Today in Art: Six Ways of Looking at the Pattaconk Brook

An art gallery in Chester, Connecticut, a scenic little town if there ever was one, (http://chesterct.org/) is going to be showing a piece of my art soon.  The gallery is Maple and Main http://www.mapleandmaingallery.com/, the show is Imaging Chester (http://www.mapleandmaingallery.com/imaging-chester) and my piece is called...wait for it...

Six Ways of Looking at the Pattaconk Brook.  The title is a bit of sideways homage to the poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," by Connecticut poet Wallace Stevens.

I chose to focus on the Pattaconk Brook because it's a watercourse flowing throughout Chester, and because I I liked its name.  According to the town website, chesterct.org/about-chester/, Pattaconk is an American Indian term referring to a round or wigwam-shaped hill, possibly as the town of Chester appeared when viewed from the Connecticut river.

 A few days ago, Joe and I drove down there--Chester is south and east of where we live in West Hartford--to look for scenic Pattaconk shots.

But first, a fun fact:  Having studied Latin for five years, I can tell you that any place in England with Chester in its name derived that name from the Latin word castrum, meaning a camp or settlement...that is, a Roman outpost in the British Isles.  The word castrum developed into the word chester and then was transplanted from England to the new world.  So here we have Chester, Connecticut, which is in no way a former Roman settlement.  Instead, it was an English settlement in the territory of the Wangunks, a river tribe of native Americans.

Joe and I knew that mid-December wasn't going to yield anything like this idyllic view of the Pattaconk Brook shot by Connecticut photographer Kyle Nolin http://www.imgrum.net/user/spngewrthy/6738926/1163028429696490822_6738926

 . . . but we hoped to find the place on the ground that corresponds to the location of these satellite photos, courtesy of Google Maps:

 Instead, the Pattaconk we saw at ground level was more like this:

Kind of bleak, don't you think?

From the map, it looks as if the Essex Steam Train, http://essexsteamtrain.com/about/ a vintage railroad tourist attraction, actually provides the closest ingress to some of those paludal areas.  Take a look at this map and you'll see the railroad route ambling right along the river, close by to where the Pattaconk forms those marshy areas before traversing through the Pattaconk Yacht Club http://www.pattaconk.org/and emptying into the Connecticut: http://essexsteamtrain.com/about/river-and-rail-map/

And thanks to Sister Mary Immaculata, M.Z.S.H., my high school Latin teacher, for explaining that the Latin noun palus, (paludis) meaning a swampy area, has a cognate in the English adjective paludal, meaning "of or relating to swampy areas." I've never heard that word uttered outside her class, except by myself.  

Despite the paludal areas, Joe was able to get a couple of good shots of the brook, like this one somewhere along Dock Road in Chester.  Can you believe that this, and the photo above, are as close as we could get to the beguilingly sinuous watercourse in the satellite photos?

Maybe if we had a walking guide to the town, and some good wading boots, we could get closer to the site of the satellite view.

But how about this one, another shot by Joe, where the brook goes through the middle of the town:

Later, after we returned home, I found a contour map of the town:

and another satellite view:

In all, I came up with six different ways of looking at the Pattaconk Brook.  Thanks to the ability to print photos on fabric, http://www.dharmatrading.com/transfers/print-on-cotton-packs-of-6-sheets.html?lnav=transfers.htmlI'm about to turn them into an art quilt.

I'll show you when  it's ready.

Betcha can't wait!
 

Somebody in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug is reading my blog

Ever since my buddy Marc set me up with Google Analytics, I've been able to use it to learn the location of people who are reading my blog.  I can see that most of them are reading it from the United States, for sure, and that most of those are in my home state of Connecticut.  Neither of those pieces of information is very surprising. Some of the people are geographically distant, but there are a few of those outliers whose identity I can guess, like my old friend Marg in Australia, and my cousin Gisele in western Canada.

But for most of the outliers, I  have no clue who they are or why they've logged on.  Germany.  Italy.  Russia.

The Russian locations are a mystery.  Sure, I've heard of St. Petersburg, and I know that my friend Rita/Margarita/Maggie lives there, or used to.   And Moscow:  I know my friend Zhenya lives there.

But Samara Oblast?  In Samara Oblast, somebody spent six minutes reading my blog. I looked up oblast and learned that it is the name given to political subdivision in some parts of the former Soviet Union.  

Someone is also reading my blog in Chelyabinsk Oblast and someone else in  Voronezh Oblast.  

Also someone in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug.

