Herb Garden Makes Gift Giving EasyIf you need a gift in a hurry, even just to bring to a party, here's an idea if you grew some herbs this year.
Gardening Gift CertificatesYou can always give a gardening 'gift certificate' for the holidays, with a promise to help a neighbor dig or plant in the spring.
Picture Perfect Gifts From Your GardenGot ink in your printer? Then you can make quick gifts from your garden photos of your riotous roses, gorgeous geraniums or serene succulents.
Give The Gift Of HerbsYou can make a lot of great holiday gifts from dried herbs you grew this year.
On December 15th ULI Philadelphia hosted the culminating presentation of the Grays Ferry Healthy Corridor Study at the Pennovation Center. The project brought together a panel of national experts, who, after completing an intensive three-day research and stakeholder interview process, presented their recommendations for including health within future planning processes for the Grays Ferry corridor (from Washington Avenue to Woodland Avenue and including the Grays Ferry Bridge). The panel’s final recommendations responded to overarching goals of the Grays Ferry Healthy Corridor project developed by a team of local stakeholders over … Read More
Urban Visionary Sponsor Spotlight: Brandywine Realty Trust In 2002, Brandywine Realty Trust set out to build the first new office tower in Philadelphia in more than a decade. Located in University City, the site was across the Schuylkill River from Center City’s long-established business district, in a part of town that people often passed, but rarely visited unless they were part of The University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, or the world-class Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The area didn’t have a corporate presence or a real identity – outside of … Read More
2018 ULI Urban Open Space Award The ULI Global Organization’s Urban Open Space Award will recognize open spaces—including parks, plazas, squares, parks, memorials, linear parks and trails, or other non-traditional park and open space formats—that have been instrumental in promoting healthy, sustainable, and equitable outcomes in communities. ULI will honor outstanding parks and open spaces in conjunction with the 10-Minute Walk Campaign, which is promoting the idea that everyone in urban America should live within a ten-minute walk to a high quality park. For more information and to apply click … Read More
Did you know that all ULI members have access to an online directory that can connect them with any ULI member around the world? Find it at ULI.org, direct link here. Problems logging in? Contact customer service at customerservice@uli.org or 1-800-321-5011.
On day 2 of the printmaking class (Tuesday), I led the participants through different ways of doing colour monoprints, using the subtractive method, the additive method, and combinations of the two. In the afternoon, they started combining monoprints with drypoints cut into aluminum flashing tiles or sheets of duralar. Some of the great results can be seen in the following short slideshow:
Patty and I went for a drink at a local roadhouse after the first class. I had a Blue Lagoon, which was vodka, blue curacao, schnapps, and seven up. Here in Michigan that means it comes in a pint glass. And they also gave me a toy seahorse, which I am holding proudly in the above picture.
Yesterday was the first printmaking class at Interlochen. There are four adult students, and it is the inaugural class in the Mallory-Towsley building, a purpose-built facility for the Interlochen College of Creative Arts. It's quite incredible, the facilities they have here: light, airy classrooms, overhead projectors where you can just plug in your laptop to a wall socket and off you go. We did contact monoprints in the first class, both black and white and multi-colour. The print displayed above is a black and white contact monoprint by some student whose name I think is Patty McNair or something. A contact monoprint is so-called because you roll a think layer of ink on a clear sheet of acetate, place paper over the inked plate, and start drawing. When you lift the paper up, you see that the ink has transferred wherever the paper came into contact with the layer of ink.
Along the road that runs beside the Interlochen campus, banners hang from posts placed about 100 metres apart, each one bearing the slogan ‘Art Lives Here.’ Every time we pass them, Patty says: ‘Who’s Art? And where does he live?’ Of course, it doesn’t really refer to someone called Arthur – unless that person were Arturo Toscanini, perhaps. Because even though Interlochen has a great creative writing program and fine art program, and stunning purpose-made buildings to match, music is still King here.
