Florence Griswold Museum

Memories of a Memoir Class

noreply@blogger.com (Tammi Flynn) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:08:00 +0000

This blog entry was written by Katherine Catalano of Old Lyme about her experience in the Memoir Class taught by Sue Levine and Lary Bloom last fall.

Read examples of students' work and learn about spring class at http://www.florencegriswoldmuseum.org/MemoirClass.php.

The Florence Griswold Museum was full of surprises this fall. While a fantasy birdhouse exhibit was in place on the grounds, a memoir writing class taught by local professionals Lary Bloom and Suzanne Levine was underway in one of the gracious side rooms in the museum.

I had taken a six week memoir writing class with Lary and Suzanne last spring at R.J.Julia’s in Madison. Like most scribblers, I had been writing for pleasure since the Dear Diary days of adolescence. Now, my friends seemed to enjoy the book and movie reviews I email them when I think they would enjoy something I read or saw. I write poems and short essays about experiences with family and observations of Nature.
I told myself that I didn’t care if anything I wrote was ever published, but that wasn’t true.

I was simply unsure if I had any real talent, and knew I needed professional guidance to know if I should even attempt to submit a piece for publication in a magazine or literary review that I liked.

That first course in Madison with Lary and Suzanne was encouraging. Some of my pieces were just flat, and some were riddled with adjectives and clever sentences stuck in just because I liked them. “Darlings,” is what Lary and Suzanne called the latter, and they gotta go.

Some of my pieces were pretty well received, but I felt I was just warming up in those six weeks, so when I saw that Lary and Suzanne were teaching the memoir class at the Florence Griswold Museum, I called immediately to sign on. This time for eight weeks. The work was more demanding. My confidence grew, and I saw myself beginning to get control of my writing and to understand the discipline of the “craft.” I was better able to stay within the word limits of the assignments on scene setting, character description, dialogue—all the aspects of good prose.

Reading my pieces to the class was the first test. The comments by my fellows were honest, and even the criticism was kind. If there was a look of “huh?” on anyone’s face I knew I’d missed the mark. One piece had them laughing out loud, though. Heady stuff.

We handed in our assignments each week to Lary and Suzanne for their close reading and critique. The following week we got them back with their assessment of the piece in general, and detailed suggestions for revision. Suzanne put little check marks on paragraphs she liked. I looked for those first.

I wrote a practice query letter to a publication I hoped would be interested in my work based on my persuasive introduction. My letter lavishly praised the publication, leaving little room on one page for anything about my submission. I’ll have to work on that.

I’ll have to work on everything, (Lary says he goes back to an article eleven times to keep polishing it), but I move forward now with confidence that I can and will submit my work for publication. Even a rejection would mean that some editor actually read it.

The criticism, pro or con, by teachers and fellow students was invaluable to my development as a writer, and I was sorry to see the class end.

My writing craft moved up a notch or two, and because this was a memoir class, fourteen strangers got to know each other pretty well in a short time.

As I looked around the room the last day, remembering the tragic, dramatic, beloved, and hilarious contributions of my fellows, I realized that there is no such thing as an ordinary life, not even my own.

Name the Princess Contest Results

noreply@blogger.com (David Rau) — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:39:00 +0000

Introducing Princess Wrenevere

Although not one of the names suggested, this avian version of King Arthur’s Queen Guinevere, was inspired by the many creative entries. Thanks for all the terrific ideas.

Come to the Museum to see the enchanted birdhouses inspired by fairy tales in “Of Feathers & Fairy Tales,” October 1-31, 2011. The winner of the $25 gift certificate for the Museum Shop was drawn from all the entries (including those submitted online).

Here’s the list of names submitted by Museum visitors.

* multiple entries for this name

Submitted Names:

Aethemannae
Agustina
Airspania
Azuli
Azur Bella
Azure
Barbara Rose
Bella
Bella Bleu
Belle
Birdella
Birdie
Blue Angel
Blue Jade
Blue Muse
Blue Velvet
Bonnie Blue Bonnet
Brina
Bubblegum
Butafle
Candy
Chandra
Chirperella
Darling
Dorothy
Elegance of the Skye
Esme Bleu
Feather
Feathers
Featherella
Fiona *
Fiona Feather Bottom
Firenze
Florabelle
Flo on the Go
FloMagical
Florence *
Florence G.
Florence of Arabia
Florentina
Gesele
Glitter
Gloriana
Gold Griswold
Golden
Graylight
Impressa
Indigo
Indigo Plume
Iyanna Jasmine
Jasmine
Jewel *
Julia
Kismet
Lady Sophie
Laia
LaMone
Layla
Lily
Lily Laurel
Lisianthus
Lula
Lulu
Madame Lilly
Manora
Marabelle Queeny
Matilda
Merry Feathers
Mia
Naomi
Of the Clouds
Ovidia
Pelagia
Persephone *
Phoenix Feathers
Philomena
Pressy
Princy
Priscilla
Ribbon
Roy Al
Ruby
Scarlet
Sea Mist
Sigelinde
Silver Lake
Silverwing Rubyheart
Sonnet
Sophia
Sophie Rose
Sparkle
Spritzy
Susan
Turandot
Vadalia
Victoria
Yodio-Gumball
Zanzibar

New Arrival on Campus

noreply@blogger.com (ted gaffney) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:18:00 +0000

On the morning of 21 June, 2011, Sheila Wertheimer, our Gardens Supervisor, arrived on campus with a beautiful Ginkgo tree to be planted in front of the Krieble Gallery. It required the help of Randy Robinson, our Groundskeeper, and two landscapers from Wertheimer and Associates - Jerry LeFever and Brian Renshaw -to get this tree off the truck and properly planted. The ginkgo tree is replacing a Japanese Tree Lilac that had occupied that space previously - but not altogether successfully.

