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Archive for the ‘Photos’ Category
Vallie Fletcher: “Snow in the City”
Saturday, February 12th, 2011
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Today I was the winning bidder at auction for this painting:
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I have an interest in American paintings depicting winter in the city. Budgetary limitations mean I keep my eye open for works by little known artists or by wholly unknown “Sunday” artists. An example of the latter is the painter James Jefferys, whom I profiled last year (see post, here). The fun of coming across these sparsely-documented painters is that it offers an opportunity to do a bit of detective work of one’s own.
This snow scene is a colorful oil on board, 16 by 12 inches, signed in the lower left. The artist, Vallie Fletcher (1874-1939), appears in American artists references and other sources. Those records indicate she was born in Beaumont, Texas. Her art studies took her to the Cooper Union in New York City and the Art Students League (she is mentioned in an 1899 catalog), although she returned west and was known as a “Texas artist.” Other than participating in regional competitions (for example, the 1927 Edgar B. Davis Wildflower Competition in San Antonio; she was not a winner), she did not leave much of a mark in the art world.
Regardless of of her lack of renown, I think she successfully achieves in this painting something direct and honest. The painting shares an approach to the urban landscape that was adopted by many of the best American painters of the 20th century.
My detective work started with a read of the scene depicted and the style of its execution. It looked to me to have been a spontaneous undertaking completed in a single afternoon. Some may object to using the term “en plein air” in this instance, since it seems Fletcher was comfortably positioned indoors, in a room on the second or third floor of the neighboring house, looking out through her window. Yet it’s possible the day grew warm enough for her to open the window, and, if so, describing it as an “open air” painting would not be incorrect.
Where was this painted?
The chief clue to the location is the gold-domed structure in the distance. It has the look of a state capitol building. Using Google Images I found these pictures of the capitol building in Denver, Colorado:
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It is a match, I believe. Even within the limitations of her loose painterly style, Fletcher has accurately captured the pillars and banding of the two-tiered masonry wedding cake that supports the gilded dome and cupola.
When did Fletcher paint this view?
She died at the end of the 1930′s, but the Keystone Cops-looking vehicle parked on the street suggests to me the preceding decade. A notation (whether it is in the artist’s hand is unclear) appears on the reverse of the framed painting:
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So, then, my working assumption is that Fletcher was in Denver and painted this view on April 25, 1928.
Is there anything to support this? Did it snow on that day, in that city? And if it did, was the storm sudden, surprising, and short-lived? Was it the kind of event that would keep the artist indoors? Was the cover of snow an evanescent subject she was eager to capture in paint?
Meteorological records maintained by the National Weather Service indicate that in Denver, on April 25, 1928: RAIN CHANGED TO SNOW … WHICH BECAME HEAVY AND TOTALED 7.4 INCHES IN DOWNTOWN DENVER. DUE TO MELTING … THE MAXIMUM SNOW DEPTH ON THE GROUND WAS 4.0 INCHES AT 6:00 PM. THIS WAS THE LAST SNOW OF THE SEASON. SOUTHEAST WINDS WERE SUSTAINED TO 19 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 20 MPH.
Which is to say, Vallie Fletcher likely kept the window closed.
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The circular porch, budding off the corner of the house, is a feature of many American Victorian-period homes of the late 1800′s. See here and here.
Silenus in Georgetown
Friday, February 4th, 2011.
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It is winter and cold and I am trying to remember summer through the aid of last year’s photographs, among which is this shot.
On fine summer days last year you could find this man sitting for hours on a sidewalk at the entrance to the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. I do no know his story, only his commanding presence. His diagonal pose, his pendulous belly, and the cup he raises to receive gifts of sustenance, recall depictions of the mythological Silenus, companion and tutor to the wine god Dionysus.
Except that, unlike the drunken Silenus, the man above knows he is in command.
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No longer worth hiding
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010.
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“. . . nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds’ nests no longer worth hiding.” –D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow.
Autumn Leaf Prints
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010On the way to work this morning I came across this stretch of sidewalk. How could I not stop in my tracks?
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The ghostly stains were the traces of fallen maple leaves.
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As I was to learn later from research on Google, it sometimes happens, when conditions are just right, that a strong natural dye in dying leaves (tannic acid) leaches out to mark each leaf’s temporary resting place on the concrete bed:
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire, consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
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Winds come to blow away the leaves and what’s left behind are what some people call “leaf prints” — representations that are spooky in the same way fossil imprints in shale, and X-rays of human body parts, are spooky.
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These impressions are images of passage, signs of dissolution befitting autumn.
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Two other bloggers who’ve been captivated by this phenomenon report their reactions here and here. An alternative version of my post is found here.
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Hey, just askin’
Friday, October 29th, 2010.
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So you’re wondering what ever happened to the boy in the photograph? Could finding the answer be as easy as connecting the dots to the cover of this new book?
