Calm after the storm

Some calm after yesterday's chaos. Breathe and be transported to the calm of the countryside by this watercolor drawn by Baroque artist Sir Peter Paul Rubens, who died yesterday (May 30) in 1640 http://ow.ly/DrGr30qJEzr

Pentecost Prayer and reflections from The Episcopal Church of Saint John the Evangelist

This week's letter from Jeremy:

Breathe.

Many of you will have seen the pictures of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man. As you will remember, that is why Colin Kaepernick and many others kneel.

Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd are the latest names added to the litany we have prayed in church and on street corners over the years. It is important to remember that as we pray, we not only mourn, we cry for justice and we commit ourselves to stand with those who suffer. Close enough to risk being wounded when the ‘stones and arrows fly’.

This week, we also mark another death. Larry Kramer fought with every trick in the book and a few not in the book for another community being ravaged by bias, hate, lack of understanding. When AIDS was being met by the majority of the population turning a blind eye and refusing to hear the cries, Larry broke though that wall – Silence=Death.

At Pentecost, let it be our prayer that we also are freed from fears that keep us quiet, freed from position that keeps us safely distant, freed from the fear of what others might think of us. Freed to weep tears of grief and anger. Freed to shout out that Black, Brown, LGBTQ+ Lives Matter.

Two resources – both from the Jewish tradition:

This article by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg gives some helpful pointers for those wanting to face their own racism:
https://www.facebook.com/RabbiDanyaRuttenberg/posts/2626460240957002?__tn__=K-R

This piece, written a few years ago in the face or earlier police violence (h/t to Fred Harrell of City Church for posting):

In memory of Mike Brown z”l, Eric Garner z”l, and many, many others recited as part of a Pilgrimage of Lament, Berkeley, CA 12/14/14

Menachem Creditor
Inspired by Yehudah Amichai z”l and Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

Dearest God,
We stand before you because we must.
We stand before You because
truths that should be self-evident
are not so evident in our country.

And so we turn to you to breathe
ever more of Your Spirit into us
because we find we cannot breathe,
the arms of armed forces wrapped around our throats
when we call out for justice.

We call to you in defiance of
of a national system that betrays our noble ideals,
where tanks and blood fill our streets,
where every Black man, woman, and child is
twenty times likelier to be killed by police.

We shout to the Heavens with one, unified voice:
Black. Lives. Matter.
We are called by scripture to pray for the day when we will
beat swords into plowshares and study war no more,
when the surplus of war led by greed and deception
will not spill into our streets,
where swords and tanks and rubber bullets and tear gas
will be beaten thinner and thinner,
the iron of hatred vanishing forever. (Amichai)

We pray to you because,
as our prophets have taught us:
human suffering anywhere
concerns men and women everywhere.

We call to you, O God,
because Your Image
was abandoned on rainy concrete for
4 and a half hours.

We call to you, O God,
because Your Spirit
was choked out of a father who
called out 11 times’ “I can’t breathe.”

We raise our hands to you,
knowing that the work is ours to do,
black, white, Jewish, Christian, Muslim,
Hindu, atheist, young, old, gay, straight –
These are your images, battered
By those sworn to protect and serve.
We are all responsible for what happens next.
And so we pray to You,

Source of Life,
raise up our eyes
to see You in each other’s eyes,
to take risks for justice,
to bring through our unified prayer today
more Love and Compassion into the world.
Ignite us to combat the hidden prejudice
which causes police to open fire in fear,
which transforms a child in a hoodie
into a hoodlum, a person into a threat.

We pray today not for calm but for righteousness
to flow like a mighty river, until
peace fills the earth as the waters fill the sea.
Comfort the families of all who grieve.
Strengthen us to work for a world redeemed.
And we say together: Amen.

More Love
Jeremy

(to receive this weekly letter plus lots more information about goings-on at St. John's, and links to online services, please email Fr. Jeremy at jeremy@saint.johnsf.org)

https://saintjohnsf.org/

Giovanna Garzoni, Botanical painter of exquisite still lives

Hedgehog. Oak leaves. Chestnuts. And a snail! From Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670, of course, because it's her day. @69quietgirl

At a time when other women artists of the 16th and 17th centuries, such as Artemisia Gentileschi, are being reappraised, it’s appropriate to pay new attention to Garzoni’s quieter but nonetheless compelling art, which embodies a powerful sense of curiosity about the giddying variety of the natural world and distils it into images of great sophistication and immense charm.

