In Pinterest this morning, Scott Hilburn’s Argyle Sweater comic strip of 9/25/20:
(#1) This from the creator of the Puns of Steel collections
#1 is a still from a sad tale of chickpeas smashed to death in a cheap Baltimore apartment, an episode of the tv drama Hummuscide: Life on the Street; meanwhile, death strikes down a rich legume in the novel The Great Garbanzo, in which the title character is murdered by a distraught husband. The grand fictions of Cicer arietinum.
Coming past me on Pinterest yesterday morning, some really impressive portrait paintings with abstractionist interventions, along the lines of the one below, the left panel of two:
(#1) Andrew Salgado, The Painter’s Apprentice (2014)
Unlike many of the artists I’ve posted about on this blog, AS and his personal and artistic histories are widely available to the public; there’s a Wikipedia page, tons of stuff on his website, and plenty of open (in fact blunt and unapologetically opinionated) interviews that are both informative and thought-provoking. You don’t have to wonder about his childhood — he talks about growing up in Regina, Saskatchewan with enormous affection — or how his personal life, as, as he puts it, a “young gay white guy” with a longtime male partner, living a new life in working-class London, and so on, plays out in his work — he’s happy to reflect on all the stages he’s been through in ten years, and on being an artist as a business, an enterprise that requires planning and salesmanship.
So: not only are masculinity, sexuality, and social identity recurrent themes in his art, they’re also prominent aspects of his presentation of self: as a guy guy, offhandedly but also defiantly queer (like, don’t fuck with me, dude, or you’ll be sorry), and simultaneously working-class, practically minded, playfully imaginative, and genuinely erudite.
AS came to me as paintings I’d never seen before but was bowled over by, paintings with no context at all. I’ve already given you a lot of context, so I’ll jump right in with more paintings, recent ones (in many ways unlike the early painting in #1, and strikingly unlike this year’s work so far, mixed-media depictions of flowers — floral atlases crossed with Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Mapplethorpe). Then to biography and art criticism.
It’s April 20th, and the plants on my patio are into late spring mode: the last course of cymbidiums opening up their flower buds as the earlier courses come to an end (these will come to their own end in six weeks or so); meanwhile, my bigleaf hydrangea has shot up into a mass of dark green leaves, with shoots now filled with buds that will open up into bright pink umbels in a week or so. All this an occasion for taking my new little camera out of doors. So I have a couple of photos for you.
No, I’m not roaming inter-war Berlin like Christopher Isherwood, passive, recording; I am not a figurative camera. But I now wield a camera, an alarmingly small digital camera that does so many things it’s hard to figure out how to just, as they say, point and shoot, and then download the pictures to my computer so I can show them to you. It’s taken me several days, but I have managed two photos on subjects of interest. A bright red amaryllis blooming on my worktable (one of five waxed amaryllis bulbs I got in a post-Valentine’s Day sale at Holland Bulbs of Holland MI). And five tiny (just over an inch long) brass castings of motos-couples getting it on in an assortment of positions (tiny, but with fingers and simple facial expressions) — entertaining artwork, shown here watched over by a fabulous portrait sketch by John Singer Sargent (which has its own sexy story). (But definitely sexy, so I suppose that #2 is off limits for kids and the sexually modest.)
Here are the shots, and then very brief commentary.
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:
(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”
Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.
(Part of this posting will dive right into gay porn for the day, with street-talk musings on man-on-man sex that’s totally off-limits for kids and the sexually modest; I’ll hold this part off until the end, so if you need to you can bail out then)
☘️ ☘️ ☘️ It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and in my e-mail: two Bob Eckstein cartoons for the day (on turning and wearing green for the day); and a Falcon Studios sale on gay porn, made holiday-appropriate by the mere addition of a shamrock, but which opens the topic of gay porn with actual St. Patrick’s day themes.