A few months earlier it was noted by the Museum’s Buildings and Grounds Committee that the Japanese Tree Lilac tree in front of the Gallery was not doing well. It was decided to replace it with a species that would prove long-lived, durable and resistant to drought conditions. After much discussion, over a period of a month or so, the Committee accepted Sheila’s recommended choice of species.

The Ginkgo, (Ginkgoaceae), the oldest tree in captivity, is often called the Maidenhair Tree. Its native habitat is Eastern China where it was first introduced to the US in 1784. One of the world’s oldest trees, it has no living relatives. It was native to North America at one time. Dendrologists and gardeners alike often refer to the ginkgo as “undoubtedly one of the most distinct and beautiful of all deciduous trees:” (W.J. Bean, Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, variable dates).

It’s distinctive fan-like shaped leaves turn a stunning golden yellow in the autumn.

(Excerpt from Wikipedia - Ginkgo palaeontology)

The Ginkgo is a living fossil, with fossils recognizably related to modern Ginkgo from the Permian, dating back 270 million years. The most plausible ancestral group for the order Ginkgoales is the Pteridospermatophyta, also known as the ”seed ferns”; specifically the order Peltraspermales. The closest living relatives of the clade are the cycads, which share with the extant G. biloba the characteristic of motile sperm. Fossils attributable to the genus Ginkgo first appeared in the Early Jurassic and the genus diversified and spread throughout the Laurasia during the middle Jurassic and early Cretaceous. It declined in diversity as the Cretaceous progressed, and by the Paleocene, the Ginkgo adiantoides was the only Ginkgo species left in the Northern Hemisphere while a markedly different (and poorly documented) form persisted in the Southern Hemisphere. At the end of the Pliocene, Ginkgo fossils disappeared from the fossil record everywhere except in a small area of central China where the modern species survived. It is doubtful whether the Northern Hemisphere fossil species of Ginkgo can be reliably distinguished. Given the slow pace of evolution and morphological similarity between members of the genus, there may have been only one or two species existing in the Northern Hemisphere through the entirety of the Cenozoic: present-day G. biloba (including G. adiantoides) and G. gardneri from the Paleocene of Scotland.

Metcalf Blooms Eternal

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda Burdan) — Wed, 25 May 2011 20:37:00 +0000

While our new exhibition In Bloom: Mountain Laurel and the Lyme Art Colony celebrates a flower that has yet to make an appearance in nature this season, Willard Metcalf's painting Dogwood Blossoms, seen in the detail above, captures a different fleeting springtime moment, one that is now gone for another season. The dogwood on the campus of the Florence Griswold Museum (below) was last week's outdoor "exhibition," so to speak.

The Boston Herald noted both the "fresh young blossoms" and the "fresh young girls" in a November 1906 review making mention of the dogwood painting. In this detail we see Metcalf's aspiring Impressionist brushwork as he reduces the delicate blossoms, as well as the face of the woman, to thinly applied smudges of color. Compared to other painted details we've examined in this series, Metcalf's handling is sparing and dry, with the weave of the canvas clearly visible.

Though Metcalf frequently dated his paintings, marking the year they were completed, we can actually construct an even more precise chronology of his work based on the blooming cycle of his subjects. Metcalf made his dogwood painting in the spring of 1906, the season after he painted the FGM's latest Metcalf acquisition Kalmia, a work featuring an explosion of mountain laurel blossoms along the marshy Lieutenant River. (You can read more about Kalmia here.) In 1905, he also painted The Poppy Garden while visiting in Old Lyme. If you stroll through our historic gardens behind the Griswold House this weekend you'll find the poppies haven't bloomed yet, but are not far off. With dogwood, mountain laurel, and poppies to occupy him, late May and early June must have been an incredibly busy time for Metcalf.

A Nineteenth Century Field Trip

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda Burdan) — Fri, 20 May 2011 13:00:00 +0000

The "phantom" woman I pointed out a couple of days ago is far from being the only thing mysterious about the Charter Oak. The legend of the tree and its place in Connecticut history has continued to grow over the centuries. When Frederic Church painted his version of the Charter Oak around 1846, the tree was still standing in Hartford. In his rendering, several figures can be seen visiting the tree, which was a historic landmark even then. This pair, a woman who appears to be writing and a young boy, may be on something like the equivalent of our educational field trips today.

