All About Art

A friend of mine paints barns. That is, she makes paintings of the same barn over and over, in all seasons and at all times of day. The angle of her view may shift or the size of her canvas, the palette, or the medium, but the barn remains, a presence in the landscape. In fact, it feels inseparable from the earth, as if she was a painting a mountain or a great tree. Brenda Cirioni’s barns are rooted and alive.

But the real barn, the barn that she connects with through her painting, no longer exists:

When I was sixteen years old my family home burned to the ground. Memories of that experience – both visual and visceral – surfaced in 2012 and found expression in Barn Series.

It was years after the event that Brenda realized that she had never truly mourned that frightening loss. Painting is a way to heal our wounds, even the hidden, unarticulated ones.

The first Barn Series Painting, 2011, Brenda Cirioni Photo:BC

As artists, we are fortunate when we find a subject that captivates us. Like many people, I have an attraction to the natural world, to old objects and worn tools. Growing up with an anthropologist mother and traveling with her to Mexico and Guatemala, as well as to India and Papua New Guinea, I learned to respect material culture and appreciate how it reveals information about people and their worlds. I have a natural affinity for old objects and textiles because they connect me to my childhood and early adolescence. I use them in sculpture, often combining them with small figures. I play.

I think of art as a form of play that connects our inner and outer worlds. Children play naturally. Children like to arrange things, to build towers, to line up stones on a beach, or arrange a series of stuffed animals on a shelf. Artists, when painting a landscape or making a sculpture, also arrange objects. Brush strokes form buildings or trees, people or abstract shapes. If I want to paint grasses that are dark green at the bottom and become pale above, I stroke the canvas with color in a particular pattern and with an intensity and intentionality to recreate the density of green below and the lighter colored, thinner reeds above. It’s the way I imagine Brenda paints a barn, filling her brush with color and forming the angles, the light, the textures — all with intuitively complex decision making that no one else can replicate. It’s authentic playing — the playing of an experienced artist.

When we are self-conscious and trying too hard at this art making, it feels all wrong. It’s only when we find the sweet spot that has similarities to child’s play that discoveries happen. I have a friend who has recently become obsessed with mosaics. She has a tree stump on which she hammers stones to break them down into small mosaic pieces. She then fits them in patterns, setting the stone shards in cement. She loves this work — and can’t find enough time to spend at her mosaic table. She is tapping into her true self. As she breaks these rocks from the earth into small pieces and arranges them in a specific way with colors and shapes, I feel like she is breaking down difficult places in the world and creating peace — like she is breaking down the hard places inside of herself and turning them into art.

Untilted, Shea Ikusei Settimi

Children play with stones, soil, sand, containers, the contents of the kitchen utensil drawer, anything that they can pick up. When we become an artist, we reconnect with that innocent and serious play. Many of the sculptors exhibiting this year at the farm’s annual sculpture exhibit play seriously in this way. Barbara Andrus strung curly willow twigs across the pond. Is this so different than lining up teddy bears? Of course it is – and there is much more work involved and commitment to her vision, but the essence is still there.

We’re fortunate when we find a medium that appeals to us and that we can work and develop. Alicia Dwyer’s Dyads are eyes that peer out from among the forest trees. They seem to be staring at us as we walk along the path; we have the uncomfortable feeling of being followed. Painted on aluminum flashing, the Dyads were made eight years ago, her first time working with aluminum. She has continued with this medium, creating armor women, and this year, a new piece in which beautiful butterflies suspended in captivity remind us of the refugee problems in many parts of the world.

My daughter, Ariel Matisse, has found that wire is her chosen medium of expression. For the sculpture exhibit, she’s making a willow tree growing out of a hollow tree stump. The willow trunk is a twisting shape made from a fistful of long wires, where one end forms the branches and the other the roots. She uses a ball peen hammer to flatten and make the branches reflect light. She grew up watching me drag tree trunks home from the woods or from a trip to Cape Cod. I can easily see my influence on my daughter and also how her own truth leads her in a new direction.