Valentine’s Day comes with complex emotions for me. On the one hand, it’s my daughter’s birthday, so it’s filled with warm feelings, stretching back to the Boston Lying-In Hospital many years ago. On the other hand, it’s a celebration of romantic love, which has been sadly absent from my life since the last century; what’s endured instead are loving friendships, something different but marvelous in their own way — though, because of the complexities of my life, they’re maintained almost entirely electronically, while I get through my days in solitude, with only my plants for company.
Indoors, a big spathyphyllum (all glossy leaves and white arum flowers) and two waxed amaryllis bulbs (a recent present from a friend), one with white flowers, one with bicolor flowers (white striped with red), now coming to an end of their flowering. Outdoors, a winter riot of cymbidium orchids in many colors: the first one, bright yellow, anomalously came into bloom in November, thanks to some freakish fall weather; the others — pretty much covering the spectrum from (brownish) red through peach, orange, and yellow to (yellowish) white — began to flower, as normal, in January and are still coming into bloom, which will last until the hot dry weather of June.
And then, Holland Bulb Farms (in Michigan) sent me a sale notice: Valentine’s Day was over, and they still had a stock of their My Valentine waxed amaryllis collections (3 red cultivars: Hugs and Kisses, Be My Valentine, and Love Struck Picasso), so they were clearing them out at roughly 1/3 off (they’re living plants, and you can store them for a while, but it’s a long time till the next Valentine’s Day). Waxed amaryllis bulbs are little miracles of botanical technology, so they aren’t cheap, even at 1/3 off, but I so loved having the gorgeous flowers on my worktable to keep me company that I stretched my budget to give myself a Valentine’s Day present. (New frontiers in self-love, I guess.) Yes, it’s frivolous and extravagant.
The bulbs arrived yesterday. They’re now in a spot in my kitchen that’s warm and gets strong indirect sunlight, so that they can begin springing into life there (and then move to my worktable, where the light is weaker). Something I hadn’t expected is that their wax coatings are not just golden (like my previous two bulbs) but are fancifully colored, with a different pattern for each cultivar. Delightful.
Or, for that matter, the eccentrically spelled elecamphane. This in reaction to a third plate from the 19th-century American Flora compendium that I’ve been posting about recently (“My wild valentine” posting here; “Daffodil poem” posting here). Which calls the plant elecamphane, but the name is elecampane, and everyone knows this plant as sneezeweed. The plate:
(#1) The usual spelling is elecampane; a net search turns up the ph spelling only on this American Flora plate — but in any case the flower is pretty clearly not elecampane (Inula helenium), but is instead a garden variety of the closely related common sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale), which is (to my eye anyway) considerably prettier than elecampane
I slept from 7:30 to 4:15 last night, with some of the most distressing grotesque dreams I’ve ever had in my life, awakening frequently with terrible muscle cramps. Eventually I turned the dream around to something life-affirming and pleasant, but I awoke dead-exhausted from the night, confused and bewildered, and with screamingly sore muscles all over my body (for the record: I have had no fever or other clinical signs of infection, and I test negative for COVID).
Not really able to face the day, I retreated to botanical art from the 19th century, as presented to me recently by the Sierra Club, in a set of five greeting cards with flower illustrations from The American Flora of 1840-1855; see yesterday’s posting “My wild valentine”, about the plate of the wildflower Potentilla atrosanguinea. Another plate from the Sierra Club set — this time for a garden flower, a daffodil — caught my eye and moved me to toss off a little poem leading up to the label on the American Flora plate:
(#1) A poem to the intriguingly named three-anthered rush daffodil
(Yes, a day late, but I’m barely functioning, so this is the best I can do.)
A fortuitous find. In my USPS mail, from the Sierra Club, a set of five 19th-century wildflower drawings on greeting cards: a free gift serving as leverage to get me to support their organization. Among the drawings, this intensely red Potentilla atrsosanguinea, with its very rose-like 5-petaled blossoms: a wild Valentine’s flower.
(#1) Blood-colored cinquefoil, Potentilla atrosanguinea, from The American Flora vol. III (1855)
Now: about the plant, and then about The American Flora.