Why take a field trip to see a tree, you wonder? The tree was the legendary hiding place for a very important colonial document, the Connecticut Charter. Granted by Charles II in 1662, this document ensured the inhabitants of Connecticut the right to a popularly elected governor who ruled in the king's stead. The charter also acted as a constitution for the colony, a service which it continued to perform into the nineteenth century. When King James II demanded the return of the Connecticut Charter in 1685 in order to create one giant royal colony in America the citizens of Connecticut took action.

The newly appointed governor arrived in Hartford (along with 60 armed men) to seize power in 1687, but the colonists resisted. In a move likely orchestrated to cause chaos and confusion, the candles of the meeting hall where the handover was to take place suddenly went out. When order was restored and the lights blazed again, the charter was gone and so was Captain Joseph Wadsworth.

Wadsworth spirited the document away and allegedly hid it in the hollow of a tree, now known as the Charter Oak, on the property of Samuel Wyllys in Hartford. There it stayed, secreted away for more than two years until William and Mary restored Connecticut's right to again rule itself under the original charter.

For its role in, literally, defending the constitution of the colony, the tree itself was honored for the rest of its days. When a storm brought the tree down in 1856, mourners gathered at the site, collecting souvenirs of the venerable oak. One of the "souvenirs," so to speak, exists to this day at the Florence Griswold Museum. Not the painting by Church, but an actual tree; a white oak on the grounds is a descendant of the original tree (at left). Acorns gathered from the Charter Oak have been planted, with ensuing generations of trees known as the "scions" of the Charter Oak.

The Phantom of the Charter Oak

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda Burdan) — Wed, 18 May 2011 12:00:00 +0000

The Charter Oak was one very big tree (by some accounts it was 22 feet in circumference!), immortalized by one very big artist (Frederic Church). I promised to tell some of the secrets of our paintings in this series and Church's The Charter Oak is literally a painting about a secret.

I’ll tell you the legend of the Charter Oak in a few days, but right now I want to look closely at one small detail of the painting. Certainly Church intends for us to pay attention to the historic tree, but he learned from his teacher, Thomas Cole (who made a very famous painting of the Connecticut River), that including fine details can make his landscapes all the more grand. Look carefully to find a dog resting in the foreground, a cupola silhouetted in the distance, and bird perched on a branch of the tree on the right.

But it’s the woman under the tree you might find intriguing when stop to notice her. She’s not quite all there, is she? You can see the whitewashed fence in front of her right through her body. As fun as it would be to turn the tale of the Charter Oak into a ghost story, there’s actually a scientific explanation for what you see.

Oil paint is made up of pigment mixed with linseed oil. As the paint ages, the properties of the linseed oil change due to oxygen exposure. Light actually travels through the paint more easily now than it did 150 years ago. The result is that you and I can see “through” the woman standing under the tree. She would have looked completely solid to Church as he was painting it.

A Barnyard by Another Name

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda Burdan) — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:00:00 +0000

The detail above is captured from John Twachtman's painting Barnyard, on view in our current exhibition. In the painting, dozens of impressionistic roosters, chickens, and doves gather around a small child. Barnyard entered The Hartford Steam Boiler Collection in 1992, but lately I've been tracking it's history, or provenance, further back.

In his lifetime, Twachtman exhibited the painting in Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York. A critic from the New York Tribune, writing in 1901, had mixed feelings about Twachtman's paintings. "The bright, almost staccato note of "The Barnyard" is wholly captivating. But if the collection embraces these lucky hits it also contains things that are amorphous and uninteresting." (You can read the full review here by zooming in.)

The critic from the New York Times agreed, writing about the same exhibition: "The point to be made is whether Mr. Twachtman's quality does not sometimes lead him too far." (See the article titled "A Trio of Painters" here.)

The painting has also been exhibited under the title Feeding the Chickens, a helpful fact to know when looking for it in archives and other records. Searching by this alternate title, I learned much more about the Florence Griswold Museum's painting.

After Twachtman's unexpected death in 1902, nearly 100 of his works were auctioned at the American Art Galleries in New York, among them Feeding the Chickens, which sold for $170. According to the New York Times, the sale, which netted $16,610, attracted many vociferous art students. "Long-haired men and short-haired women uttered exclamations of surprise when a picture brought a good price."

Feeding the Chickens was purchased that night by George DuPont Pratt, whose family held the painting for over forty years. Only ten years after buying the Twachtman, Pratt built his home, Killenworth, on Long Island for a reported $500,000. In 1946, the home was sold to the Soviet Union for a song at $120,000 and remains the retreat of the Russian delegation to the United Nations. Lucky for us the financially-strapped Pratts sold their Twachtman at auction in 1942, where it was once again titled Barnyard.

Hartford in a Dream

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda Burdan) — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:00:00 +0000

The mysterious doorway and narrow windows presented here are a small part of a 1975 pastel by Werner Groshans, an artist sometimes called a "magic realist" for his realistic, yet always somewhat strange style of painting. Not quite a Surrealist himself, Groshans shared some of the Surrealists' sensibilities, tending to take realistic scenes and transform them into the slightly off-kilter visions of a dream. The softness of the pastel, visible in this detail, literally blurs the image, contributing to the sensation that the scene is perhaps a hazy image in a fading memory.