On Samantha Pasapane’s website she writes, “I love steel.” Samantha will be bringing a new sculpture in her Savaging Series to the farm.

Savaging, Smantha Pasapane

Lydia Musco has already installed her sculpture, Organizing Echoes with Ash, on the concrete pier in the middle of the lower pond. The title of her sculpture suggests ‘creating order.’ Lydia’s column is made of ceramic tiles that she combines and stacks. Her sculpture, though abstract, entices the viewer to linger with its physicality. I see a figure or even two figures together, and then when I look again, it seems to be echoing the play of light on the rippling water. 

Organizing Echoes with Ash, Lydia Musco, installed at Old Frog Pond Farm, 2017 Photo:LH

Art making connects us to something original inside us, to a truth about who we are and how we relate to our world as human beings from our very origin. Brenda Cirioni’s most recent paintings are what she calls Spirit Houses.

Spirit House I, 2016, Brenda Cirioni Photo:BC

They seem a natural progression from the Barn Series. In these paintings, the landscape with identifiable trees and grasses is gone, but the body of the barn remains without the old story. In the painting above, the white shape is floating as if on a sea. It’s haunting and surreal, yet familiar, a space we have all inhabited — one where we just don’t know. That’s when there’s nothing left to do but find a medium that resonates — words, paint, wire, clay, even fruits and vegetables — and get down to some serious play.

Old Frog Pond Farm's outdoor sculpture exhibit opens on Friday, September 8 and will be open every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through Columbus Day. Hours are 11-5pm and admission is $7. Join us for an opening reception and meet the artists on Sunday, September 10 from 1-4pm. In the next few weeks I will be writing about more of the artists and fall activities. Join us at the farm!

My First Visit to the Farm

Fruit is ripening, farmers are planting, weeding and harvesting, and outdoor sculpture is being installed, but it wasn’t always this way. Sixteen years ago, I read the real estate listing for the property — five bedrooms, a detached garage/barn, apple orchard, and a chicken coop. I was a sculptor, not a farmer, and definitely not an orchardist, but the rentals I looked at were either too small or had no art studio space. That’s when my friend, Elizabeth, suggested I visit the farm; she had grown up here, and her parents had sold the property to its current owners.

It was mid-March, mud season in New England, when I turned off the highway, drove several miles, and rounded a bend on a narrow country road. I saw sad fences and a gray pond. The farmhouse needed paint and the outbuildings begged for repair. Winter’s old snow and patches of bare ground met my eye; nothing green hinted towards Persephone’s eventual rise from Hades.

I shook hands with the realtor and we entered the front door. A brick fireplace filled the living room where a few pieces of furniture had been placed. It didn’t feel like home, for every personal knickknack had been cleared away. I followed the realtor down three steps into the kitchen. Dark pine boards covered the walls and ceiling. There were no drawers or cabinets, only open shelves for plates, bowls, and glasses. Along one wall, heavy pots for making jam and stocks stood like sentinels guarding alien territory. Above a wood-burning cook stove hung a patchwork of blackened iron pans. This was a work kitchen.

We walked up the stairs and I peered into the small bedrooms with sloping walls and chimneys flues. Enough room for my three children. Simple and practical, the house was over 250 years old, and it had never been fixed up to be someone’s modern suburban dream. We entered the master bedroom, and for some reason I thought, If the house has hot water, everything will be fine. I turned on the hot water faucet in an avocado-colored sink, a popular sixties color, and warmth ran over my fingertips.

We walked outside again: I was drawn towards the pond. An American elm towered high above a small waterfall. Her thin hanging branches swayed in the breeze, and reflections rippled over the surface of the water. When so many elms had died all over America from Dutch Elm disease, this one was clearly thriving.

The Elm, May, 2002

“Can I see the chicken coop?”

Inside the ramshackle white clapboard shed, I teased away thick curtains of cobwebs. Every surface was covered with slimy white-green chicken shit in varying stages of drying. Some forty old hens squawked, panicked by my presence. I had never been near a chicken, and was as much disgusted as fascinated by their gnarly feet, overgrown toenails, and featherless backs — the feathers, I later learned, were worn away by the roosters’ endless mounting.

