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White Pine (Pinus strobus)

The white pines are the gentle giants of the northeastern conifers. Their needles are long and soft instead of aggressively sharp or stiff like other pines, and they can grow one hundred feet tall or more. The white pine is the Maine state tree, and the pine cone and tassel is our state flower.

The living room in our 180-year-old farmhouse is paneled with the original “pumpkin pine” boards taken from the loft floor when the house was remodeled. Pumpkin pine is the deep orange heartwood of old growth pine trees. The boards over our fireplace mantel are just under twenty-four inches wide.

In American colonial days, all good trees two feet or more in diameter on land not previously granted to a private individual were reserved for masts for His Majesty’s Royal Navy. A fine of £100 was levied against anyone who cut a tree marked with the King’s “broad arrow.” So boards in Mainer’s homes were never, ever more than twenty-four inches wide, even if they came from a larger tree. They were carefully trimmed to remove any possibility of incriminating evidence!

The fine blue-green needles of the white pine are grouped in bundles of five. The cones are four to eight inches long and take two years to mature. The tips of the woody cone-scales are often crusted with sticky, aromatic resin. When I was drawing the pinecones in my study book, my hands were sticky and pine-fragrant from handling them.

A white pine grows taller as the main leader at the top of the tree grows. The branches are arranged below that in whorls of five to nine branches each. A couple of weeks ago, a medium-size pine near the back of our yard broke off in a windstorm. The breaking place, about fifteen feet above the ground, was at the point where the leader had been killed and one of the lateral branches below it had become the new trunk. This made a slight kink in the trunk and a weak place in the tree.

Forks in white pine trunks are usually caused by the white pine weevil. Unfortunately for the lumber industry, this reduces the value of the timber considerably. Since this little critter likes pine trees in warm, dry, sunny places best, pines in open fields are particularly susceptible. The weevil lives on the terminal leader of the tree, and lays its eggs there. The grubs that hatch feed on the inner bark of the leader. This effectively girdles the topmost shoot of the tree and kills it. The great old white pine at the edge of our meadow shows the mark of its battle with this tiny marauder, for the trunk forks about halfway up its height.

White pines are inextricably bound with Maine’s history. They have formed a major part in many industries here over the years. Because its soft, light wood does not warp or crack as easily as other trees, it has found its way into buildings, cabinets, furniture, boxes, and patterns as well as the masts of royal ships.

Why are there trees I never walk under
But large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
(Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)

March is usually still winter around here, but we have had so little snow and so much warm sunny weather that it looks like April already. There are bare patches of ground showing in the old tired snow on the mountains, and the driveway is clean and dry instead of all ice like it was this time last year.
It smells like spring, because the skunks are out. Steve saw a local one nosing around our house the day before yesterday.
And it sounds like spring, too. I heard turkeys gobbling at dawn this morning, and I think that I heard a mourning dove in the distance.
Two winters ago we had about 150 inches of snow. Last winter we had about 90 inches. And this winter so far we have had not quite 60 inches. All of the major snowstorms of the winter have gone south of us, it seems. I will be interested to see if it advances the tide of the season when the trees and plants begin to stir, too.

“Aster” is Latin for “star,” and great constellations of them bloom in our meadow in the late summer and fall. The New England is the last and showiest of them all. Its great ragged purple and gold heads are summer’s last hurrah around here, lingering long after many of the other flowers have faded. They are also called Michaelmas daisies, because they bloom around the time of the ancient holiday of Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel.

I have a page in my study book devoted to the New England aster, Symphotrichum novae-angliae. It has a cluster of handsome composite flowers with a stem as tall as I am. The disk flowers show a beautiful double spiral pattern. After the blooms are spent, the seed heads are soft and fluffy with dense pappi that help waft the seeds aloft in late fall breezes.

I had one spectacular photoshoot with the asters that last week of September. I caught them in the late afternoon when the sun was slanting through the meadow, and they were abuzz with bees of all sizes. I also captured a small yellow butterfly with my camera. He ignored me and went about his business with the asters, so I was able to get several good shots of him. I believe he was a pink-edged sulphur, or some variant thereof. From the photos I did a watercolor of the butterfly, bees, and asters.

The end of 2009 was interrupted by family needs and an unexpected and lengthy stay out-of-state. But I am back in Maine and back in my studio now, and am happily putting on the harness again. Look for more blogs and work posted in the near future.

Winter seems to be sliding in early this year. We had our first snow on Oct. 13, a wet slushy snow that muted all the fall color for a few hours. It didn't last long before it melted, but it gave us a preview of things to come. The nights have been unusually cold, too, with lows in the teens. I am glad for our old woodstove now.