Have you ever heard of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug?  I certainly haven't.  An okrug, I learned, is some kind of autonomous district.  The Khanti-Mansi Autonomous Okrug is an oil-producing state deep in Siberia.  The Ob-Ugric people live there, and on Wikipedia I learned that their language is one branch of the Finno-Ugric group.  That language group has always fascinated me because its geographic reach extends from Hungary on the southern and eastern end to Estonian and Finnish more to the north and west.  This seems highly improbable to me, but I know it's true.  Have you ever seen the Hungarian language, Magyar?  It's undecipherable, at least to me.  Ditto Finnish.  Nothing like the Scandinavian languages of its neighbors.  

But of all the far-flung blog readers the biggest mystery to me comes from India, where someone in Tamil Nadu has been spending time reading http://Stitching-it-all-together.blogspot.com. Tamil Nadu is a state in southern India whose capitol, now Chennai, used to be known as Madras.

Why on earth is that happening?  It seems as improbable to me as the geographic reach of the Finno-Ugric language group, not to mention its spelling.

My husband suspects they're internet spies, possibly not even human beings.  Well, if they're trying to spy on me to figure out how to get my millions out of my deep pockets, it's going to take them a long time.

Meanwhile, Marg, Zhenya, Rita, and Gisele, glad to have you!  If that's you.

Today in Art: Post Script to a Screw-up

 
Yesterday I posted about my struggles in reproducing an old photo of my grandparents from in the 50s.  I'm trying to reproduce this photo, taken by my father, as a whole cloth quilt using Derwent Inktense  pencils on Pima cotton.

The chiaroscuro nature of this image turned out to be a real challenge for me.  My efforts have veered from making my grandparents look like corpses to making them look like charcoal burners.

With much sadness and frustration, I've rejected two prior efforts as substandard.  I'm now on my third try, and this one holds high stakes: I told myself that if the third effort wasn't good enough, it would be time to stop trying.

This is that latest effort as of the end of yesterday.  My grandfather looks like a toasted marshmallow.

Today, thanks to the impressive coverage power of the paint called titanium white, I've managed to make him look less sun-baked and more normal.

I'm feeling better about it.  Hopeful.  Still trying.  I know there are several serious artists among my contacts. 

Any suggestions?

Today in Art: Violating the KISS Rule

Ever heard of the KISS Rule?  That's Keep it Simple, Stupid.  I first heard it from one of my co-leaders when I led a Brownie troop.  In the 25-plus years since it was first stated to me, the rule has served me well...sometimes as much in the breach as in the observance.

In fact, if rules were made to be broken, then the KISS rule is my go-to rule.  It's on my mind all the time.  When I violate it, I'm acutely conscious of the transgression and try meticulously to pinpoint its genesis.  I squirm and kick myself.  I vow to learn from it.

Take my recent efforts to reproduce, on fabric, this image of my grandparents, taken in the early 50s.

This image holds tremendous emotional weight for me: it shows three beloveds, now long gone, in a beloved place: the back room of my grandparents' third-floor home at 102 Concord St., Hamden, Connecticut.  Reproducing this image is a way to honor them, and to honor my father, the photographer.  In fact, the act of reproducing this image has taken on an air of the sacred for me, and has become a means of sanctifying my grandparents' memory.

Emotional weight.  Check.  So here's one place NOT to violate the KISS rule.

But I did.

I felt happy enough about my first effort to post it on Facebook:

In fact, I'd just about declared it done, and I heat-set the pigments (Derwent Inktense pencils).

And then I decided it wasn't dark enough.

So look what I did:

After I darkened it, my grandfather, Puppa, looked like he'd been rolling in charcoal. I think that black eyebrow was the coup de grace.

So I prepared a second piece of fabric and started Take No. 2:

And again, the darks are too dark. My efforts to lighten up Puppa's face, with Jacquard Lumiere in pearlescent white, have given him a ghostly, tete de morte look.  Meanwhile,my grandmother, Honey, looks like a chimney sweep.

So I prepared yet a third sheet of fabric and produced this:

Puppa looks like he's been hitting the tanning booth.  Honey looks like the actor Ernest Borgnine, who, by the way, was also from my home town, Hamden, Connecticut.   Check it out:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Borgnine

But back to the KISS rule:  the violation is always apparent in the aftermath, never in the approach.

This time, I told myself that if I wasn't satisfied with the third effort, then that would be enough, and I might as well close up shop on this effort.

At this point, I'm not sure whether to continue on to try to fix numbers one or two, or give it up.

It's somewhat painful to share this, but I'm hoping that it will be instructive, at least to me.

And on a more positive note:  my childhood home on Concord St. in Hamden is still standing.  Here I am in front of the house in 2009.