Opening this weekend! SAGA 89th Annual Members Exhibition

In the Shallows
reduction linocut © Sherrie York
12" x 12" - Edition of 20

If you are in New York City this weekend, why not head out to the beautiful galleries at Governors Island for the Society of American Graphic Artists' 89th Annual Members Exhibition, featuring over 150 hand pulled prints by brilliant SAGA printmakers from across the country. (Including In the Shallows, by... me!)

The opening reception will be held on Saturday, October 26, 3 - 5 pm at The Arts Center at Governors Island, next to the ferry landing. The Trust for Governors Island operates year-round ferry service to Governors Island.

Ferries will also run from Brooklyn, this weekend only. There may be delays and more visitors riding the ferry due to the annual harvest festival on October 26 and 27; please plan your visit accordingly.

SAGA's exhibition is free and open to the public from October 22 to November 3, Thursday to Sunday from 9 am to 6 pm or by appointment.

Coastal Update

The forest floor looks very different here! 

Days here in my new environment are zooming along, although finding a place to settle is taking its sweet time. I told someone the other day I feel as though I'm still collecting "dots"... and that when I have enough to start connecting them I hope the picture will resolve...

Until then... well. I'm staying quite busy with other adventures (in addition to the home and studio search).

Long time Brush and Baren readers will know that one of the reasons I have shifted my home base to Maine is my connection with several National Audubon Society projects: Hog Island Audubon Camp, the Audubon Artist Residency, Project Puffin, and now Mad River Decoy.

My twin-sister-from-different-genetic-stock Sue is tangled up in all these things, too, and it was her idea that the life-size Least Tern decoys she produces for conservation projects would also make lovely tree toppers, if only they had the proper holiday garb.

Least Tern Tree Toppers available at the Project Puffin website

So of course we set about crafting costumes for terns. Because that's what one does.

I've also been to New York! The state, not the City, although that's not too far away, either. The purpose of the trip was two-fold: Firstly, the 70th birthday party of an Audubon colleague. (That's Pete in the pink and black boa at right, buddy Artie in the black hat.)

And it turns out that friend, colleague, and master oil painter Jim Coe lives just an hour-and-a-half north of the birthday boy! So I toddled on up to Jim's place to visit him for the first time in his home habitat.

It was an eye-opening moment! Everywhere I looked I felt as though I were standing in one of Jim's paintings, a testament both to his craft and to his relationship with his surroundings.

A view towards the Catskills and a barn that has featured in several Coe paintings

Back in Maine I continue to explore my own unfamiliar surroundings. Thanksgiving morning I put on my new blaze orange hat (a necessity for walking in the Maine woods in the autumn, apparently) and made my way down to the shore at the LaVerna Preserve, which is just a few minutes from where I'm staying. Nice, eh?

But of course it's not all sunshine and shorelines here. The weather has been getting increasingly colder and grayer... and today we're having our first real snow of the season.

First snow in Pemaquid

I did finally get out my journal and make a little drawing yesterday, and I'm planning to spend some quality time with my sketchbook this evening. It gets VERY dark VERY early here... Sunset today is at 4:03pm. Interestingly (to me), even though the darkness continues to lengthen for another 10 days or so, TODAY is the very earliest the sun will set. Sure, it will come up a bit later in the morning, but tomorrow's sunset is 4:04! Hey! We're already in the Improving Zone!

So... I'll continue to press on... and perhaps have some sketches to show you later this week! I ordered some paper and fresh lino, which arrived this past week, so maybe I'll get something small and manageable underway. Until then... it's time to make a hot cup of tea and watch my first Maine snow come down!

Celebrity hawks and model bovines

The problem with recounting a trip after it's over is that it starts to take on the quality of unfinished reading assignments: We're on the next book now, Sherrie. Please try to catch up. Already events of last week have taken on a dream-like quality... so I'll hustle things along and return us all to the regularly scheduled program already in progress.

Before we bid farewell to Pennsylvania, we visited with friends and bovines in the vicinity of Phoenixville. I am always touched by the generous nature of folks who are, well, interested in nature, and their willingness to share their work and lives with a wandering pair toting pencils and paintbrushes.

