"Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered"

A few days ago, I was sitting on the porch with Jeannine, enjoying breakfast in the cool morning air, when she mentioned that it might be fun to go sometime to the new Howard Pyle exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum. My interest was piqued -- I've always loved Pyle's work, especially his illustrations of Robin Hood. Given that I had nothing particular planned for the day, I suggested that we not wait, and go that day, and she agreed.

The show was great -- many of Pyle's original oil paintings were on display, as well as some watercolors and a goodly number of his black and white ink drawings. One of the paintings -- I think it's titled "The Mermaid" -- is one of Pyle's best-known works and one I have seen reproduced many times in books and on prints and posters.

However, it was not until I got close up to the painting that I noticed a really nice detail…

… clinging to a rock under the crashing surf is a little crab.

I am so used to thinking of beautiful color when considering the work of Howard Pyle that this painting, an illustration from an edition of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, surprised me with its monochromatic look.

I was also struck by the way Pyle had rendered the giant in such a way as to emphasize his great size by painting him in soft, almost cloudy tones, as if seen from a great distance through the haze of intervening air, while the human in the lower left is rendered in harsher, more solid shapes and tones.

The influence of Pyle on the later works of Frank Farazetta is clear to me in this closeup detail of that human figure… it puts me in mind of a number of the cavemen which Frazetta painted.

There were many pieces which dealt with scenes set on or near the ocean, but I think my favorite was this one, an illustration of the "Flying Dutchman" from a story in Harper's Monthly Magazine. I love the way Pyle achieved the look of the foam on the ocean's surface in this watercolor… and the composition is brilliant.

I really enjoyed the show, but I have to mention two things which caught my eye, two silly mistakes that struck me as pretty obvious… and made me wonder about the process of putting together shows of this nature.

The mistakes were on two "tombstones", those descriptive cards which accompany the pieces hung on the walls and also those in display cases. One of them was for a print by another artist, something which had inspired Pyle. As I read the card, I noticed this mistake:

… the unnecessary repetition of the word "the".

Moving into another gallery (if I am remembering correctly, the show occupied four rooms in the museum), I was looking at some examples of books with Japanese prints in them from which Pyle had derived some inspiration, when I noticed the following:

Obviously, the word "extensive" should have been followed by another word like "collection" or "library".

As we were leaving the museum, I spoke to a woman at the front desk and told her about these two errors. She listened to me politely and seemed to be somewhat concerned, but also said she didn't know if they could be corrected, as the show had come from another museum, and the cards belonged to that museum.

So how did these mistakes survive through one exhibition and into another? It seems pretty absurd to me that such obvious errors could not be caught with even slightly careful proofreading. I am pretty certain that I am not the only person who noticed these things, so it is pretty likely that in the show's previous incarnation someone MUST have mentioned them. So why no corrections? I know it's a minor point (or two minor points), but it seems to me that when you are putting on an important show of a major artist like this, you would want to have it as perfect as humanly possible.

Moving on…

Having enjoyed the show, and beginning to feel slightly peckish, Jeannine and I considered our food options. We checked out the Rockwell Museum's cafe, which was a pleasant space but only stocked with pre-made sandwiches, most of which had some variety of (gag!) mayonnaise slathered on them. Then Jeannine remembered something from our last trip to the Rockwell -- on a whim, I'd taken the road from the museum in the southerly direction, to see where it went, and as it turned out, it took us to Great Barrington, not far from one of our favorite restaurants, Xicoh Ten Catl.

The idea of fresh, delicious Mexican food won out over stale mayonnaise-ridden offerings, so off we went. Xicoh Ten Catl did not disappoint -- we got a table outside on their shady porch, the air was slightly cool and soft, and the simple meals we ordered (a vegetarian burrita for Jeannine, the chicken version for me) were just perfect.

We followed the meal with a casual stroll around downtown Great Barrington, doing a little shopping, and then headed home, with one more stop in Hinsdale for a soft ice cream. Not a bad day. -- PL

Dance, flowers, and food

Yesterday, Jeannine and I had a very pleasant summer Saturday. We'd made plans to go to Jacob's Pillow, the famous dance venue in the Berkshires. Jeannine had been there once many years before, but we'd never gone together, and I'd never been at all, although I could recall seeing the sign for Jacob's Pillow on my many motorcycle rides down that scenic stretch of Route 20 in Massachusetts.