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Edgar Hewitt Nye, “The Great Bluff, Chesapeake Beach, Maryland”
Monday, October 25th, 2010Earlier in the month I bought at auction a painting by the Washington, D.C. painter Edgar Hewitt Nye (1879-1943):
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A plein air sketch (oil on canvas, 18″ x 22″, signed, lr, “E. Nye”, ca. 1920s), this bright landscape was untitled in the auction catalog and otherwise lacked information about its location. It looked familiar, though. The mystery was solved when I found a few souvenir postcards dating back to the early 1900′s when Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, was a popular tourist destination for day-tripping Washingtonians (who arrived there by railway) and Baltimoreans (who traveled by excursion ship). Edgar Nye was one such traveler. What he decided to capture on canvas was not the crowds attracted to the roller coaster and other boardwalk diversions, but an untouched stretch of Calvert Cliffs just to the south of the town. The cliffs are a fossil-rich, Miocene era formation stretching for 30 miles along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Calvert County, Maryland.
Here, then, on a summer day, just a short remove from the noise of the resort, we can imagine Nye walking down to the water’s edge. He finds himself in a place where the air is laden with moisture, where baby waves break softly on the beach. It is here the artist plants his easel in the sand and spends a few hours playing with colors.
He puts to shame the dull penny postcards.
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Why are women turning away?
Sunday, October 24th, 2010What accounts for this trend? A slew of recently-released books written by and about women feature on their covers images of women turning aside and away from us. Four examples:
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Washington, DC, Peaches
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
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This is a prized specimen on the peach tree in my backyard, before a squirrel discovered it this morning.
Most years, when spring arrives, the absence of bees dooms the tree’s production to a pathetic harvest of pea-sized, sick-green bulbs that drop in the harsh winds of June storms. But this year the bees showed up and fulfilled their pollenating duties.
So here in July, quick, before more squirrel depradation, I gathered these:
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“Sleepless Nights” by Elizabeth Hardwick
Saturday, June 26th, 2010.
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Melancholy suffuses “Sleepless Nights.” A collage of memories, ruminations, vignettes, and character sketches, its 150 pages encompass a lifetime of poignant observations by a first-rate writer.
The book is most powerful as a remembrance of persons, mostly women, now dead (“They are gone, with all their questions unanswered”). Hardwick recaptures the essence of their lives, examining without compromise “the niceness and the squalor and sorrow.” Hardwick’s prose is a wonder. She assembles telling details in the service of building a series of fateful narratives. She produces writing that is in the best sense “novelistic” — even if the resulting book falls outside the category of a novel. The book is beyond category, and is no less rewarding for that fact.
Every few pages Hardwick recounts another love story she either participated in or was a wide-eyed witness to. She refers to them as “love affairs with energy and hope.” Each affair begins well. For example, she describes a temporary roommate in her Manhattan apartment, a gay man who “was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy.” Yet every affair turns tragic, in its own way. These stories are so fully (yet economically) modeled that you’ll swear, by the close of the book, that you’ve read several novels. With Hardwick, the relationships of men and women, of both high and low station, almost always lead to bitter endings. Closest to home, a sad bitterness attaches to Hardwick’s own reflections on men, from her earliest encounters (among the “couples, looking into each other’s eyes, as if they were safe”) to her caustic memory, at the book’s end, of “a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off.”
Hardwick always shows a remarkable empathy for the life journeys of others, especially for the deprived, those she finds “worn down by life.” Of a janitor, Hardwick notes: “He was one of those men who acted as if he expected to be shouted at and would not know how to reply.” Early in the book she profiles the doomed Billie Holiday, whom Hardwick knew in New York City in the 1940′s and 1950′s. The author re-envisions the jazz singer’s life, starting with a quick sketch of her physic presence (“the heavy laugh, marvelous teeth, and the splendid head, archaic, as if washed up from the Aegean”), moving on to her performances, then offering the lesson of her early death (“she shared the changeling’s spectacular destiny and was acquainted with malevolent forces”). A later chapter of the book, Part Nine, stands apart as a remarkable essay about the cleaning women whose lives intersected with Hardwick, as she moved from homes in Maine, Boston, and New York City.
The scope of Hardwick’s curiosity is wide-ranging, yet three of her interests struck me as noteworthy. One is her odd fascination, her obsession, with people’s teeth. While she tends to introduce new characters with only minimal physical descriptions, she invariably tales note of the person’s dental health, as if it were a critical component of moral character. Is this a bit of folk wisdom absorbed in her youth spent in the horse-breeding state of Kentucky? A notable item in her bag of writer’s resources is her familiarity with farm animals and their behavior, which she freely applies to people. A Depression-era socialist organizer in rural Kentucky “had the look of a clever turkey.” Two city street people, homeless women, “wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for.” A final attachment is Hardwick’s love/hate relationship with New York City. Early in the book she argues for a clear linkage between person and place: “It is not true that it doesn’t matter where you live.” Her verdict on Gotham: “This is New York, with its graves next to its banks.” And then there’s this surprising statement: “A woman’s city, New York.”
I recommend “Sleepless Nights” to writers who want to write better. Hardwick belongs to the elite class of “writers’ writer”; come and learn from her. I also recommend the book to anyone fascinated with Manhattan of the post-WWII era, and to anyone who wants to spend a few hours with a companionate teller of women’s truths.
[A version of this review appears on Amazon, here.]