​On a recent warm summer evening, before beginning our nightly ritual of hand watering our gardens, into our little artCentral-green car we loaded—my husband David and me and our two puppies, Chiquita and Lasyrenn. Making a quick curbside dinner pick up at The Carthage Deli on the Square, we headed east beneath amazing banks of billowing clouds that seemed to grow more beautiful beyond every curve in the road.

Arriving at our destination—a favorite place to relax and unwind and where a portion of the original Route 66 pavement runs along Spring River—we circled Kellogg Lake twice looking for the perfect location to spread our rug and picnic on the grass with a view of the water.

As we made our first go-around, in front of the lakeside stone pavilion a very large flock of Canadian geese completely blocked our passage. We waited patiently amused as we watched them decide to slowly go waddling and flip-flopping their way up the steep embankment and out of our path while sporting their gleaming white face masks like chin straps. When just a few stragglers hung behind and voiced indecision about joining the others, the entire consortium turned around and blithely ambled back over the road in the other direction. Our dinner appetites ripening, we watched and waited some more.

On our second go-around, passing the boat ramp we saw quite a few folks comfortable in assorted lawn chairs. Quietly bantering back and forth, surrounded by coolers and tackle boxes, they sat with fishing poles at the ready to make their evening catches.

One large family had come to unload for an evening excursion over the lake’s calm surface. Their flatbed truck filled with sleek crafts looked like a colorful bouquet of pointed flowers. With paddles like leaves sticking out here and there in every direction, one by one they launched and began quietly slicing the water—a family flotilla of kayaks—mother and father and an assortment of boys in varying sizes, each and every one wearing life vests and baseball caps.

​Finally we settled in the peaceful quiet beneath shade trees on the far shore away from the activity of anglers and paddlers. Sharing our sandwich and chips and cool cucumber water we watched the graceful fountain spraying misty plumes high and wide not far from the markers commemorating Charles A. (Lex) Kellogg and Mary E. Kellogg who donated the land for the lake and E. M. “Uke” Haughawout who contributed foresight, planning and direction for Kellogg Lake’s creation in the mid 1950’s.

Seeming to arrive out of nowhere, thoroughly enjoying the splashing and laughing of horseplay, boy members of the family flotilla chopped their way into the placid waters just before us, calling up images of other hatted paddlers moving a bit more languidly through the waters of the Yerres river across the ocean in France.

​French boaters like those pictured in Périssoires sur l'Yerres (Boating on the Yerres) were a favorite subject of the realist and impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. As described online: "The three boats—sporty, kayak-like craft—glide on a stream that opens in a wedge shape. The tilt of the riverbank exaggerates the downhill flow of the water. The geometry of the painting, a rough wedge expanding from the top right to the lower left, promotes the sense of downward, leftward flow. The lead boat cuts an arrowhead of light into the shadow cast by the large tree.” This painting is one of the earliest and largest of the seven boating scenes that Caillebotte completed between 1877 and 1878 at his family's estate along the Yerres River.

Perhaps you will be inspired to don a summer hat and take a spin around Kellogg Lake where you can enjoy the dancing fountain, boat, picnic, fish, hike, play Frisbee, cloud and bird watch and conjure images of other flotillas out for summer pleasures while enjoying the gifts of Mother Nature’s waters.

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For a summery outing right in town be sure to visit the JASON SHELFER | SCULPTURAL SPECTACULAR— the free drive-through exhibition now on view at artCentral, 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage.

​I have painted mermaid images for as long as I can remember. I once painted a 1970 Chevy with a mermaid swimming down one side and her companion merman swimming over the opposite doors. The first gift I gave to David was my painting of a Haitian mermaid.

David has collected mermaids for decades, especially gathering them during his Navy years as a sailor circling the globe. We now have these treasures scattered all over our house—resting on table tops and nestled in planters, swimming on walls and perched on the tops of picture frames.

Searching the web, I have learned that mermaids have been swimming through worldwide cultures for a very long time. The first known mermaid stories “appeared in Assyria around 1000 BC. The goddess Atargatis, mother of Assyrian queen Semiramis, loved a mortal (a shepherd) and unintentionally killed him. Ashamed, she jumped into a lake and took the form of a fish, but the waters would not conceal her divine beauty.”