“What’s going to happen to all these birds?” I asked.
“Why? Would you want them?”
Why not, I thought to myself, not knowing anything about chickens.
 “Sure,” I said.
 “I’ll ask the owners for you,” the realtor responded.

The other side of the chicken coop housed a Kubota tractor. It came with the property. This orange machine was huge and I looked away. Alongside the shed, a rickety fence marked the wintered-over remains of a sizable kitchen garden. I loved tending a small garden and growing a few vegetables, but this was a garden that would feed a family all winter. Then, crossing the driveway, we walked into a brown, two-story unheated garage. Inside this empty space I could make a new studio. It would hold all the rusty metal, old tools, and machines I use to make sculpture.

The listing had mentioned an old orchard. “Where are the apples?” I asked. He casually gestured across the street. The road was lined with old apple trees. We walked across the street and followed an old cart road that bordered the orchard. I peered through rows of bare branches.

“What would you do with the apples?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I heard myself say. “I’d have to learn,”
“It’s hard to grow apples,” he cautioned.

I could feel a small delight rise. Pears, cherries, and peaches are all delicious, but apples figure in mythology, history, science, and even religion.  I wondered, could I grow apples?

The realtor and I walked to the back of the orchard to a small clearing near some wetlands. A giant bird flew overhead. “Great blue heron,” he said. I nodded, while peering into a weathered shed. Giant earth-encrusted tools silently stood in their stalls. Later I learned the names — manure spreader, back hoe, brush hog, but at the moment they were as otherworldly as the caw caw of the heron, that ancient pterodactyl.

I didn’t consider the reality of taking over a farm and an orchard. Yet something had happened as I walked the property. This place will keep me grounded, I thought to myself.

Now, sixteen years later,  the stately Elm is a decaying stump, and though a few new Elms have sprouted nearby, no other tree can replace that loss. Blase, my partner, and I are anticipating the opening of the new harvest season, admittedly with a mix of eagerness and trepidation. We love to greet old friends and welcome new people to the farm. We have a crop of apples this year, and the sculpture exhibit is going to be our largest and, we think, our best exhibit yet. But we don’t enjoy rushing to the phone at 10pm, and finding a customer wondering if we have Gala apples, their favorite.

I am more grounded than ever, but like the changing landscape we are beginning to think about what comes next. Change is what we can count on. We are getting older and beginning to feel different pulls. I want to do more art and Blase wants to work more with people. How will we grow and how will our journeys braid together and transform the landscape? Whatever field we cultivate, the heart will surely grow.

The Almata Apple, just picked!

The First Food

Fill a cooking pot with ripe apples.

(I pick up the fallen ones from under the trees.)

                        Williams Pride Apple Drops, August 12 — one of our early apples.

Empty the apples into the kitchen sink and rinse them with water.

Take them out and quarter each apple with a sharp knife.

Throw them back into the pot — peel, seeds, core and all.

Add 1 ½ cups of water and begin to cook, covered.

Enjoy the chunk of apple that didn’t make it into the pot.

Ask that all beings enjoy peace, refuge, and healthy food.

Give a stir now and then to move the apples from the top to the bottom.

Keep a cover on the pot so it’s steamy inside.

When the apples are half-cooked, if you are going to use a sweetener, add it now.

(I added ¾ cup of organic sugar to this first batch.)

Ask that all beings find their own sweet spot.

Cock your head like a robin and listen to the kitchen sounds.

Smell the emanation of apple permeating the house.

It there is too much water, take the lid off and release some of the moisture.

Stir a little more.

Cook until all apples are soft.

Turn off the stove and let the pot cool with the lid off.

Pause to absorb the moist scent of cooked apples.

Laugh out loud, though there is nothing funny about a pot of smushy apples.

Offer gratitude to the trees.

After the apple glom cools, ladle large dollops into a food mill.

