On the wall behind us…Cai Gua-Qiang: Cuyahoga River Lightning: drawing for the Cleveland Museum of Art. On loan. Read about it here. (A-MA-ZING.)
Hello friends! I have navigated our interstate highway system once again and I remain fascinated by how we are able to get from here to there. (There are flaws, I know, but there are joys to be had along the way.) The drifts of black-eyed-Susans and Queen Anne’s lace in the ditches along the pavement…the undulating rows of the vineyards along the Great Lakes…the barns, fading and groaning under the weight of years…the giant windmills, catching energy as they rotate amidst the farmland…the rising mist at dawn, as I pull down the visor to avoid the glare of the summertime rising sun… the road cuts, spilling all sorts of rock formations for all to see…and reminders of the people of the First Nations, challenging the status quo with billboards along the way. And the quiet. Hours alone in a car with so much time to think and reflect and plan. Ahhhhh…
My days in the Midwest were filled with visits with all four children, their partners and all four (!) grandchildren. There were playgrounds and errands and chores and iced lattes and strolling and laundry and changing diapers and burping and laughing and reading kids’ books and great food and…well, you get the idea…
Oh, and meeting tiny Freya and sniffing the back of her neck (eau de newborn) and snuggling her on my shoulder.
I was so lucky to have time with everyone at once and also, some in single family units.
When Ben, Gretta and Maggie invited me to meet them at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, I was delighted! We met up to see the Watershed exhibit and it blew my mind more than once. From their website: Watershed brings recent work from fifteen contemporary artists to UMMA for an exhibition that immerses visitors in the interconnected histories, present lives, and imagined futures of the Great Lakes region.
The museum provided an excellent workbook for families to use as they moved through the exhibit. You can find a copy here (excellent museum work!) In the photo (above), Maggie and I were considering our reactions to some of the things we saw while walking through the gallery. It’s hard to describe how lovely it was to have Maggie tucked up next to me, to share our thoughts and to watch her draw in her booklet.
Two of the artists used cyanotypes to create their works. Meghann Riepenhoff’s work responded to the chemicals dumped into the confluence of the Genessee River and Lake Ontario by Kodak. You can check out her amazing work here.
Along with the workbook for families, the museum offered small cyanotype kits to families. I can’t wait to see what Maggie does with hers! I came home and dug out an old package I had stashed in my studio and tried my hand at making a print this morning (above.) Clearly, the paper is old and it’s not a sunny day here in Vermont, so the results were not great…but I had fun.
Coincidentally (don’t you love coincidences?) my friend Anne recently sent me some snail mail written on a card made by one of her students. You can find Nina’s gorgeous botanical cyanotypes here.
There’s so much more to share, but I will save some for another day.
I hope you have been well, dearest readers, as summer pushes its way through August. We are hoping for more rain here in Vermont, and cooler days, perhaps you are too.
xo