Shedding Daylight

Gary Myers is an artist whose work I admire and whose blog I’ve followed for several years. He lives just north of Elmira, New York, in the memorably-named town of Horseheads.  His paintings, recognizable, unique and strangely stirring, have hung in such galleries as the West End in Corning, New York, the Principle in Alexandria, Virginia and the The Haen in Asheville, North Carolina.

A museum exhibition titled Internal Landscapes: The Paintings of GC Myers, officially opened at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York on August 18. Continuing through December 31, the show groups together larger paintings from the last few years with a few very early small pieces that represent the beginnings of his work. A highlight at the Fenimore is the first public showing of The Internal Landscape, a painting whose progress readers of Gary’s blog were able to follow.

Evangeline Memories

For weeks I’ve watched my blogging friend Proserpina entice her readers into accepting a simple concept - color-based blogs - and encourage them to help create a rich and expressive tapestry of personal preference. “Here is a color,” she says. “Here are its qualities. Here are some references to it in history and the arts. Does it remind you of something? How do you feel about it? How has it decorated your life?”  

Such simple questions, and yet the answers she receives build one upon another to form patterns of exquisite complexity. Readers contribute images of famous paintings, or their grandchild’s refrigerator art. They bring limericks and literature, poetry, personal photographs of beloved objects, memories from days of long-past travel and dreamscapes from journeys yet to come.

With each new color, discoveries are made. When Proserpina designated “Blue” as her first color, I was a bit disappointed. I’ve always considered blue to be my least favorite color and yet as images, videos and snippets of literature were posted, I realized ”blue” is too general a term. While I dislike the primary blue of the color wheel, powder blue baby blankets, navy blue and electric blue, I wear denim and covet turquoise jewelry. I’ve reveled in the azure, aqua and cerulean of Carribbean waters and will sit for hours watching the smokey indigo of disappearing sunsets. Clearly, there are distinctions to be made.

Falling Acorns, Rattled Nerves

 

Flung across the  landscape by the rising winds of autumn,  acorns bounce and tumble toward their destiny, the sound of their fall exploding into the air like riffs of small arms fire or the percussive chatter of  firecrackers.  If you happen to be standing near a car when the first gust strikes and an acorn-laden oak decides to let her seed-crop fly, the noise created by the collision of nature’s irresistable force and a human’s immovable object is astounding.  If you open the car’s door, slide across the seat and close the door behind you, the amplified sound is deafening, the storm of green and brown pellets less destructive than hail but no less impressive.

I experienced my first acorn storm in the Texas hill country, an area of valleys and ridges threaded through with oak.  Live oak is the area’s signature tree, but red, pin, lacey, and bur also root in its soil and history.  Like the sudden swell of redbud in spring, the astonishment of the prickly pear’s extravagant yellow blossoms and the turning of Virginia creeper as it climbs toward true red,  every country event can be an adventure – unpredictable, unique and unexpected – and the acorn storms are no exception.