The doorway Groshans captures is actually a part of a real building, the Connecticut State Armory in Hartford, built in 1911 and still in use today. This 1920s era postcard gives you an idea of the building itself and its fortress-like quality, an aesthetic shared by many armory buildings. The doorway above can be matched up to this vintage view, though Groshans takes some liberties with the rest of the architecture.
If we compare Groshans' finished work (seen below but also appearing in our current exhibition Inspiration & Impact) to the postcard view, the real-yet-unreal qualities of the pastel rendering become clearer. He's chosen a side-view of the building, emphasizing the large sky-lit drill shed, and has simplified the architectural details of the monumental building. It's the front of the building, though, that gets the greatest magic realist makeover.

In Groshans' version, the armory is partly buried under a hill that does not exist in reality. Out of Groshans' imagined hill grows a large tree, which amazingly dwarfs the 100 foot tall shed, an inconsistency of scale typical of dreams. The erie quality of the building, seemingly being swallowed by the ground and overshadowed by the (shadowless) tree beside it, can be felt even in the tiny detail of the doorway. The passageway does not open into the cavernous space of the building, nor is a real door depicted. Instead Groshans door is as solid and impenetrable as the roof above, providing no access at all, either for the viewer's eye or the imagined inhabitants of this dream version of Hartford.

Spring has Sprung at the Florence Griswold Museum

noreply@blogger.com (ted gaffney) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:32:00 +0000

Spring has sprung at the Florence Griswold Museum

It took a while but spring has finally come to Old Lyme.

Do not miss an opportunity to visit the grounds of the Museum during the heady days of “First Greens”. Myriad daffodils abound on the grounds; in particular just north of the Florence Griswold House.

As you drive in through the main entrance to the Museum, don’t miss the beautiful old cherry tree on the left just past the tulip tree. It possesses such a sublime essence of pale pink beauty. It has only a few days of glory before it sheds its petals.

The trees and shrubberies are coming into their own. We are well into the first blush of spring and the Pepperidge and Willow are harbingers of the early leafing of our Maples, Beeches, Oaks and Dogwoods.

The historical garden and Huntley Brown gardens are also displaying the first flowering of April and May flowers. The first tulip was seen yesterday. Lilacs are just around the corner.

Come quick, come soon; spring is too quickly a fleeting memory of loveliness and aromatic smells.

The Color of Snow

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda Burdan) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:00:00 +0000

The Museum's recent acquisition The Broken Wall, a snowy landscape by Wilson Irvine, will soon be leaving the galleries, replaced by the spring scenes of our upcoming exhibition In Bloom. Before this painted snow melts away, let's take a closer look at one tiny section of the canvas depicting a snow-covered shrub at the base of an evergreen tree.

Though we often think of Impressionists as midsummer sun-seekers, the impression of a winter landscape was perhaps even more challenging to capture, with the sun glaring off a snow-covered scene. Courbet's snowy landscapes inspired Monet's early experiments in winterscapes. It's been said many times that the Impressionists banned black from their palettes with painters choosing instead to build their dark shades from colors such as Prussian Blue or mixed complementary colors. But what about "snow white"?

White is definitely in abundance in French and American Impressionist painting, but as Irvine shows us, white is almost never pure. The cool feeling of snow here is accomplished with a heavy dose of violet, lilac, and robin's egg blue. Irvine layers onto this icy base, adding a frosting of warmer white that tends toward a sun-faded pink. While he pushes the cool colors into the canvas, as evidenced by the individual bristle marks, he dabs on this warmer color, letting the paint be pulled from a loaded brush that barely touches the canvas.

Though in this detail The Broken Wall seems wildly painted, Irvine was no Abstract Expressionist. When viewed as a whole (see below), the painting distracts us with it's representational subject matter, concealing the multitude of abstract passages out of which it is created.

Reestablishing the Woodhead Memorial Garden

noreply@blogger.com (ted gaffney) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:09:00 +0000

A handsome flat stone of Vermont Granite was installed on April 14, 2011 in a newly re-established memorial garden to the north of the Florence Griswold House. The garden honors the legacy of Daniel Woodhead, Jr. Surrounded by thousands of yellow and white daffodils planted by Rob Wilbur of Wilbur and King, the stone is positioned in a stand amongst three maples. Designed by Mary Ann Besier and Ruth Baxter of Rumney and Associates, the slab was ordered, cut, scribed and delivered through the conscientious efforts of Joe Fulton of Shoreline Memorials.

Daniel Woodhead, Jr. (1911-1978), a retired business leader from Winnetka, Illinois whose family had roots in Old Lyme, guided the Florence Griswold Museum as its President from 1974 until 1978. He hired Jeffrey Andersen as director in 1976 and shortly thereafter led the Museum in establishing its first Endowment Fund, which he generously supported. His tenure as President was cut short by his unexpected death on June 18, 1978. Many members admired his leadership and gave funds to establish the Woodhead Memorial Garden on the north side of the Florence Griswold House. Designed by his successor, Dr. George B. Tatum, a distinguished architectural historian, the garden consisted of a rectangular space with a yew hedge that was intended to function as an out-of-door “room” for meetings during the summer. Unfortunately, every winter deer ravaged the hedges and inadequate sunlight meant that they never matured satisfactorily. In the 1990s the hedges were removed and, thanks to the acquisition of additional property between the Museum and the Bee and Thistle Inn, the area was opened up and returned to a more natural state.