As I go out for my morning walk (briskly, 3 pound weight in each hand, Olympic-style weird-wiggle-walk, approximately 4-5 mph) I see the high-school kids emerging from the cabins in the woods and sloping off to their summer camp music programs. When I pass some of the campus buildings, I can hear even at 8 am the sound of a young pianist practising two-handed scales at lightning speed, someone in the percussion building banging a glockenspiel, a clear soprano voice singing a heart-stoppi…
This week's Meditation is on a recent survey of the work of Kara Walker, an African-American artist who mainly makes gigantic murals from cut silhouettes.
When you meet Tom Robinson (www.tomrobinsonartist.com), it's like encountering a natural force in its untamed state. There's a warmth and friendliness coupled with a barely-contained energy, which is evident in the many activities that he has been involved with in Chicago, and nationally, for more than 30 years. He is an artist and sculptor who has designed furniture, created many public art projects, and was instrumental in setting up the Chicago Art Open, an annual showcase for the work of Chicago's vibrant and eclectic art scene. I met Tom in his huge new studio and gallery space on the opening night of the show 'Drawing Attention'.
Philip: You work in a variety of media. Do you see common threads or themes when you move between drawing, painting, sculpture, and constructions?
Tom: I work in series and am very procedural, so each piece of work starts independently of the other. I would like to believe each medium eventually peaks into one thing.
So yesterday was the final meeting of the Interlochen Journal and Sketchbook class. We gave them a lot of time to draw and write:
Patty and I gave a craft presentation during which we got all the people attending the conference to try some drawing and quick writing. Then we had put up pictures on the walls of the room where we held our class, and laid out our participants' journal/sketchbooks in an impromptu exhibition for all conference attendees to look at and envy:
Four days is a short length of time, but it certainly produces intensity; and if it isn't enough time to finish a piece of writing, we at least got all of our students started on some truly interesting pieces of memoir and fiction. This Writers' Retreat is growing year by year, and I would recommend that you come along next time if you were thinking about it this year.
Yesterday during the Journal+Sketchbook class, we got the participants to do blind contour drawings of stuff we set up for them in the Great Room. Things such as grapes, crumpled up paper bags, bottles:
And once again, after some initial bewilderment about what they were asked to do (''What! Draw without looking at the page? Draw without lifting the pen from the paper?'), they all produced highly expressive and interesting drawings, as you will see in the following slideshow:
After they draw for half an hour, Patty leads them into a writing exercise. I always show the drawings from these classes, even though this is really aimed at writers - but writers quite rightly don't want their first rough drafts reproduced on someone's blog. So you'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you that the act of moving from drawing and back to the writing often produces new directions in things they're already writing, or starts for completely new material. I gues…
Tuesday afternoon was the annual Writers' Retreat Hike and Write. Program co-ordinator Anne-Marie organises a trip to the Sleeping Bear Dunes shoreline, which overlooks the vastness of Lake Michigan. The idea is that people hike through a forest and up a hill, emerging at the top of the dune. After a short walk along the crest of the dune (which rises to about 200 feet at points), people get the time to sit looking out at the lake in the sunshine, and either write in their journals, continue writing they've already started, or do some drawing:
It was a scorching mid-summer day, which wasn't so great for my pale Anglo-Irish skin. But it was worth frying in the open air for the chance to look out at the lake from my perch up on the sand dune.