A snail moving right along beside a pile of grapes and pears, by Giovanna Garzoni in 1651

Three pomegranates. Two shells. One stag beetle. Brought together & painted by Giovanna Garzoni

Flowers emerge exuberantly from a dusky vase that reflects the Garzoni's window

Today's artist without a (known) birthday: Giovanna Garzoni, painter of portraits but best known for her still lifes. Here by herself, c. 1660, w/ a portrait -- perhaps of herself in youth?

She was born into an artistic family in Ascoli Piceno in the Marche and worked in a number of cities in the Italian peninsula cities, always attracting distinguished patronage. Visits to Rome enabled her to connect with the antiquarian and collector Cassiano dal Pozzo and the circle around the scientific Accademia dei Lincei, which was founded in 1603 and valued empirical, observational research (it was named after the lynx, a creature renowned for its sharp vision). She was encouraged to dedicate herself to botanical painting and although her reputation chiefly now rests on the still lives created in this context, her output was very varied, including portraits, miniatures, depictions of sacred and mythic themes, calligraphy and copies of Old Masters. From 1625 Garzoni was in Venice and five years later she found employment in Naples, serving at the court of the Spanish Duke of Alcalá. Turning north again, from 1632 to 1637 she worked in Turin, in the employ of the Duke of Savoy.  The style of still-life painting she perfected, working in gouache on vellum, was characterised by brilliant colors; the forms of blooms and fruit were usually built up meticulously with minute dots of paint and it was through such a precise technique that she was able to convey an unerring sensitivity to nuances of texture and form. She must have worked slowly and the fruit and flowers matured under her gaze; leaves wither, figs split open, cherries and peaches are at their most splendid, and strawberries and artichokes have to be eaten soon. Her paintings are carefully composed, often with a strong decorative sensibility, and feature a fascinating combination of native flora and fauna along with exotic additions that allude to the wealth and horticultural skills of her Medici patrons. She never married. Toward the end of her life, she settled in Rome, where she died at the age of 70 (February 1670).

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring and protecting our world.

 Calligraphy by Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord

When I was in high school. my English teacher assigned Silent Spring to our class. In researching this post, I see that the book was published in 1962 so she was way ahead of the curve. I wasn’t. I am sorry to say that my focus was elsewhere and I couldn’t get into the book. Probably got a poor grade on the book report. Much of the country got a poor grade as well as her research and recommendations were controversial and ignored for years. 

“Since the 1962 publication of Silent Spring - in which Carson described the effects of pesticides on plants, animals, and humans - she has been both valorized and villanized. Scientists, politicians, policy makers, garden clubs, and the media have alternately taken swats at her science, her gender, and her questioning of the "irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world.” (KQED) 

Rachel Carson, in full Rachel Louise Carson, (born May 27, 1907, Springdale, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died April 14, 1964, Silver Spring, Maryland), American biologist well known for her writings on environmental pollution and the natural history of the sea.

Carson early developed a deep interest in the natural world. She entered Pennsylvania College for Women with the intention of becoming a writer but soon changed her major field of study from English to biology. After taking a bachelor’s degree in 1929, she did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University (M.A., 1932) and in 1931 joined the faculty of the University of Maryland, where she taught for five years. From 1929 to 1936 she also taught in the Johns Hopkins summer school and pursued postgraduate studies at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

In 1936 Carson took a position as aquatic biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (from 1940 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), where she remained until 1952, the last three years as editor in chief of the service’s publications.

She wrote three best sellers dealing with the natural world before the publication of Silent Spring (1962).  That prophetic book was first serialized in The New Yorker and then became a best seller, creating worldwide awareness of the dangers of environmental pollution. The outlook of the environmental movement of the 1960s and early ’70s was generally pessimistic, reflecting a pervasive sense of "civilization malaise" and a conviction that Earth’s long-term prospects were bleak. Silent Spring suggested that the planetary ecosystem was reaching the limits of what it could sustain. Carson stood behind her warnings of the consequences of indiscriminate pesticide use despite the threat of lawsuits from the chemical industry and accusations that she engaged in “emotionalism” and “gross distortion.” Some critics even claimed that she was a communist. Carson died before she could see any substantive results from her work on this issue, but she left behind some of the most influential environmental writing ever published.