Now, many years later, the Museum is re-designating this attractive open space as the Woodhead Memorial Garden. Thousands of daffodils bloom there each spring. This highly visible area brings joy to visitors, residents, and even passers-by that drive by on a daily basis.

Secret Lives of Paintings

noreply@blogger.com (Amanda Burdan) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:14:00 +0000

One of the great and unique pleasures of museums is the first hand interaction with works of art. There it is, right in front of you. You can read about art, go to lectures, browse collections on the internet, but those experiences never exactly replicate the understanding that comes from seeing for yourself.

When the Google Art Project launched a few months ago, the power of visiting international collections and the ability to "zoom in" to an image created an interesting buzz in art and technology circles. This website seemed to do something others didn't, or didn't do as well. People were impressed.

While the Google Art Project allows you to scan the surface of a painting in great detail. . . well, in fact, so does your eye when you're standing in the gallery. The new technology certainly still has its place, especially in bringing art from international collections right to our desktops. The great thrill of looking up close at any square inch of the canvas you find interesting, however, is available to you in any museum.

Over the next few weeks, I'll post some photos (taken with my phone, no zoom necessary!) of paintings currently in our galleries, like the one here of Willard Metcalf's Kalmia, a depiction of mountain laurel along the Lieutenant River. In this image you can get a sense of areas of thinly applied, dry brushwork (the branches of the laurel) as well as the thick and gooey pinks of the blossoms cooled with lilac shadows. The sheer number of strokes -- of different quality, direction, color, and texture -- that make up this tiny piece of real estate is impressive.

I think you'll be equally impressed with the images to come and the secret details hidden in plain view on the surfaces of the canvases in our galleries. Come and see for yourself.

Eaton and the Reverence of Nature

noreply@blogger.com (Tammi Flynn) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:28:00 +0000

This post was written by Charles Clark, whose Charles Eaton painting, Evening Quiet, is featured in the current exhibition Connecticut Treasures: Works from Private Collections. The work is a promised bequest to the Museum. We thank him for sharing his thoughts with us!

For the last thirty years I’ve been researching and writing about Connecticut artists who were in their day famous but owing to shifts of taste became, or remain, obscure. Threats to Connecticut’s beautiful countryside drove me first to landscape painters like Charles Warren Eaton, but recently I’ve become interested in contemporary artists like Norman Ives, a graphic designer, painter, and printmaker, who worked with abstracted type forms, and who lived and worked in the New Haven area.

My great-grandparents were patrons of Eaton’s and all my relatives had his paintings and drawings hanging on their walls. This is how I first saw his work. From 1900 to about 1910, Eaton gained fame as the “Pine Tree Painter,” the sole artist to record the white pine forests that were so common across the Northeast at that time. These are the paintings he is best known for today.

When I was a boy, paintings like Evening Quiet, a good example of the pine tree genre, struck me for their mystery, their peacefulness, and their rich glow. They didn’t look like anything else, and as I learned more about Eaton, and wrote about him, I realized we were bound by a love of the New England landscape and an absolute reverence for trees (a critic once commented on the unvarying beauty of Eaton’s trees – whether he painted in Connecticut, or Belgium, or Italy, here was an artist who knew nature and whose landscapes are more than an assembling of natural forms.) That he read Emerson and Thoreau comes as no surprise.

As a little jest, but in truth, sincerely, I once told a friend that after a bad day, as a form of meditation, I’d “take little walks in these paintings.” Art not only amuses and pleases, and shocks, but can edify and even console. Rather than announce “look at me, aren’t I pretty,” paintings like Evening Quiet quietly establish a rapport with the viewer. They are antidotes to this noisy age, evidence that, upon reflection on the timeless beauty of nature, mankind can, with any luck, live a life of modesty.

Planting The Museum's Cornfield

noreply@blogger.com (Sara Sargent) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:41:00 +0000

One of the things I love about being a summer intern here at the Florence Griswold Museum is that my days are often filled with surprises-

everything from noticing something new in a painting thanks to a second grader to planting a cornfield! Only a couple of weeks ago on June eighth, I found myself out behind the Museum's garden helping to plant several hundred Indian corn seeds along with fellow co-workers Ted, Randy and Matt F. But why would an art museum plant a field of corn you may be asking yourself.