The peak of the color here generally comes around Columbus Day weekend, and this year was no exception in that department. But now the brilliant scarlet of the sugar maples is behind us, giving way to the deep russet and gold of the oaks and beeches. The brilliance of early fall is breathtaking, but the subtler colors of late October have their charm, too. I had occasion to ride through the Notch from Mexico to Andover yesterday. We were exclaiming, "Oh, look!" all the way there. That is one of my favorite drives, almost any time of year.

The garden is down to just a few hardy plants in my cold frame: lettuce, chard, New Zealand spinach, and parsley. The soil temperature in the box has been hovering around 45 degrees, warm enough to keep it all from freezing. On the nights when the temperature went down into the low teens, I draped an old sleeping bag over the box. That was enough to protect it until morning. This is the best lettuce I have gotten from the garden all year. No slugs, no bugs, no groundhogs, no deer. I may start growing more of my food under glass.

I have watched the flocks of migrating birds moving through. Some late robins visited us this past week. The warblers have been flitting silently through the bushes. The local birds who spend the winter with us are settling in now. This includes the ever-present chickadees, the blue jays, hairy woodpeckers, nuthatches, and our lone ruffed grouse. That grouse (or partridge, as they are called locally) often spends the early winter around the end of our driveway, in the windbreak near the trees with berries that she favors so much. I also saw a female cardinal in the quince bush the other day; I don't know if she will stay around or not. Cardinals are rare in our yard, unlike in Ohio where I grew up. We are at the far northern edge of their range here.

NEWSLETTER Fall 2009 No. 4

Greetings from the mountains of western Maine!

Most of September was devoted to framing my art to put in this month’s exhibit at Frost Farm Gallery, so this newsletter will have to be all about framing. For me the art-sharing is all one piece with the art-making, anyway. A large part of the retail price of any work of art is the frame, too. Hopefully you will come away from this with a little better appreciation of what is involved in the process from the artist’s point of view.

My husband Steve and I worked together on this project. This is the first time we have made our own frames. Steve did most of it: sawing and gluing the molding, cutting the glass and mats, and putting the hardware on the back. I did the design part, and helped with the assembly. It was a happy collaboration, and the results are stunning if I do say so myself.
I will start by saying that none of this would have happened without the help of our friend Dirk MacKnight. He is not only a superb photographer, but an able teacher. He gave us some good instruction on how to make frames, and then loaned us a lot of the equipment we needed. (You can see examples of his fine landscape photography by looking for him at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dirkphoto.)

The first consideration is the style of the frame. This body of artwork needed to be presented with great simplicity. I picked a plain ¾” wide wood molding in three different colors, natural oak, walnut brown, and black. I chose two colors of matboard, giving the works on watercolor paper a cool white mat to match the paper color, and the works on Stonehenge drawing paper a warmer white. We gave a few of the pieces a double mat, with a colored mat for the inner one.

It amazes me how much the colors of the mat and molding affect the appearance of the work. Adjacent colors “talk” to each other. Whatever color you pick for the frame will make that same color stand out more in the painting, so you have to choose carefully. You can’t take a weak painting and make it a great one just with the framing, but you sure can take a plain one and make it sing.

For example, here is the “Spruce Twig” watercolor framed in three different ways. The first frame is made from the black molding. The black looks dull and doesn’t do anything for the painting. The second is the walnut brown, which is better but still looks thin to me. The third is the way we ended up framing it, with a larger frame and mat and an inner second mat of a rich rusty brown color to bring out the colors in the spruce cones.

A second example is this watercolor of a crow feather. It is a wing feather that a crow dropped just for me last winter, and I keep it on my work desk to brush eraser crumbs off my drawings (art supplies form the sky!). You can see the way we framed it at the right, with a double mat, and you can see it with the black mat covered at the left. It is a very simple painting, but the narrow line of black from the inner mat is really what lifts it above the ordinary.


I really enjoyed the process of framing the paintings, even more than I thought I would. There is a real thrill to seeing a work framed and hung for the first time. I am looking forward very much to going back to my studio work now, and glad to know that whenever I need a frame we can produce one that will set the art off to its best advantage.

For those of you who are in Maine, my work will be at Frost Farm Gallery in Norway, Maine from now until the end of October. For more information, check out their website at www.FrostFarmGallery.com. It is a beautiful venue, and one that really complements this particular collection of paintings.

I have attached a file of the spruce twig here for you in the form of an art card. Art cards (or ACEO’s) are a collectible form of miniature art the same size as a baseball trading card. Print this one on good stiff photo paper, cut it out, and start your own collection, if you wish. I give you permission to print or reproduce this image as you choose.

For more information on “Swift River Treasures,” my artmaking process, or recent work, or to check out my blog, see my website at http://betsy-bell.fineartamerica.com. You can also search for me on fineartamerica.com as Betsy Gray Bell under the “Artists” button in the top menu bar. (The drop-down box under it has a search feature.) Fine Art America offers a print-on-demand service, matting, framing, and shipping, and fine art greeting cards as well.

