus Darwin told "the story of the sex-life of plants, disguising truths of nature in even more revealing metaphor." His fictional account was based on actual plants that bore two stamens and one pistil, and elaborated on tales of ladies with two male suitors. or as Linnaeus called it, "Mariti duio in eodem conjugio" - two husbands in the same marriage. Another passage is about a plant called Genista, where "ten fond brothers woo the haughty maid," these being ten stamens arising from two bases, as if from two mothers, and united by their filaments. This description perfectly fits a piece I made last weekend. I will have to figure out how to give a special shout out to Erasmus in the title of this piece. This picture of him cracks me up--you can see a twinkle of bawdiness in his eye, can't you? These tales caused quite a stir in their day, as you can imagine.
Speaking of which, I wanted to tell one last Natural Selection story before I tumble off to bed and that is about how I named my first piece last week, which had to be done for the postcard. I have been anticipating this part of the show, and when I have fleeting moments of idle focus, familiarizing myself with the Botanical Latin book I bought two years ago at the
Chicago Botanic Garden. As I make each piece, I take notes to remind myself of the general theme, and then compile all the words that could be used.
The piece I used in the postcard is a detail of the image that preceded the last blog entry. I wanted to convey that this piece was about being well-endowed. You know, kinda like
Dirk Diggler. The first word that popped out at me was
nimio or
nimis, which means "very excessively."
Perfect. I then found the term
stema which translates as "penis or stamen." There needed to be a clincher, so I decided to browse through my beloved Sunset Western Garden Book, and came upon one of my favorite garden friends, the Passionflower. The Latin name for this plant is
Passiflora. I worked these three words until I came up with something that sounded right -
Passistema nimis. I am curious to see if some plant afficionado will take delight in puzzling out my titles in the directory.
Okay...that's my update. I gotta catch some shut eye. I have been so stimulated by this project that it's keeping me up at all hours. I can't really complain because I love being this immersed in a show and I don't know when I'll do another one of this magnitude again. I can catch up on all that sleep in September, can't I?
I have always been a big fan of word games. (Hence my sadness last week when Scrabulous was yanked from Facebook) But I'm playing the granddaddy of all word games right now-it's called "Pin the Fictional Latin Name on the Bonsai Sculpture." 
It's been really interesting to see what words the authors of this book deemed important to put in the dictionary section. Sure, you have to have words to describe color or leaf shape. I love the various illustrations and charts they have included for those themes. Half of this 545 page tome is taken up with a Latin-to-English-to-Latin dictionary and that's what I'm going through with a fine toothed comb. 