No, the museum is not establishing a farm to grow vegetables for Café Flo (Indian corn is purely a decorative variety of corn). Instead, the plantin

g was part of the many preparations that we are making for the exciting Harvestime festival at the museum in October. After the grand success of the Wee Faerie Village, David Rau the director of education and outreach at the museum has developed a similar concept for the museum grounds that will engage the creativity of local artists once again. No crows will dare to touch our precious cornfield thanks to the over two dozen scarecrows created by local artists inspired by famous artists from around the world and though out history which will dot the grounds for the month of October. These scarecrows will come in all shapes, sizes, colors, patterns and designs. On your journey around the grounds you will run into all sorts of characters- anyone from Picasso to Georgia O’Keeffe to Childe Hassam. H

owever, even an incredible scarecrow exhibit such as this is incomplete without a cornfield! And it looks like our field is off to a good start; after only two weeks the corn is already around 11 inches tall and is flourishing because of all of the rain and hot weather we have been having. Please feel free to come by and check on the progress of our cornfield throughout the summer when you come to visit the museum. The field is now nicely marked with a sign featuring Van Scarecrow, our very own scarecrow mascot. (Here my fellow intern Ian is posing with the newly installed sign.)

The cornfield will be featured in one of the exciting activities planned for the scarecrow exhibition; guests will be able to pose in scarecrow costumes in front of the hopefully very tall cornfield (the plants are supposed to get to 8 feet by the end of the summer). The museum will be hosting lots of other special events including Not-So-Very-Scary Nighttime tours of the scarecrows as well as pumpkin carving and scavenger hunts. In the meantime, I will be reporting every once and a while about how our corn is shaping up. Stay tuned for the next step- thinning the corn. At this point, it looks like the corn might be knee high by the fourth of July!

(Below is an updated photo of the corn taken on June 24th)

Betty's Tree

noreply@blogger.com (ted gaffney) — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:34:00 +0000

Red Bartlett Pear Tree planted in honor of Betty Chamberlain

Elizabeth (Betty) C. Chamberlain, of Old Lyme, is a longtime friend and trustee of the Florence Griswold Museum. To honor her years of service and devotion to the Museum, the Buildings & Grounds Committee proposed, back in January, to plant an ornamental tree in her honor.

It was agreed that an espalier ornamental fruit tree (Red Bartlett Pear – pyrus communis) would be planted on the west side of the Rafal Landscape Center. Everyone felt a pear tree would be a welcome addition to the museum grounds. Sheila Werthiemer, our Garden Historian and leader of the volunteer “Garden Gang,” observed that, although there is no record of an espalier tree being planted on the old estate’s grounds, they were being cultivated in America during the Lyme Art Colony days, certainly by 1910.

“Espalier” refers to the horticultural practice of training trees through pruning and grafting in order to create a formal "flat plane “ or menorah candlestick branch pattern. Espalier trees usually grow against a wall, fence, or trellis. The technique was used in Medieval Europe to produce fruit inside a fortress courtyard where open space was at a premium. It eventually was seen as a means of decorating courts and garden walls. In the 17^thCentury the word espalier described the trellis or frame on which a plant was trained to grow.

Sheila selected the pear tree from a local nursery and planted it on April 23, 2010. In addition, we also decided to plant a number of low blueberry bushes to flank the tree. Suitable signage was installed to identify the tree and why it was planted.

Please look for this tree on your next visit to the Florence Griswold Museum.

Introducing Van Scarecrow

noreply@blogger.com (David Rau) — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:21:00 +0000

A year or so ago, while planning the Museum’s Wee Faerie Village project (October 2009), I was looking for an illustrator who could produce a fanciful map for the project. While on the website of children’s author and illustrator John Himmelman, one of the faerie dwelling architects, I noticed a link to his son Jeffrey Himmelman’s website. That click brought me to a world filled with colorful warriors and witches; all odd, yet endearing, creatures. It didn’t take me long to know that I’d found my faerie village map maker.

But indeed, I had found much more. As we began working together on the Wee Faerie Village project, it occurred to us that having faerie images would be useful in conveying our concept: that these winged creatures were the artistic muses to the original artists of the Lyme Art Colony who stayed at Miss Florence’s boardinghouse.

I sent Jeff some images of faeries that I liked from books and websites, and asked him to draw his idea of a faerie to get the ball rolling. What he created was a beautiful faerie woman dressed in autumnal splendor with wings shaped like oak leaves. She was a strong, warrior-type faerie, but the tone was going in the right direction.

As the project developed, Jeff suggested that the faeries for the project should be younger to appeal to the many families we hoped to attract to the Museum. He was dead on, and with only a few drafts passed back and forth, he created, (or is the word conjured?) the image of “Griswold,” the boy faerie. Griswold was both boyish and elfish in form, with an acorn cap beret, a sharp pencil tucked sword-like in his waistband, and wings that resembled oak leaves and maple seedlings. He was shown holding an old-fashioned ink pen like a spear in one hand while cradling rolls of drawing paper in the other.

Soon, Griswold was followed by “Flor
ence,” a girl faerie. More demure than the first female faerie, and matching Griswold in character, she was shown cradling a paintbrush. Winged and dressed in leaves, she was crowned with purple flowers and had a colorful artist’s palette and pots of paint strapped to her belt.

This duo was followed by a small band of other faeries, as well as a faerie dog and cat, along with a faerie gate that led into a intricate map of the campus that enabled over 10 ,000 visitors to find their way around the Wee Faerie Village. The Museum also created a series of puzzles and magnets using the Griswold and Florence images that sold very well during the three-week run of the event.

