attention art directors, part 2

Someone I met recently happened to show me a Super 8 movie he made with a few friends in 6th grade, about 1977. Based loosely on Baretta, the cop show with Robert Blake, his film had fight scenes, chase sequences, and even a panning shot as characters ran down the street. (It did not however, have a cockatoo.) It was kid-acted, -shot and -directed with surprising skill, with adult input on editing and driving the getaway car. In winning grade school fashion the production was called Barfetta and Eric hand lettered his title cards in puffy, balloon type. I'm not sure why I was so smitten with this little opus but I'm sure it has something to do with the iconic low-tech image quality and the 1970s color. (It made me think of this old post about footage of cars driving away from Woodstock.) I could see each of these frames as a Gerhard Richter painting.

Madoo*

The gingko grove at Madoo is underplanted with boxwood trimmed into balls.
The plantings invade the path in an intriguing breaking-the-fourth-wall sort of way.

brightly painted details are part of Madoo's personal, idiosyncratic charm

photo by Madoo Conservancy

the Chinese bridge with vintage Lloyd Loom bench

 

 

The garden paths all vary—each with different inlays.
These are slices of telephone poles.

Inside Dash's "summer house": hand-splattered floors and painted wicker

the painting studio

Bob Dash, Rain Across Sage Fields, 1975

Bob Dash, Pasture on the Hill, 1964

Bob Dash, The Terrace, 1975

Dash in the garden, photo by Madoo Conservancy

Robert Dash in the summer studio building, 2009, photo by Edible East End

Madoo, the petite and poetic garden tucked away in Sagaponack on the South Fork of Long Island, is the legacy of the late Robert Dash, poet, painter, gardener, eccentric personality and acerbic wit. It's just shy of two acres but brimming with personal flourishes and historical references. The now verdant hideaway was barren land when Dash stumbled upon the property in 1967. Only a few ramshackle 18th and 19th century barns and out buildings delineated the plot which sat amidst neighboring potato farms. Dash set about creating the garden “blunder by blunder, increment by increment,” moving and renovating the buildings, adding antiques, statuary, cast-offs—fashioning enchanting tableaux in miniature along meandering pathways. It is this labyrinthine quality that imparts an Alice in Wonderland feel. Within its compact confines, Madoo features a "summer studio", the winter house, a "knot garden" (ground cover clipped into a woven motif) based on Tudor designs, a rose walk and rill complete with forced perspective, a quincunx bed, and an herb and vegetable kitchen garden recalling medieval potagers, among other highlights. The garden's "ever-changing" roster brings together roses, elephant garlic, yews, laburnum with ivy and clematis, ginkos and boxwood, and asparagus left to feather. I know next to nothing about gardening but it was just this mashup of high and low, historical and whimsical that enchanted me. Director Alejandro Saralegui, who gave me a personal tour in June, keeps Madoo a vibrant cultural presence with classes, tours, and events.

Dash was a poet -- starting off in the Beat era of the 1950s and 60s—and a self-taught painter of some renown. There is a show of the work of Dash and Fairfield Porter (a friend) at the Parrish Art Museum in WatermIll, through October 26.

*Madoo is "my dove" in Old Scots.

Madoo Conservancy, 618 Sagg Main Street, Sagaponack, NY 11962 (631) 537-8201

Madoo Conservancy PO Box 362/618 Sagg Main Street Sagaponack, NY 119 - See more at: http://www.madoo.org/#sthash.Rbik05GT.dpuf

The Madoo Conservancy PO Box 362/618 Sagg Main Street Sagaponack, NY 11962 Tel. (631) 537-8200 - See more at: http://www.madoo.org/#sthash.Rbik05GT.dpuf

The Madoo Conservancy PO Box 362/618 Sagg Main Street Sagaponack, NY 11962 Tel. (631) 537-8200 - See more at: http://www.madoo.org/#sthash.Rbik05GT.dpuf

a journey through cloudland*

Note: Even more to bring to this encore post; a friend alerted me to Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov who is following in Wilson Bentley's path— fashioning a DIY attachment to his camera and capturing stunning images of snowflakes. See images at bottom. Yet another Russian, Andrew Osokin, has done the same just with a macro lens, documenting snowflakes as they touch the ground, moments before they disappear.