“On 9 January 1493, Christopher Columbus observed something he had before seen on the coasts of Africa…mermaids. In his journal he described the encounter with three mermaids that elevated themselves above the surface of the sea.”

Mermaid sightings by sailors and Christopher Columbus, too, when they weren't made up, were “most likely manatees, dugongs or Steller's sea cows (which became extinct by the 1760s due to over-hunting). Manatees—the creatures once believed to be mermaids—are slow-moving aquatic mammals with human-like eyes, bulbous faces and paddle-like tails. Indeed, manatees and dugongs are both known to rise out of the sea like the alluring sirens of Greek myth, occasionally performing ‘tail stands’ in shallow water.”

“Thousands of miles from the seas Columbus sailed, the dugong—found in the Pacific Ocean—had been living in legend for centuries. In 1959, 3,000-year-old cave drawings depicting dugongs—the word translates to "lady of the sea" in the Malay language—were discovered inside Malaysia's Tambun Cave.”

With such an alluring heritage and our love for creatures of her mystique, how could we resist bringing home this over-painted lady of the sea? We were not sure where she would land, but we  agreed that, before we placed her in our gardens, we needed to rid her of her over-done bold colors.

On the shelves of our local hardware store we found a user-friendly, non-toxic but still effective paint removal gel. For two weeks, yearning to reveal the concrete beauty of our mermaid’s sweet face, delicate hands and curvaceous form, I kept stripping her down, layer by layer. Even when the swarming mosquitoes seemed ferociously intent on torturing me, I held my course and continued removing our mermaid’s suffocating impasto pigments.

​Finally, our lovely lady stood bare and beautiful swimming with her two companions atop splashing concrete waves still slightly tinted with hints of the thick blues that had once weighed them down. 

​Now from the street you can see them atop the incline rising up to our house. Above a sea of mossy green they charmingly beckon us to admire their restored dignity and their rescued mystical essence. 

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For many more magical sightings be sure to visit the JASON SHELFER | SCULPTURAL SPECTACULAR—the free drive-through exhibition now on view at artCentral, 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage!

Here in Carthage the towering mimosa tree on my street and all the other lovely mimosas blooming this time of year throughout our town are descendants of Albizia julibrissin, the Persian silk tree or pink silk tree—a species of tree in the family Fabaceae, native to southwestern and eastern Asia. The genus is named after the Italian nobleman Filippo degli Albizzi, who introduced the exotic tree to Europe in the mid-18th century.

The magically intoxicating mimosa blossoms decorating our neighbor’s giant tree were like hundreds of perfumed ornaments placed and arranged just so in a hairdo woven with strands of fern-like foliage above dozens of scented adornments fallen down over the walk and grassy lawn.
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The mimosa perfume lingering long in my mind and my imagination appeared to go before and follow us all the way to and around the park and back home to a lovely cup of tea that seemed to be infused with the same Mimosa scent.

That morning’s surreal meandering set my mind to pondering the wonders of magic realism—that style of fiction and literary genre that paints a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magical elements. Magical Realism is familiar to us in literary and film classics in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy—“One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez; “Beloved” by Toni Morrison; “The House of the Spirits” by Isabel Allende; “Like Water for Chocolate” by Laura Esquivel; and the “Harry Potter” novels by J. K. Rowling.
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Well-known artists who are considered strong followers and practitioners of Magic Realism art include Italian painters Felice Casorati, Giorgio de Chirico and Gian Paolo Dulbecco; German Alexander Kanoldt; Latin American Marcela Donoso; American Paul Cadmus, Joseph Cornell, Edward Hopper, Syd Baker and Colleen Browing; Armenian Gayane Khachaturian; Swiss Ricco Wassmer; Dutch Carel Willink; Belgian René Magritte and Mexican Frida Kahlo de Rivera.

​For a very real and magical outing be sure to visit the JASON SHELFER | SCULPTURAL SPECTACULAR— the free drive-through exhibition now on view at artCentral, 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage!
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​​In art there is a long tradition of appropriation—the practice of borrowing what has come before and using that original to engage an old conversation from a new perspective.
 
My husband David recently sent me the image of a provocative painting he saw on Facebook. The painting titled “Agency Job”, an oil on canvas created in 2009 by the British artist known as Bansky, is a classic example of appropriation art.