Rotate the crank around and around.

 Watch as the strained sauce stained pink (from the peel)

eases its way into the large bowl below.

While it cools do something else.

Have the courage to follow your truth.

Fill a bowl with enough applesauce to eat over the next few days.

Fill containers for freezing.

Stack neatly in the freezer in the basement.

Return to the kitchen and enjoy a taste while the sauce is still warm.

A Teapot, a Woman, and maybe a Boat

One of the problems with making large-scale outdoor sculpture is that you have to store your work when it comes home from an exhibit.

Compost Tea, Linda Hoffman & Gabrielle White, leaves and chickenwire

A few years ago, Gabrielle White and I made Compost Tea. This large teapot was exhibited in two shows and, since then, has been steeping under our back porch. Several weeks ago, we needed to clear this area for washing vegetables. The dilemma — should we dismantle the teapot? I’m one for moving on and getting rid of things. Gabi was reluctant. “Let’s float the teapot,” she suggested. Gabi made a test raft with four five-gallon plastic buckets and a wood pallet. When I returned home that evening I walked on it — and slid into the pond.  I later learned that Gabi had fallen in several times. The raft supported our weight — which meant it would support the teapot, but was not very stable.

However, by the next evening the buckets had filled with water and the raft was floating under the surface. Gabi and I stepped into the muck to unstrap the buckets from the pallet and empty them. We searched Craigslist for larger plastic barrels, but southern Connecticut seems to hold the monopoly on used 33-gallon plastic barrels — too far to drive.

Then I thought of the boat. We had been working on a sculpture inspired by the line, The Boat Returned Flooded with Moonlight. I have a little boat that a neighbor gave me years ago. Gabi and I had hauled it out, painted it, and then bought some chicken wire. Gabi is obsessed with the way light shines on and reflects off of chicken wire sculptures. We made a wire figure of a woman seated in the boat with a billowing skirt, a bit like you might imagine Emily Dickinson boating along the Thames. But our Emily kept falling out of the boat, and the sculpture never came together.

Meanwhile, the teapot was now behind my studio awaiting the construction of a raft. At our next session of work, Gabi had the brilliant idea of putting the lady in the teapot. We removed the teapot’s broad-brimmed hat and placed the woman inside. She was visible from the waist up, a jack-in-the-box figure with her own wide-brimmed hat.

The sculpture was intriguing. Then, encouraged to find a solution to our raft difficulties, I said, “Let’s put the teapot in the boat.” I knew we might have to forgo the woman. A boat, a teapot, and a woman was getting a little complicated. Out went Emily. We carried the boat from inside my studio to the teapot and temporarily installed the teapot in the boat with spout pointing towards the bow.

It had a certain presence. They seemed compatibly sized for each other. Then we decided to remove the teapot’s broad-brimmed hat and push Amelia down into the opening. Gabi calls the lady, Amelia, while I prefer Emily. We always enjoy our collaborative way of working even when we disagree. We now had a boat, a teapot, and a lady captain who seemed to be piloting the boat from her teapot quarterdeck. One of her slender arms was resting on the rim of the teapot and the other was gesticulating, as if photographed in mid-sentence. Who was she? Where was she going?

On Friday afternoon, Gabi and I met again to continue work. We wanted to see the sculpture afloat on the pond. 

Gabi, Mike Labonte, farm volunteer, Bruschi, farm dog, and I preparing the sculpture for a test voyage.  Photo: Farmer Kevin

We don’t yet know what the final piece will be. The woman needs work, the teapot is unsteady in the boat, and Bruschi isn't sure about any of it. You'll  have to come to Old Frog Pond Farm’s annual sculpture exhibit, Around the Pond and through the Woods to see for yourself what we decide. This year’s exhibit opens on Friday, September 8 and continues through Columbus Day. The opening reception is on September 10 from 1 - 4 pm. And, as long as the teapot stays afloat, storage will not be an issue!

Gabi in the canoe taking our sculpture for a tour of the pond.