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Kitty Calash

~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

Kitty Calash

Tag Archives: landscape

The Landscapes of Things

20 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by kittycalash in Collecting, Living History, material culture, personal

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collecting, collections, history, interpretation, landscape, material culture

Or, you never know where things will end up.

New post, Old post, Cataloger

New post, Old post, Cataloger

You can learn a lot about a place by visiting its antique and junk shops. Here, where the China Trade was A THING, you can practically fall over Chinese export porcelain (and its imitators) of a variety of types every day. It can become a bad habit. You can become an enabler.

IMG_7449

Elsewhere, the objects for sale tell a different story. I’m fond of the haphazard antique malls museum of things world, and while on a tea pot delivery mission to Maryland, went to one in Mount Vernon. It was astonishing.

Mid-century modern furniture, the Arabia Anemone tableware of my childhood, and shelves of geisha dolls, Kabuto, ceramics, and the occasional sword confused me at first until I realized these were probably the jumbled contents of a prior generation of military and civil servants’  homes emptied by their children. The aesthetics were markedly different from what I typically encounter in southeastern New England, where I am accustomed to reading subtle variations between the states I frequent.

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Local variations occurred in Vermont as well, though the general flavor was more familiar.

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Some things are universal: chaotic piles of partially-identified snapshots can be found anywhere, stacks of pelts and dog-like foxes, not so much. Origins debatable, ethics questionable, the late mammals tempted the tourist trade in St. Johnsbury, where we stopped as we headed south for home.

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We influence our landscape more than we credit: from changes in the land wrought by farming to climate change to the differences in what we cast off and what we collect, the visible human influence is undeniable. Material culture can be about place as much as it is about thing.

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Lighting Out for the Territories

10 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by kittycalash in Art Rant, History, personal

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

19th century, George Caleb Bingham, Karl Bodmer, landscape, light, Missouri River, paintings, weather

I don’t know about you, but the end of winter often seems harder than the beginning: will this ever end? The snow begins to melt, the dirt turns to mud and you’re walking on ice suspended in pudding. It’s claustrophobic.

George Caleb Bingham (American, 1811–1879). Boatmen on the Missouri, 1846. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1979.7.15

George Caleb Bingham (American, 1811–1879). Boatmen on the Missouri, 1846. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1979.7.15

The weather turns here and the lid finally comes off the sky and reveals that blue above and I think of the vistas of the west, the fields that open up along the rivers of the center of this continent, the fields rough with corn stubble punctuated by trees that pass your car window like drum beats in a song, so regular.

I wonder about the people in the past, wonder what they thought and knew about. Of course it was different for the uneducated and the poor then as now, but if you were wealthy, oh, the places you could go.

Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809-1893),  White Castles on the Missouri , 1833  watercolor on paper, 9 x 16 3/8 in.; 22.86 x 41.59 cm  gift of Enron Art Foundation, Joslyn Art Museum, 1986.49.176

Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809-1893),
White Castles on the Missouri , 1833
watercolor on paper, 9 x 16 3/8 in.; 22.86 x 41.59 cm
gift of Enron Art Foundation, Joslyn Art Museum, 1986.49.176

At the dawn of time back in Missouri, I never had the pleasure to hold but I did get to order 8×10 color transparencies* of things as wonderful as the Karl Bodmer watercolors of the trip he took up the Missouri River, and George Caleb Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri.

Art history classes will teach you to recognize painters and images, styles and eras, but they won’t teach you the kind of seeing you can only get by being in the same place at the same time in the same light.

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. Oil on canvas, George Caleb Bingham, 1845. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 33.61

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. Oil on canvas, George Caleb Bingham, 1845. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 33.61

Far from the wide Missouri, I have to be content with images in books and the internet, but I can tell you from looking: Bingham got it right. The sky really does look like that above those rivers and plains; the light is rosy and grey at once, the river swift and glassy. I don’t know how it works, I only know how happy it makes me.

Come, spring: bring us the river and the light.

*Yes, and we had the printers run separations and then FedExed them to other museums for approval. Can you imagine!

And, if you’re handy to the place, the St Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is having a Bingham show. 

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Watson Farm

03 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by kittycalash in History, Museums

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Tags

farm, landscape, weekend

20120703-061241.jpg Sunday afternoon we decided to go to a farm, and chose Historic New England’s Watson Farm on Jamestown. It was a good choice, I think, and perhaps this will be the summer of historic farms and landscapes.

I always wanted to be Tasha Tudor when I was little, live in a historic house, wear historic clothes, eat historic foods, perform historic chores. We lived in a ca. 1875 house in Chicago, so of course I wanted 1875 clothes for my school, which was also ca. 1875, at least in part. Fortunately, I did not get them, children being even less tolerant in the Dark Ages of my youth than they are today.

So Watson Farm’s ca. 1790 date and traditional methods appealed to me, and appealed to Mr. S, who wanted just “farm,” and the Young Mr. was just stuck with the decision.

20120703-061408.jpg The farm is largely uninterpreted. HNE provides a brochure and map for a self-guided tour, and there are cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, and cats scattered about the landscape. The fields are pasture, with the farm managers maintaining a vegetable garden for their own use. In terms of learning, it was not a stellar experience and knowing what I do about the farm, I can see why. With 285 acres that need to remain untouched, you can’t plant signs everywhere despoiling the landscape and getting in the way of cattle. In terms of beauty, it was outstanding.

The brochure takes you on a roughly 2-mile walk through the fields and down to the shore of the island. (There is a shorter loop option.) The view was lovely and on Sunday, with weather coming in from the west, the sky was dramatic and it was just about like walking in a Thomas Hart Benton painting.

I think the best moment for me was hearing the cows eat. I don’t remember ever hearing a cow eat grass before, but it was a wonderful sound, “like eating a whole lot of celery, with a pillow over your head,” said Mr. S. Well, sort of. I wish I’d made a recording of it, because it is a sound very few people ever hear anymore. Even the most urban among us can encounter police horses snuffling in their feed bags, and reenactors can visit the dragoon’s horses at battles. But cows snuffling up and chewing grass–that’s another kind of almost-lost sound altogether.

And that’s the whole point of these historic landscapes, preserving the things that would otherwise be lost: not just the vista, the plants and the animals, but the sounds the animals make, the smell of hay toasting in the sun, the sandy prints of burrowing animals, and the truly otherworldly, out-of-time experience of stepping off the asphalt path.

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