​​As an introduction to his contemporary conversation, Banksy borrowed “The Gleaners”, the 1857 canvas painted in oil by Jean-François Millet. The original painting describes the activity of collecting leftover corn and other crops from farmers’ fields after the harvest. Millet depicts three French peasant women each involved in one of the three aspects of gleaning: searching for ears of corn, picking them up and tying them together in a sheaf. Their tasks were backbreaking but made an important contribution to the diet of rural workers.
 
An analysis of “The Gleaners” offered on www.visual-art-cork.com tells us:
 
“The painting's focus on the lowest ranks of rural society attracted considerable opposition from the upper classes, who were upset by its artistic pretentiousness and its social radicalism, and linked it with the growing Socialist movement. ‘The Gleaners’ was however accepted for display at the annual Salon of the Academy and was greatly admired by French republicans for its dignified and realistic appreciation of the rural poor.
 
Millet paid close attention to the “Gleaners” composition, using artful devices to imbue his subjects with a simple but monumental grandeur. The angled light of the setting sun accentuates the sculptural quality of the gleaners, while their set expressions and thick, heavy features tend to emphasize the burdensome nature of their work. Furthermore, these figures, bent double and toiling in the darkened foreground, are set against a warm pastoral background scene of harvesters—with their haystacks, cart and sheaves of wheat—reaping a rich harvest. The contrast between abundance and scarcity, and between light and shadow, is cleverly used by Millet to emphasize the class divide. And the remoteness of the landlord class is also highlighted by the blurry image of the landlord's foreman, sitting on a horse in the remote distance (right).”

“Millet had been deeply affected by the 1848 revolutions and their promise of democracy. Becoming the first European painter to portray the peasantry, a doomed class impoverished by advancing capitalism, he was castigated by the bourgeois class.”
 
In Millet’s calm imagery of the 'Gleaners' he declares that there are signs that the world can be changed into a better place—that change is coming. The white vest and red and blue hats of the gleaners form the three colours of the Tricolour—the flag of the French Republic and the symbol of popular Revolution in France - as captured for instance in "Liberty Leading the People” (1830) by Delacroix.
 
For us as citizens of a nation that flies the Red, White and Blue, is not Bansky offering the same message delivered by bold French artists almost two centuries ago?

The slaves stolen from their African homelands were packed into the bowels of cargo ships and carried across the Middle Passage. Bell graphically describes how having lost everything—their homes, their families, their status, their languages and their spiritual practices—the enslaved people came together through their shared language of drumming: he tells how out of their clandestine gatherings Vodou, their new, synthesized spirituality, was born calling in an entire pantheon of lwa (spirits) that guided the enslaved.
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Bell identified by name the Vodou spirits that brought courage and succor and the will to rebel. When those very Vodou spirits began to appear in my night time wilderness dreams, I felt compelled to know them better. So began my quest to learn all I could about Vodou which led to my making a collection of paintings and subsequent exhibitions titled “Les Morts et Les Mystères: The Ancestors and the Spirits” among whom the lwa Danto appears.

Danto is commonly associated with the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the patron saint of Poland. Among Haitians the original association of Danto with this Catholic icon of the Mother Mary is hypothesized to be from copies of the icon brought to Haiti by Polish soldiers.

In Haitian spirituality Danto is understood as the hardworking mother-warrior spirit known for her fierce protectiveness. Her child is said to be a daughter, Anaïs. Danto is associated with tough, country ways. She is credited for the initiation of the 1791 slave revolt begun with the slaughter of a black pig on a feast day in her honor. Danto, the Mother figure associated with Mary, gave inspiration with her fierce, protective presence!

When I find myself in times of trouble,” the Beatles poignantly sing…"Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me speaking words of wisdom, let it be. Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. Whisper words of wisdom, let it be. And when the broken-hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be. For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see. There will be an answer, let it be…”

While we are waiting for health and peace and well-being to come to our community and our country, remember to look to your sources of strength and comfort and to always look to art to soothe and inspire your heart.
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Visit artCentral’s free drive/walk-through exhibition at 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage. You will be uplifted by JASON SHELFER/SCULPTURAL SPECTACULAR on the beautiful, tree-canopied Hyde House lawn.