Kljatov is most in the spirit of Bentley with his personal intensity for the project and home made mechanical ingenuity. He also, like Bentley, photographs the snowflakes against a homemade black backdrop. Kljatov's specimens have a crystalline sharpness. Otherworldy, they look alien and almost unsettling. They are, for me, too clinical to have the same resonance as Bentley's soft, idiosyncratic and sometimes humorous work.
Also of note: A couple years ago this Talk of the Town (All Alike by Adam Gopnik) mentioning "Snowflake" Bentley was a beautiful adjunct to this post.

Wilson Alwyn Bentley (February 9, 1865 - December 23, 1931) was born in Jericho, Vermont, in a farmhouse that remained his lifelong home. He was home-schooled and never ventured far from Jericho. At 19, after he combined two treasured presents– a microscope and a bellows camera–Bentley succeeded in capturing the world's first photomicrograph of a snow crystal or snowflake. Working outside, of course, he caught each crystal on a black board and transferred it rapidly to a microscope slide. Doing this he was able to create about 5000 images over the course of his life.

In town, Bentley was considered odd and was known to many neighbors as the "Snowflake Man" because of his quiet demeanor and unusual preoccupation. Although he was a gifted musician– he played piano, organ, clarinet, coronet, and violin, as well as composed music –he devoted himself to his photography and study of snow.

In 1931 Bentley worked with William J. Humphreys of the U.S. Weather Bureau to publish Snow Crystals, a monograph illustrated with 2,500 photographs. After picking up his copies of the newly published book he walked home in a snowstorm. He died of pneumonia at his farm on December 23.

. . . . .
"The rare delight of seeing for the first time this exquisite lineaments under a microscope, the practical certainty that never again will one be found just like this one... To perpetuate each masterpiece the image of each of each rare gem in the photograph, before its matchless beauty is forever lost (to us) is an experience is so rare so truly delightful that once undergone is never forgotten...Was ever life history written in more dainty hieroglyphics!"– Wilson Alwyn Bentley

. . . . .
Bentley donated his collection of original glass-plate photomicrographs of snow crystals to the Buffalo Museum of Science
*Bentley's description of a snow crystal's trajectory

Thanks to Herbert Pfostl/Blindpony for alerting me to Bentley.

Snowflakes by Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov. Read more about his technique on his blog

 

38+ shades of grey

Iceland greys

19th century Dufour et Cie Psyche grisaille wallpaper panel. the paper trail

Farrow and Ball paint chips

undyed wool

Claremont Grisaille, fabric by Schumacher

Confederate greys

my mother and her pet chicken, 1930s

above and below, Vija Celmins, Ocean, 1975 and Explosion at Sea, 1966

ash, carbon, cinder, lead, smoke, fog, battleship, greige, Davy’s, charcoal, heather, flint, cement, slate, silver, platinum, titanium, warm, cool, dark, light, medium, pigeon, elephant, graphite, pearl, dove, glaucous, Cadet, cinereous, mouse, gunpowder, stone, fuscous, liard, lavender, blue, steel, mercury, chinchilla, seal

I've been thinking about grey. A design job I was working on turned unexpectedly difficult this past week when the printing of some 4-color greys proved to be a stubborn wrangle. [In printing, as you may know, all colors are reproduced as flat (or Pantone) inks or represented by overlapping tint screens of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink ("4-color" or "CMYK")]. Grey, I have confirmed firsthand, can be difficult to capture in 4-color printing. The tone can shift to purple, green, or a brown muddiness; ironically there is a lot of color buried in grey. Despite an array of odd, unlovely and opposing connotations, I've always loved grey. It has an elegant subtlety, range, and depth: Grey matter, grey flannel, Grey Lady, eminence grise, strength, intelligence, sophistication, business, storminess, boredom, depression, old age, grey area, doubt, indistinct, equivocal, dustiness, dirt, disuse, poverty, humility, religious asceticism, modesty, conformity, totalitarianism, secrecy, shadows, fog...  Grey is protean; it's never black or white.