There is time for making art, once you understand that it’s about making choices. (Ricë Freeman-Zachery, author of Creative Time and Space: Making Room for Making Art)

Thanks for joining me in the journey. I hope that you enjoy looking at the art as much as I have enjoyed making it! I would love to hear from you, too, so please do reply with comments. And next month I will be back to doing the naturalist thing again.

Betsy

This time of year, everyone who grows tomatoes in their garden around here has green ones sitting around in the kitchen. Here is my favorite green tomato recipe, which I collected more than 35 years ago after a memorable meal with friends.

"MACHUNKHA"
From Margie (I went to college with her)

INGREDIENTS:
¼ cup chopped Spanish onion (or enough to cover the bottom of your pan)
1/8 cup butter
a tiny bit of chopped green pepper (This is optional. Use more if you like peppers.)
1 or 2 green tomatoes, cut into ½ inch cubes
2 or 3 red tomatoes (generally use 3 red to 1 green), peeled and cut into ½ inch cubes
¼ cup milk
¼ cup flour
salt and pepper to taste
small amount of finely chopped garlic, if you like garlic

METHOD:
Melt butter in frying pan over moderate heat.
Add onions and green pepper. Sauté to transparency. Add garlic.
Put unpeeled cubes of green tomato in your pan. Cook until they lose their hardness. Add red tomato cubes. Cook another 5 to 10 minutes. Mix the tomatoes together to confuse them and cause identity crisis yielding unusual flavor. [Yes, that is the way the original recipe read.]
While this simmers at a low temperature, mix your milk, water (to thin), and flour together, beating into a paste with a pastry whip or fork. Pour it into the tomato mixture while stirring tomatoes. Now add salt and pepper to taste (recommended very small amount of salt, more pepper.)
Cook on low temperature until it reaches gravy consistency.
Serve from pan with whole loaf of fresh white bread—Italian or other tearable bread—dunking bread into the machunkha to eat.

If you should happen to have any left over (not likely), thin it with milk when you reheat it, stirring it back to gravy consistency.

2 large green tomatoes and 3 large red ones make about 6 servings.

According to informed sources, fall arrives today at 5:18 PM EDT. The dance of the stars never ceases to amaze me, how every one knows its place.
I always approach the fall equinox with mixed feelings. Summer is all too short in my neck of the woods, but I do so enjoy the pleasures of a cozy place by the woodstove and the crisp air of September. I love apples, too, and having a teapot full of hot tea on the table.
We had our first frost a couple of nights ago. It was a light one. The squash and cucumber plants in the main garden had their leaves frozen, but the zucchini here in the kitchen garden next to the porch was hardly touched. The basil is bronzed on top, but not gone. I had to take out my tomato plants already. At the end of the summer they started showing signs of late blight. (That is the nasty fungal disease that caused the Irish potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century.) I took them out rather than let the disease develop and spread spores all around my garden. Our kitchen is full of bowls of green and red tomatoes, and fried green tomatoes are a regular menu item at the moment. I understand that this has been a bad year for the blight in some quarters, since it thrives in the weather conditions we had for most of the summer. This is the first time we have had to deal with it.
I found a dead dragonfly by the back door after the frost. I had no idea that these biggest dragonflies were painted with such amazing colors, blue and orange and black. They moved so fast, I thought they were just dark gray. I never saw a big one like this up so close before. He will find his way into the paintings, I am sure.
The photo is of the red maple just to the northeast of the house. It is always the first tree to turn red in the fall, and it is in full color now.

Here is the official promotional blurb about my solo exhibit at Frost Farm Gallery, which is coming up soon:


Frost Farm Gallery will hold a “First Friday” reception, meet and greet the artist, on Friday, October 2, 2009, from 5-8pm at the gallery located in the historic David W. Frost farm, 272 Pikes Hill in Norway. The exhibit will feature "Swift River Treaures: Original Naturalist Works by Betsy Bell." Live acoustic music will be performed by Brad Hooper.

In a recent conversation at the gallery, Betsy shared how art came to be such a large part of her life. “My artist grandfather gave me a sketchbook for my first birthday. I sold my first painting when I was in my early teens. Art has always been a part of my life. I have spent most of the last thirty-five years as a homemaker, mother and caregiver; even so, I always found time and resources for art."

When asked about her process of creating art, she replied, “I live in a 180-year-old farmhouse in the mountains of western Maine. Swift River Treasures combines my passion for making art with my enjoyment of being an amateur naturalist. I take so much delight in living here in the Swift River valley and learning about the treasures I find around me. For me, the art-making process is a way of capturing and sharing the beauty I see.” Betsy has a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of Maine at Augusta. Her work is in public and private collections in many parts of the country.