Although she and her writings were under attack by both individuals and companies, Silent Spring " spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She received many honors, among them, the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.” (Wikipedia). 

For a while, those who wished to protect the environment were helping to win the battle against pollution, pesticides and the destruction they created ,  Must of that progress has now been stopped. 

The Regan administration began to eliminate environmental protection regulations. The destruction of environmental protections has been continued by current administration which has eliminated 100 regulations inspired by Carson’s work. If this continues, we will be able to see first hand the value of books like Silent Spring and the environmental movement as the environment will be degraded, possibly creating an earth which is not sustainable for human life.

   https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/02/15-ways-trump-administration-impacted-environment/

http://rachelcarson.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

https://web.archive.org/web/20120808015112/http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/cars-rac.htm

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nature/disrupt/sspring.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring

Online Books:  https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Carson%2c%20Rachel%2c%201907%2d1964

Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord, Calligrapher:     http://blog.susangaylord.com/

Mary Cassatt

Born on this day in 1844, in Pennsylvania, Mary Cassatt of (mostly) Paris. Self Portrait, 1880,

Here is Mary Cassatt speaking about her own painting: “To us the sweetness of childhood, the charm of womanhood. If I have not conveyed some sense of that charm — in a word if I have not been absolutely feminine — then I have failed.” Mary Cassatt is often celebrated today as a “feminist painter”. But her own conception of her painting as “absolutely feminine” sits oddly with today’s conception of feminism, which does not emphasize “the charm of womanhood”, still less “the sweetness of childhood” (and by implication, the sweetness of a life spent looking after small children) as essential elements of feminist doctrine. But Cassatt saw no tension at all between painting pictures of mothers and babies, as she did almost exclusively in the latter part of her career, and being a committed feminist. To her, feminism was of course a matter of women getting the vote, of having equal educational opportunities to men, and of women not facing formal bars to advancing their careers (such as having to quit when they married). But it also required recognition of the equal value of what Cassatt, in common with just about all of her contemporaries, thought was the essentially feminine task of child-raising. Her commitment to the idea that women were of equal value to men was enough to get her denounced by one American critic as “an advanced woman . . . of the kind that wears mannish clothes, talks loudly and with easy disdain for the male sex; in her art, she is masculine and almost bizarre”

Unlike Alcott, whom Chadwick has paired her with in her discussion of 19^th century American women, Cassatt avoided the conflicts facing the woman artist by her wealth, class position, her strong personality and her refusal to marry. Other women were caught within an ideology of sexual difference which gave privileges to males and often forced women to choose between marriage and a career.

Today, Cassatt is recognized, not only for her major contributions in the history of painting and print-making, but also for her considerable influence in shaping American taste. She advised several of her friends who were interested in collecting art, including the Havemeyers. The Havemeyer collection, which includes many paintings by Cassatt and Degas, was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a cornerstone of that museum's first-rate collection of French Impressionist art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cassatt

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Cassatt

Domenico Beccafumi, Italian Mannerist Painter

The eyes have it. Saint Lucy, painted in 1521 

Expulsion of the rebel angels from heaven, 1528.

Very muscular reclining Venus in a landscape, 1518. Somehow I'm thinking this is not from life

Anatomically unlikely male nude

Disembowelment of St. Ignatius of Antioch. Yes, those are his guts being pulled from his body. Glories of early Christian torture as imagined by Mannerist painter Domenico Beccafumi, 1526.

Again with the stigmata. Here, Saint Francis, the only male saint to be so distinguished. By Domenico Beccafumi

Demon missing a few teeth, welcoming the rebel angels into hell. Beccafumi, showing he can do horrendous and grotesque as well as the next painter.

Domenico Beccafumi, also called Domenico di Pace, (born c. 1486, Montaperti, Siena, Republic of Siena—died May 1551, Siena), Italian painter and sculptor, a leader in the post-Renaissance style known as Mannerism.

Wikipedia:  There are medieval eccentricities, sometimes phantasmagoric, superfluous emotional detail and a misty non-linear, often jagged quality to his drawings, with primal tonality to his coloration that separates him from the classic Roman masters.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Domenico-Beccafumi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_di_Pace_Beccafumi

Joy Harjo, Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Hendrick de Keyser. Stonemason and sculptor of the city of Amsterdam

Amsterdam's Westerkerk, 1620s, a beautiful building designed by Hendrick de Keyser. He was born on this day in 1565

The Bartolotti House curves to embrace a bend in the Herengracht: one of the wonders of Amsterdam, designed in 1617

The East Indies House, another fab characteristic design

The Huis met de Hoofden, 1622. Yes, it has heads. What's not to love ?