When Jeannine suggested we might go to see a dance event there, she left it up to me to pick one. Not knowing much about dance, I chose one which looked to be at the very least interesting in a technical way, because from the image in the advertising, the dancers would be performing on a stage littered with hundreds of ping-pong balls. I found myself wondering how they would avoid slipping on them.

So we set out on a pretty nice, partly sunny day, and found our way via, one of my favorite scenic routes, to Jacob's Pillow, which is not too far off of Route 20. It's a lovely place, lots of rustic-looking barns and outbuildings which house studios and theaters set among beautiful trees and gardens, with many benches and picnic tables here and there. The event we were going to see involved two performances by choreographer and dancer Jonah Bokaer in the Doris Duke Theatre.

And it turned out to be… interesting. In fact, it turned out to be almost exactly what I had imagined it to be -- mostly concept and very little actual dancing. Jeannine was more disappointed than I was, because she likes to see more athletic dance movement and prefers lively music to go along with it (neither was on hand for these performances).

Actually -- and I almost hate to mention this because it reveals, perhaps, exactly what a nerd I am -- both performances made me think of moments from the original "Star Trek" TV series. In the first one, which I think was titled "Recess", part of the "dance" involved a dancer hidden under a huge sheet of white paper which was crumpled up into a heap… and the dancer moved round underneath it, crawling and lurching across the stage. I immediately thought of the way the Horta (the silicon-based cavern dweller in the episode "Devil in the Dark") , moved. It was eerily similar.

And in the next performance, titled "Recess" (this was the one with all the ping-pong balls), at one point hundreds of balls were poured from a chute on the left side of the stage, reminding me of the way the tribbles poured down on Captain Kirk when he opened the grain storage locker on Space Station K-1 in "The Trouble with Tribbles".

Yes, I am a geek.

After the show, we debated if we should try to get in a swim (the weather report said possible thunderstorms, and the sky WAS getting a bit dark) or drive a little further west and check out a place Jeannine has been wanting to go to for years, the Berkshire Botanical Gardens in Stockbridge, MA. We chose the latter, and although it did start sprinkling on the way there, it didn't rain enough to dampen (literally AND figuratively) our enjoyment of this beautiful place. I think the herb garden, with its beautiful design and WONDERFUL aromas, was our favorite spot. Here's a small panoramic image of Jeannine wandering among the sage and cumin and dill.

I had to stop to take a photo of this bench -- not just for its beauty, but for the fact that my daughter and her roommate would likely appreciate the sign next to it.

There were a number of interesting tree houses on the grounds, and Jeannine snapped this shot of me enjoying the view from the top level of one of them.

There were so many beautiful flowers at this place that I could fill up multiple blog pages with images of them. In lieu of that, here are a few of my favorites from what I shot.

Near the end of our perambulations through the gardens, we came upon the "Children's Garden"...

...which was very cute and featured a "Wishing Tree".

Here are a couple of close-ups of some of the "wish tags" attached to the tree.

(I love the spelling of "unicorn" on this one.)

Nearby, there was this lovely mailbox decorated with living plants…

… and this sign:

After getting our fill of gorgeous colors and shapes and inviting scents, Jeannine suggested we have dinner at a place in Great Barrington. I had eaten there once with my friends Rick and Rob, and had raved to Jeanine about the food. It's called "Xicohtencatl", and it serves what is described at authentic Mexican food.

(Here''s their website: http://www.xicohmexican.com/)

We got great seats on the porch, just as it started raining more heavily. Jeannine had a large plate of scallops which she said were the best she'd ever had, and I had a whole Tilapia on a bed of greens. And it WAS a whole fish, head and all. I had never had fish served that way, and it had also been a while since I'd had to carefully extract the bones from a meal so I didn't swallow any. But it was GREAT. I would heartily recommend this place to anyone. 

We didn't get the swim that we had hoped for -- it poured pretty much the entire drive home -- but it was a wonderful day nonetheless. -- PL