In addition to the exhibit, gallery-goers will experience the live acoustic music of Brad Hooper from Midnight at the Hilltop Hotel, a compilation of original songs that have been around for as long as twenty years. Reviewers are comparing his work to artists such as John Prine, Arlo Guthrie and Steve Earl. Brad will be selling and signing CDs after the show.

The event is free and open to the public. The exhibit and sale will continue at Frost Farm Gallery through Saturday, October 31. First Friday art openings at Frost Farm Gallery are in conjunction with the Commons Art Collective, McLaughlin Garden, and Painted Mermaid Gallery. For more information call 743-8041.

NEWSLETTER Summer 2009 No. 3

Greetings from the mountains of western Maine!

Waves of wildflowers have been going over our meadow all summer long. Now the white and yellow of midsummer has given way to the gold and purple of almost-fall. Summer in Maine is so ephemeral—blink and it’s gone!

August’s painting was quite a departure from my botanical work, but I just couldn’t resist it. When I caught the tiger swallowtail butterfly last June, I got one last photo of him with the sunlight shining through his wings. He looked like a stained glass window, with brilliant color all outlined in black. So I took my photo of the underside of the butterfly’s hind wing, played with it in Adobe Photoshop, and used it to develop a kaleidoscopic composition for an oil painting that is reminiscent of a Gothic rose window.

The circle has been a universal human symbol for the spiritual in art since the beginning of recorded history. It can be seen everywhere from Tibetan mandalas to French Gothic cathedrals. (Mandala is a Sanskrit word that means “circle,” and signifies a circular, symbolic art form.) I have been experimenting with the mandala as an art form for more than thirty-five years now, revisiting it from time to time in different formats. I never get tired of exploring its possibilities.

This one was painted on a shaped 20” diameter canvas with water-mixable oils. I developed a paper template from the digital file of my photograph and used it to produce the pattern. Painting it was very soothing, almost like meditation. I worked from the center out, repeating the patterns as I moved around the circle. The edges of the canvas are painted black to match the background, so it needs no frame.

My goal was to present the beauty of the butterfly’s wing in a manner that entices you to stop and look at it in a new way. Sometimes a fresh, different presentation gets your attention in a way that a straightforward image never could. This is my final homage to the tiger, and summer’s last hurrah.

From there my attention turned back to the botanical illustration. I have just started a page in my study book about evening primroses. They have been blooming in our back yard now for several weeks. A common biennial wildflower, Oenothera biennis has lemon-colored flowers that open in the evening. Oil made from the seeds contains an omega-6 essential fatty acid, the active ingredient that makes it useful in a number of medicinal applications. The ripening seedpods form a beautiful pattern clustered on the growing stems.

This month’s Collector’s tip comes from photographer Dirk MacKnight, of Andover, Maine: If you buy a digital photograph or art print, be sure that you know what you are getting. For best quality and longevity, get prints that were made on acid-free paper with pigment-based inks. Color photocopies on standard paper are not lightfast, and an artist should not be charging the same price for them as for a print on archival materials that will last 75 to 100 years or more. (You can see Dirk’s work online at his flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dirkphoto/ )

The free art card this month is a single tiger swallowtail, a straightforward bit of naturalist work. I have attached the file here for you to print. Art cards (or ACEO’s) are a collectible form of miniature art the same size as a baseball trading card. Print this one on good stiff photo paper, cut it out, and start your own collection, if you wish. I give you permission to print or reproduce this image as you choose.

For more information on “Swift River Treasures,” my artmaking process, or recent work, or to check out my blog, see my website at http://betsy-bell.fineartamerica.com. You can also search for me on fineartamerica.com as Betsy Gray Bell under the “Artists” button in the top menu bar. (The drop-down box under it has a search feature.) Fine Art America offers a print-on-demand service, matting, framing, and shipping.

For those of you who live in Maine, my recent work will be on display at Bruce and Adrienne Little’s Frost Farm Gallery in Norway, Maine, from October 2 to 31. The title of the exhibit is “Swift River Treasures: Original Naturalist Works,” and the opening reception is Friday, October 2 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. Brad Hooper will be providing live acoustic music that evening. For more information about the exhibit or the gallery, you can check out their website at www.FrostFarmGallery.com. I have begun posting the Swift River Treasures collection online on Fine Art America, but this will be the first time that the originals will be offered for sale.

Picasso says that an artist paints not to ask a question, but because he has found something, and he wants to share—he cannot help it—what he has found. (from Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle)

Thanks for joining me in the journey. I hope that you enjoy looking at the art as much as I have enjoyed making it! I would love to hear from you, too, so please do reply with comments.

Betsy