Cabbage Update

Folks, how many people do you know who can, with straight face and ingenuous intention, caption a blog post "Cabbage Update"?

But enough about me.  How about those cabbages?

There's a lot of cabbage news to report: artistic, horticultural, and philosophical.

I'll start with the artistic news:   I successfully met a deadline of June 1, 2014 for the creation of my latest cabbage image.

Here it is: 

Perfect Green Cabbage, 2014

This image will appear in publicity for an upcoming fiber art show in which I'm participating at the River Street Gallery in Fair Haven Furniture in New Haven.  http://www.fairhaven-furniture.com/.

The second piece of artistic cabbage news is that, today, I just finished another cabbage image, Weeping Cabbage:

Weeping cabbage is so named for the fat raindrops in the original image on which the piece is based:

I made the two images with the intention that one of them would be used for the publicity for the River Street Gallery show.  I couldn't decide which one to use for River Street so I went right ahead working on two at once.  Perfect Green Cabbage got done first, so it will go in the River Street publicity, but meanwhile, here's weeping cabbage, just completed, and potentially to be hung at the same gallery.

The second piece of cabbage news is horticultural:  I recently planted six Red Acre cabbages in various places in my garden.

Here's one of them, little more than a seedling, but already showing the simultaneous green and purple coloration that gives red cabbages their iridescence.  There are five others, and I'm looking forward to the unique ability of their frosty, glaucous looks, to cool me down on the hottest days.

Every cabbage image I've ever created has been inspired by a cabbage in my own yard, so I want to keep those cabbages coming.  They do make magnificent specimens in the garden:

Can you believe I even have philosophical cabbage news?  As follows:

My artistic career has been visited by a version of Cabbage Night.  Cabbage Night is a pre-Halloween evening of mayhem, so-called in some places in the northeastern United States (but known elsewhere as Mischief Night, ).

According to Wikipedia, Cabbage Night got its name from a local custom in rural Niagara Falls, Ontario, during the 50s and 60s, of "raiding local gardens for leftover rotting cabbages and hurling them about to create mischief in the neighborhood."

Today, Wikipedia says, "the night is commonly known as "Cabbage Night" in parts of Vermont; Connecticut; Bergen County, New Jersey; Upstate New York; Northern Kentucky; Newport, Rhode Island; and Boston, Massachusetts.^[3]

My own personal Cabbage Night came in the form of three rejections:  most recently from How does your Garden Grow at the Whistler Museum and Gallery in Lowell, MA; before that, from CT + 6, a show sponsored by the West Hartford Art League; and before that, from the CT Academy of Fine Arts 2014 annual show.

For at least two of those shows, I entered Homage to Cabbage III:

My lovely cabbage was hurled into a slough of dishonor and negation.  And I was disappointed.

But on the other hand, how about the following couple of developments:

One, I've just received a commission to create a quilt commemorating a couple's renewal of their marriage vows, a creative project I'm happy to receive;

And two, I've just been asked to have a solo show at Hartford's Clare Gallery, where the themes are spirituality and social justice.  http://spsact.org/clare/ClareGallery.html.

I'm happy to be so honored, and am already thinking about the spiritual theme I'll be expressing at that gallery, which part of St. Patrick and St. Anthony Church in Hartford.

So now--after Cabbage Night, the treats.

And that's the way it is in cabbage news.