Now, a year later, the Museum is embarking on another fall event geared for families called “Scarecrows at the Museum: A Harvestime Adventure.” Instead of faerie dwellings, this October the Museum grounds will be covered with full-scale scarecrow creations based on famous art and artists.

To kick off this initiative, I contacted Jeff Himmelman to see if he was up to drawing scarecrows that alluded to famous artists. Within days, the first rendition of Van Scarecrow was attached to an email. The resemblance to Vincent Van Gogh was startling, from the craggy beard to the sun-worn hat. In Jeff’s depiction, however, one of the scarecrow’s eyes was a button sewn into place that was slightly unnerving.
A quick straw poll (get it?) among the staff confirmed that we needed a slightly less maniacal looking scarecrow mascot—one that would not actually scare crows, not to mention small children.

Always open to constructive criticism, Jeff went back to the drawing board, and a revised Van Scarecrow appeared. Before we went to color, the final step, I asked Jeff to incorporate some corn (I was in the process of negotiating the planting of a small cornfield on campus) and a crow. I figured a scarecrow couldn’t be too scary if he had a crow buddy. Jeff went to work. The email marked “Final” arrived a few days later.

“Et, Voila!” as Van Scarecrow might have said it. The first official image for the Museum’s “Scarecrows at the Museum” was born.

Want to find out more about this year’s Scarecrows at the Museum?
Sign up for our monthly e-newsletter by emailing tammi@flogris.org."

Curating: an art and a science

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Orzel) — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:56:00 +0000

One of the most exciting aspects about the museum's upcoming exhibition, Landscapes in Counterpoint, is the dual role played by the artist Tula Telfair. Nine new landscapes by the artist form the centerpiece of the exhibit, but she also acted as curator for the remaining gallery displays. Relying on her extensive formal training, and inspired by a modern grouping of works in an installation she saw at the National Museum of Denmark, Telfair selected nearly three dozen paintings from the Florence Griswold Museum's permanent collection. These works inform and augment the exhibit's examination of the nature of landscape painting in its' historical and modern forms. Above, a glimpse of some of the works curated by Telfair for the exhibit. You can read more about her selection process on the museum's official webpage.

Bringing an exhibit to life

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Orzel) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:28:00 +0000

{Tula Telfair and museum staff prepare to hang one of Telfair's landscapes in the Smith Gallery}.

A certain hushed formality is a given in most museums. Such an atmosphere seems fitting for spaces devoted to the display of meaningful works of art. However, as these photos prove, the last days leading up to a well-curated exhibit are anything but hushed or formal!

Yesterday, artist/curator Tula Telfair and the rest of the museum staff got down to work installing paintings in preparation for this weekend's opening, Landscapes in Counterpoint. Gallery walls are often repainted to complement a new exhibit. In this case, Telfair elected to re-use the soft gray hues that provided the backdrop for the previous installation, Sewell Sillman's Pushing Limits. After the walls dry, the art is hung with painstaking care, and finally, text labels are added next to each piece.

These images also give viewers an idea of the true scale of Telfair's dramatic landscapes. Below, a glimpse of Curators Amy Kurtz Lansing and Amanda Burdan, and Museum Director Jeff Anderson, working with Telfair's Most Approaches Suffer from the Predictable Isolation of Schools.

Landscape painting, under the microscope

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Orzel) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Tula Telfair, Pleasure Was Considered Decadent, 2010. Oil on canvas, 70h x 80w inches. Courtesy of Forum Gallery.

Although Tula Telfair's landscape paintings occupy monumental canvases that seem to encourage distanced observation, she urges her viewers to step close to each work. Imagine looking at a painting under a microscope. On Telfair's canvas, you'll see the traces of three to seven different painting techniques, for the way that paint sits on the surface varies depending on the terrain that's represented. This style of seeing invites the viewer to imagine her style of working on the canvas by examining the brushstrokes themselves.

Telfair's actions are preserved forever on the surface of her paintings, and are a direct response to the imagined landscape. As physical terrains shift, so does her method of painting each subject, with a towering expanse of cloud depicted intentionally differently from, for example, an expanse of field. Her technique speaks to a rigorous art education and deeply thought-out creative process. As Telfair puts it, in her landscapes, paint is a subject in itself.

So be sure to lean in closely to examine Telfair's landscapes when you visit the exhibit. A scientist is rewarded with a new display when peering through the microscope, and you'll be rewarded with an entirely different view of Telfair's paintings by examining them thoroughly!

Exploring the modern landscape

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Orzel) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:55:00 +0000

Tula Telfair, Most Approaches suffer from the Predictable Isolation of Schools, 2010. Oil on canvas, 72h x 108w inches. Courtesy of Forum Gallery.

Tula Telfair's powerful landscapes reflect memories of her own experiences in nature. At a young age, she witnessed the vast terrain, varied weather systems, and changing color palettes of landscapes around the world. But unlike the traditional works of the American Impressionists or Hudson River Valley School, the images on her canvases don't represent real locales.

Instead, Telfair's landscapes are imagined - vividly imagined. When I spoke to her last week about her work, she emphasized how important it is that her dramatic paintings provoke strong emotional responses or memories in viewers. As a thoroughly modern landscape painter, she creates image-based work that treats both the landscape, and its' viewer, as subject.