David and Edie at Seven Stars Farm are two such kindred souls. They opened their home, their business, and their thoughts to us... and we are better people for it. (More about Seven Stars.)

It's calving season at the biodynamic dairy. One night we worked until well after dark, and were rewarded with a look at a just-born calf, still quivering under the ministrations of its mother's tongue. (Or perhaps from the shock of an unceremonious thump into the big, wide world.) In a few short minutes it was able to hold its head up- much faster than me on most mornings.

I also met Cindy, AKA #186. Big Jersey doe-eyes and a curious disposition. While her barnmates ruminated, Cindy watched Carroll spread the silage, watched Denis and I drawing, watched the cats, watched Sue at work. David told me later that Cindy produces fine milk with a high butterfat content, and I myself saw her strong new calf. Apparently a curious attitude about the world around you is good for everyone. (I've always thought so, and it was nice to have my supposition validated by a cow.)

In too short a time we left Phoenixville and Pennsylvania and headed north to New York. Again we were welcomed into the homes and lives of friends and colleagues, and at last Denis was able to speak French with people whose vocabulary exceeds three words.

Saturday evening it rained a bit, and on Sunday we met friend Roger in Central Park to do a little birding and sketching. New York, early on a Sunday, blue skies after rain, is a fabulous place to be: fresh and sparkling and amazingly hushed.

I think it's safe to say that Roger grew up in The Park, and he knew precisely where to take us to see its bird life in good form, even in early March. (Black duck and tufted titmouse new for me.) At my star-struck request he also directed us to the penthouse nest site of the famous Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk who set up housekeeping across the street from the model boat pond in the early 1990s. Now star of literature, screen, and television, he and his mate have a devoted cadre of hawk paparazzi and well-wishers everywhere.

Lo and behold, the hawks were home when we came calling... so we sat in the park and made some sketches. We also drank coffee and people-watched. C'mon! It's Central Park!

At the end of this day, our journey together came to a close. Denis went on to Boston, and I stayed in New York another day for meetings and visits. I was strangely reluctant to come home just yet... sorry to have spent so little time in places and with people I've only begun to know. But perhaps it won't be long before I wander that way again. As Denis and I have said to each other at every unlikely travel proposition for the past 16 years: "Why not?"

DNA trail

Well. It's been a solid week without internet access that didn't cost me a dollar a minute, so aside from one quick adventure in emptying the accumulated spam from my email box I have been living in a de-blogified zone. The good news is that I've collected stories and made sketches suitable for blogging. The bad news is that I'm not in a space to scan the sketches or edit the adventure just yet. I'm still on the road! In New York for one more day, then back to Philadelphia for the trip west. It's been colder than... (insert suitable expletive here) on the East Coast, and the chisme from home says it's been 60 and fabulous there. Ain't that always the case?

Potential trip topics-to-come: Darwin's dead finches, Audubon's dead buntings, monster fossil fish from the inland sea, a man with "a Frenchie aspect," organic dairies, sour silage, gorgeous jersey cows, the extraordinary lives of ordinary people, generosity among strangers, bad apples, chickens in the mist, more cars in one parking lot than exist in my home county, birding Central Park on a Sunday after a rain, weak coffee, strong tea, head-bashing butterflies. Let's see.... what else?

A list of known places I've left DNA scraps in the form of broken fingernails in the last 8 days: a NWA jet (wrestling my bag into the overhead bin), a hostel in Philadelphia (cracked on the bed frame), the Academy of Natural Sciences (no idea, they just disappeared), a just-tilled farm in Pennsylvania (probably fending off the muddy cat who insisted on crawling over me, my backpack, and my drawing papers), Central Park (climbing across a rock to draw a pond), the New York subway ('nuff said). And the wastepaper basket of the New York apartment in which I am presently holed up.

You must understand that my nails are typically short and unadorned to begin with. Ordinarily I wouldn't even notice, but this morning's snap represented a new record: on this trip absolutely every single nail across both hands has been mangled for the sake of art and nature and mucking about in the big wide world. I realize it's not the USUAL sort of suffering for one's craft, but for now it's the best I can do. I'm having too much fun otherwise.