On the way back we all visited a local chocolatier called Mimi Wheeler, who makes hand made chocolates from cocoa pods she imports from South America. The choccies are filled with wild ingredients like beetroot, hot chilli peppers, and …
I'm at the Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan for the next two weeks. Patty and I have just done our first day teaching the Journal and Sketchbook class to a group of five adults, and it went really well. There are 40 people here for the week. Some are taking our workshop, others are taking workshops in Fiction, Poetry, and Memoir. On Monday afternoon Patty read from some of her published fiction and I gave a video-assisted presentation on my work to the whole group. It took place in the beautiful Writers' Building, which has these enormous pillars made from small rocks:
It's also supported by these gigantic columns made from tree trunks, about five feet in circumference and maybe 25 feet high:
In the evening Anne-Marie Oomen, who runs this writer's retreat, gave a reading from her own memoir:
Even after the first half day, there was a vibrant feeling of shared creativity in the air. All of the people attending have used precious holiday time and paid good m…
This week's Meditation is on a piece of clay sculpture by an Aztec artist from c. 1450, and the relation between so-called primitive art and the Western tradition.
"But what is your final goal, you may ask. That goal will become clearer, will emerge slowly but surely, much as the draft turns into the sketch and the sketch into the painting through the serious work done on it, through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of the first fleeting and passing thought."
When I was in Chattanooga last weekend, I visited a number of artists' studios on the south side, an area that has been transformed in recent years by the arrival of painters, sculptors, glass artists, furniture makers, and other creative people. The two artists who impressed me the most were painter Janet Chenoweth and sculptor Roger Halligan, who have a building near Main Street that combines a large workshop and studio area at the back with a beautiful gallery area at the front. They were kind enough to agree to a joint interview, and I began by asking them to talk about their work.
Philip: Jan, your work has an interesting balance between 2-D elements such as texture, colour, and drawing, and 3-D elements such as jars, found objects, …
Ten years. That's the entire span of Vincent Van Gogh's life as an artist. I've been dipping into a selection of his letters again, and I had forgotten the following sobering facts: in the Spring of 1880, he decided he wanted to become an artist; by July 1890, he was dead.
The selection of his letters is illustrated with lots of his drawings and sketches. His earliest efforts were really not that good. The best you can say about them is that they are direct and earnest. But his progress in drawing mirrors his phenomenal progress in painting. In ten short years, he went from drawing like this:
Only ten years. Just think what you were doing ten years ago. Feel how it seems so close by, so recent. A lot can happen in a decade, of course, but it's still not that long a piece of a human life. Yet Van Gogh accomplished so much during that short career.
“Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.”—Michelangelo.
This is my first full blog entry after my trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee. I was there to take photos for a travel article that Patty was researching. We were hosted by a superb PR company called Geiger & Associates, who organise press trips to places such as Chattanooga in order to introduce journalists to as much of a particular town as possible in three or four days. For example, on our first full day there, our itinerary was: visit to the Moon Pie factory (a hallowed biscuit/cookie maker); a tour of the aquarium (otters! penguins! more fish than one person could ever eat!); a boat trip up the Tennessee River gorge; a tour of the Delta Queen riverboat; a stroll around the artisans and artists area of Bluff View; dinner; then a walk deep underground in the caves below Lookout Mountain.
I also took the opportunity a few days later to visit Chattanooga's Main Street Arts District, and later I will post…
In the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at the QEII library, Thursday from 7:30-9pm, with my colleague and New Ontologies book series co-editor Sean McGrath:
The Centre for Newfoundland Studies (7:30-9:00 pm) will celebrate The Legend of Job, a collaboration between artists Gerry Squires and Boyd Warren Chubbs. The speakers will be Professor Sean McGrath (Philosophy), Esther Squires, and Boyd Warren Chubbs. Dr. McGrath will talk about the philosophical context of the work. Esther Squires will read the foreword (written by her father) and talk about some of the images from The Legend of Job. Boyd Warren Chubbs will speak about the evolution of the project especially in terms of the manuscript design. The Legend of Job, illustrated by Gerry Squires and lettered by Boyd Chubbs, is an iteration of the Book of Job that takes many of its design elements from the medieval manuscript tradition. The event will be hosted by Patrick Warner, Special Collections Librarian for the Queen Elizabeth II Library.
This looks quite of interest. Alas, I’ll miss it since I’ll be at SPEP, but anyone in the area should come to check it out.