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The Artist’s
Almanac
June 2009
download and print this installment as
a PDF
(you will need Adobe Acrobat reader to open this file, you can
get
it here free)
No price is set on the lavish
summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.
- James Russell Lowell
This is the greenest June I
remember, as the verdant trees preen proudly in the sun, rich
from redundant rains. This is a month of young love and
marriage, of flowers and first fruits, of romance and dreaming,
as spring glides into summer. But late June simmers with heat
and humidity, as cumulus piles on cumulus, higher and higher.
After busy mornings, the languorous afternoons invite a
reflective siesta.
Suddenly the weather radio alarm
jolts me awake and intoning a National Weather Service warning –
a deadly storm approaches with weak rotation spotted.
The rest of our day is spent jumping to catch the latest tornado
warnings, listening to the rumble of far-off thunder, and
phoning family. Once the day’s storm passes we pick up fallen
limbs, count lost trees, and watch the evening news to see who
was hit. This has been the pattern this June.
This has been a June filled with
surprises This week I learned that a long-dead great-uncle was
for the first ten years of the last century a professional
photographer in a small town in southern Kentucky. With a full
format camera and an artist’s eye he portrayed the village of my
mother’s birth. Now, a hundred years later, his children, who
knew nothing of his early career, discovered his old
photographic plates in the attic and donated them to Western
Kentucky University, where they are a featured show in the
university museum.
Looking East along Broad Street across the
railroad crossing
This irruption into my life was like
a time tornado, stirring up old memories and scattering new
visions from afar, like debris from a distant past. I saw my
four-year old mother standing in the front row of a family
portrait made in front of the 1846 Kentucky farmhouse along the
old New Orleans Trace, as well as a winter scene from the old
farm reminiscent of a painting by Peter Brueghel. I saw my
great-grandfather at his apiary, my great-grandmother in her
mourning dress, and my grandfather holding his horse at a livery
stable, all for the first time ever. The man to the left of him
appears to be wearing an old Confederate jacket, a reminder of
the storm of the Civil War that passed through the area a scant
forty years earlier.
It is one thing to deal with a photo
album full of cherished pictures, more valuable as time passes;
quite another to have 60 new photos strewn before you a century
hence, scattering assumptions, creating new images, and
rearranging old ideas. Both Nature and History are full of
surprises.
I remember Uncle Will as a wry old
jokester, not as an artist. Yet I found more artistic
composition in many of these pictures than chance would allow.
In the view looking east on Broad Street the three figures are
carefully divided, one against two, so as to frame the view into
the distance, their differing dress emphasizing the divide
between them. The open gate, the gracefully curving parallel
side road, the slope of the barn roof and the trees themselves
seem to indicate careful positioning with an eye to composition.
The past becomes palpable.
Yet another element is added in the
picture of mother and child. The choice of his young bride and
daughter as a portrait motif may have given the artist the
passion needed to arrange these flowing, draped, opposed
diagonals so beautifully arranged and realized.
Welcome June - Season of flowering
and fruition.
Upcoming Events
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Kentucky
Library and Museum, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green,
Kentucky: Photo Exhibit – Portrait of a Town: Cave City,
KY (6/1/09-8/30/09)
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Fall Into
Art – Third Annual Art Show benefiting Hendersonville
High School’s Academic and Arts Program, October 2-4, 2009
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View the
prospectus for our forthcoming book,
The Founding of the Cumberland Settlements, now available for preorder at
www.cumberlandpioneers.com/volume1a.html.
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