Hendrick de Keyser, (born May 15, 1565, Utrecht, Spanish Habsburg domain [now in the Netherlands]—died May 15, 1621, Amsterdam, Neth.), most important Dutch sculptor of his day and an architect whose works formed a transition between the ornamental style of the Dutch Renaissance and the Classicism of the 17th century.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hendrick-de-Keyser

https://www.archimon.nl/architects/hdekeyser.html

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/keyser_i_hendrick_de.html

Georges Braque, key figure in the development of Cubism.

Georges Braque, 1908, Baigneuse (Le Grand Nu, Large Nude), oil on canvas, 140 × 100 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Born on May 13, 1882 in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France, Georges Braque was a major painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor of the 20th century. Along with Pablo Picasso, Braque was a key figure in the development of Cubism. He was also responsible for the introduction of many collage techniques including stenciling and combed false wood-grain effects.

Braque grew up in Le Havre and, following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, trained to be a house painter and decorator. In the evenings, he studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1897-1899. He studied in Paris under a master decorator and received his craftsman certificate in 1901. He studied painting at the Académie Humbert in Paris from 1902-04.

L'Olivier près de l'Estaque (The Olive tree near l'Estaque). At least four versions of this scene were painted by Braque, one of which was stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in May, 2010

Braque’s first works were Impressionist, but by 1906 he was painting in a Fauvist style, successfully exhibiting that year in the Salon des Indépendants. Braque met Pablo Picasso in 1907. Both artists were influenced by Paul Cézanne’s use of geometry in depicting his subjects in his work. Cézanne’s paintings greatly impacted the direction of the Paris avant-garde, and soon after, Cubism.

Starting about 1911, Braque began experimenting with other media and techniques, as well as new canvas shapes. He began mixing paint with sand using a house-painter’s comb to introduce areas of imitation wood-grain into his paintings. In 1912, Braque married Marcelle Lapre and rented a house at Sorgues, near Avignon. There, he and Picasso began using pre-existing objects and materials in their paintings.

Braque and Picasso’s artistic collaboration lasted until 1914 when Braque served in the French Army during World War I. He was wounded in the war and temporarily blinded in 1915, but resumed painting in 1916. During his recovery in 1917, Braque began a close friendship with the Spanish artist Juan Gris who was also closely associated with the Cubist movement.

The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain.

— Georges Braque

In the 1920s, Braque returned to a more “realistic interpretation of nature, although certain aspects of Cubism always remained present in his work.” He painted landscapes and reintroduced the figure into his work which was characterized by bold colour and textured surfaces. In the mid-1920s Braque also designed the decor for two Sergei Diaghilev ballets.

In 1931 Braque made his first engraved plasters and began to portray mythological subjects. His first retrospective was held in 1933 at the Kunsthalle Basel. In 1937,  he won first prize at the Carnegie International, in Pittsburgh.

Studio with Black Vase, 1938 

The mantelpiece 1925

The Round Table 1929

From about 1936, Braque’s paintings shifted again from the still-life to wider interior views. “Into ornately decorated rooms he introduced impersonal, flattened figures, such as in Woman with Mandolin or The Duet. 

Woman with a Mandolin. 1937

The new mood suggested by his use of brighter colours was offset, however, by a series of macabre vanitas still-lifes, linked to the theme of the artist’s studio, that he began in 1938, possibly in despair at the approach of World War II. He also built a sculpture studio near his house at Varengeville and began experimenting with sculpture about this time, producing simple and playful, if rather two-dimensional works.

During World War II Braque remained in Paris. He painted mainly still lifes and interiors that were stark and sombre in colour. During this time, Braque also made lithographs, engravings, and sculptures.

In 1954, Braque designed stained-glass windows for the church of Varengeville. During the last few years of his life, Braque’s poor health prevented him taking on any large-scale work, but he continued to paint, make lithographs, and design jewelry.

Resurrection of the bird, 1959 

Georges Braque died on August 31, 1963, in Paris. He is buried in the church cemetery in Saint-Marguerite-sur-Mer, Normandy, France.

http://www.georgesbraque.org/