As viewers, we're on the right path if we feel on edge or overwhelmed, or if a painting triggers powerful physical sensations from our own remembered experiences of the natural world.

Certain landscapes have the power to remind us how ephemeral our lives are, in the context of our existence in a mysterious universe. Many of us have experienced universal moments of awe and wonder as we have looked across a mountain range or craned our necks to see a night sky full of stars. It's this sometimes unsettling, but essential aspect of the human experience, that Telfair's work evokes. Which landscapes have had that effect on you?

Behind the scenes with Tula Telfair

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Orzel) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:03:00 +0000

{In her Manhattan studio, Tula Telfair works on the landscape paintings that will be the centerpiece of the museum's upcoming exhibit.}

There's an unmistakable relaxation response in our bodies that heralds the spring season, isn't there? Longer sunny days, warm breezes, and blooming flowers inevitably inspire easier smiles and sighs of contentment as everyone thaws out from the long, cold winter.

It's exactly that kind of powerful, sensual physical response to nature that inspires Tula Telfair's dramatic landscape paintings, and she seeks to evoke a similar reaction in her viewers. Last week I had the pleasure of going behind the scenes with her to talk about her upcoming exhibit at the Florence Griswold Museum, Landscapes in Counterpoint.

As with any body of creative work, Telfair's landscapes have evolved over time. They began as quick color studies meant to inform the narrative, figurative pieces she was creating at the time. But one morning, an art dealer walked into her studio to find a grouping of these luminous, colorful landscapes scattered across the floor, "like little jewels", she remembers.

From that dealer's initial interest in showing similar pieces, a body of large, dramatic landscapes has emerged. Now, she spends the days in her Manhattan studio absorbed in large canvases like the ones pictured above, working on as many as eleven at one time. In the weeks leading up to the opening of her exhibit on April 24th, I'll be posting more from behind the scenes, sharing pieces about her creative process, and recommendations for the upcoming exhibit.

Sillman snapshots

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Orzel) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:05:00 +0000

"Si was my teacher for color and drawing at RISD. Dare say - life-changing experience.""He used to drive up to RISD in his Black Jag convertible, aloof and indiscernible... and fascinating.""Sewell Sillman was absolutely the most important professor I studied with at RISD. He gave me the tools that are the backbone of my color work today.""He was the most demanding, knowledgeable, and at times, the most exasperating instructor I had in my entire art school experiences. I was very happy to be there.""Si was like a second father to me, and he was also my mentor. When I grew up and went into the arts, he guided me. After school, I moved to New York, and he gave me private classes in color theory for quite some time, all in exchange for a case of champagne.""We would come into his class and put our studies up along the board, and hold (sometimes literally!) our breath while he would slowly and very critically look them over. A very demanding teacher with an incredible sensitivity to color.""He made a huge impression on me. I had taken many drawing classes over the years and learned a lot about drawing - but he taught me to see."

Throughout the exhibition Pushing Limits, we've been incredibly lucky to hear from Sewell Sillman's students. The anecdotes that they've shared about their teacher have ranged from colorful and amusing to moving and inspirational. Read on for some of our favorite snippets from former students who are now designers, art professors, and award-winning painters.

Uniquely inspired by Sewell Sillman

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Orzel) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:34:00 +0000

Did you know that the museum has a guest book in the first room of the Krieble Gallery? It's easy to get so absorbed in the art itself that you might miss it... but the next time you're here, it's worth a look! Of course we love reading glowing reviews of our exhibits (like the one below).

We're so fortunate that our lovely visitors also share their impressions from their experiences at the museum, in words or with their own drawings... and the Sewell Sillman show has inspired a larger-than-usual outpouring of thoughts and images!

It's exciting to see how the museum's first full-scale contemporary art exhibit has inspired so many of you!

"Red on Edge": Tell + Show Gallery Discussion

noreply@blogger.com (Amy Orzel) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:38:00 +0000

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The Krieble Gallery was transformed into an experiential learning lab on Sunday, for the first in a series of gallery talks devoted to exploring Sewell Sillman's modernist approaches to the treatment of color, line, and time. In "Red on Edge", Amanda Burdan, the curator for the newly-opened Sewell Sillman exhibition Pushing Limits, gave an engaging lecture on how Sillman's artistic practices drew on the radical ideas behind modernist color theory. Attendees had the opportunity to see firsthand how these techniques influenced the art on display in the gallery, and even got a peek at works that are not a part of the exhibition.

The next interactive gallery discussion, titled "Reflecting on a Line," will be held on Sunday, March 7 at 2 p.m. Expect to discover some surprises hidden within the pages of Sillman's personal sketchbooks, which help tell the story of how he developed his unique drawing style!

Opening for Sewell Sillman: Pushing Limits

noreply@blogger.com (Tammi Flynn) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:44:00 +0000

What a wonderful start to the exhibition! Over 300 people attended the opening of Sewell Sillman: Pushing Limits. The Museum was so fortunate to have Jim McNair and all the people who made the exhibition possible in one place. Read more about the exhibition...