Prints

This is Lancaster County, my home base, at its winter best. The haystacks are a good sign that this is likely an Amish farm. Therefore, the title more or less wrote itself.

By August, the garden has passed its peak and is winding down. The daylilies are gone, leaving only their foliage as a backdrop for the last hollyhocks and blue sage to combine and give me summer’s last bouquets.

One summer day when I visited Tatton Park in England, a section of the gardens featured a “forest” of sunflowers that were heavily populated by bees getting drunk on nectar. The perimeter of the sunflower planting was provided by an elaborate construction of espaliered pear trees, heavily laden with fruit. I like to think the bees hang out there all season, tending to fruit blossoms before their sunflower party season in August.

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore lies the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge. It is filled with marshes like the one depicted in this print, and in Fall it rings wildly with the cries of Canada geese as they gather for the great reunion that starts their winter in this location. Clearly the geese know a good thing when they see it.

When I developed this print I was trying to focus on the shading of trees as a way to sculpt the landscape. The title was drawn from the fact that I inserted a number of tiny details in the scene. As with many Brueghel paintings, the longer you look, the more action you see. This picture holds a bicycle race, a plowing man, swimmers in a quarry, sunbathers on a beach, rowers in sculls, picnickers, and a kite flier, all nestled among the trees.

From the moment these bulbs first poke a tentative cone of a nose through the soil in early spring till the start of their bloom time in August, these white lilies garner all manner of attention. Sprouts are bathed with a mixture to repel lily beetles. Regular inspections and doses of deer spray are laced with words of encouragement, and in some instances stakes are installed to support wavering stems that get too tall.  By bloom time it feels as though a holiday is in the offing, and like marchers in a July 4th parade, each specimen stages a celebration, offering noble blooms that provide a drawing challenge and fragrance at dawn and dusk that makes my heart sing.

The pink coneflowers that grace my garden in August provide color on their own, but also appeal to the butterflies, which add other hues to the scene.

No hyacinth blooms in December, but fortunately one can find them at the market at times. This one came from Canada, and I was most grateful both for the visual treat it offered and the heavenly fragrance it provided to my living room for at least a week. I was particularly drawn to the greenish tone to its buds which, combined with the deep blue of the blossoms, offered a really wondrous color scheme.

A mutual friend of ours introduced me to Doreen by arranging to have me stay in the basement flat of her home in London. She told me she would leave breakfast materials out when she left for work the next day. I had no idea, though, that I would find this carefully arranged still life. Breakfast proved to be lengthy since I had to do the drawing before I disturbed anything. It took more than a few years, but I finally got it into print form as a reminder of that morning and in honor of what grew to be a friendship solidified by many subsequent visits.