LOWER DOOR

FRUIT, n. s. [fructus, Latin; frwys, Welsh; fruit, French.]
1. The product of a tree or plant in which seeds are contained.

The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best,
Neighbor'd by fruit of baser quality. Shakesp. Henry V.

2. That part of the plant that is taken for food.

See how the rising fruits the garden crown,
Imbibe the sun, and make his light their own. Blackmore

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Opening a papaya: the contrast between the beautiful colored flesh of the fruit and the black mass of seeds is startling.

All fruit is best eaten in season and close to where it was grown.
Our son and daughter-in-law were married in Calcutta. A second reception was given in Jargram by her parents a few days later. The afternoon before the big party we relaxed in warm, December sunlight in their yard which was filled with fruit trees that would never survive in Michigan. A papaya was harvested, pared and served - nothing like the ones I thought I had enjoyed from our supermarket. It will remain in my mind as one of my ultimate eating experiences.

The meadowlark (Sturnella magna) eats seeds, insects and worms so the fruits it stands with are probably pretty safe - a peaceable kingdom. The plants involved in the drawing span the seasons from early spring violets and a Siberian iris, to early summer Queen Anne cherries and the beneficial blueberries that are harvested here in August.

In this drawing of a peach all the elements echo some aspect of each of the others.

The ovary walls of the flowers in the genus Prunus harden or lignify, creating their distinctive stones or pits which protect the seed inside. The peach has such a pit hidden inside it. The striated skin of this species has some of the aspects of the linear quality of the paper it is sitting on. The piece of paper is unique in that I made it in an experiment many years ago but it is traditional in employing one of the four classic patterns used in marbling - the stone design. The actual stones placed on the paper are from my collection of ringed rocks. They echo both the shapes and the linear aspects of the paper.

There are many kinds of china that are not just decorated with fruits and flowers but replicate shapes - for instance, cabbages that are soup tureens. In an antique shop in Shakespeare, Ontario I once saw a set of incredible cups in the shape of tulips. They were frighteningly expensive and certainly worth it but well beyond what I would ever have been able to justify spending. I still dream about them.

I have taken the idea a step closer to nature. Here a brilliant oriental poppy pretends to be a bowl containing a serving of raspberries. Currants are scattered around the table that the poppy sits on. An edible landscape.

HERBARIUM

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself."

William Blake, 1799, The Letters




An HERBARIUM, sometimes described as a museum of plants, is composed of plants collected, pressed, dried and organized for study and record keeping. My concept of an herbarium expands this idea to include drawings, books and objects that deal with botanical matters.
The cabinet for my Herbarium was built by Oscar Hoff. The wood is maple and the design echos the Sky cabinet.

The exterior of the cabinet is faced with drawings of fruit. Featured in this post are the eleven drawings on the top door.




FIGS: Despite the fact that fresh figs seem more available now than in the past, they retain a feeling of the exotic. Certainly the beautiful and complex interior is a surprise the first time one sees it revealed. They are among my favorite things too eat and to draw. They stand at the top of the cabinet, center stage, in a proud line.




PLUOT: Whereas the fig is notable for its antiquity, the pluot is a very modern fruit. It dates from 1989 and has an inventor, Floyd Zaiger. 70% plum and 30% apricot it is sweet and some varieties have an interesting dappled skin. My Dapple Dandy is sitting on a tile made by the Trent Tile Company of Trenton New Jersey before 1939.




LEMON: On a very hot day in Athens many years ago, after a thrilling wander around the Acropolis, I bought a glass of fresh unsweetened lemon juice from a well placed stand outside the Propylaea. I believe it was the most refreshing and delicious beverage I have ever tasted. The lemon is an amazingly useful fruit that can appear on any part of a menu.
The drawing references the importance of pollinators to the production of fruit. A bumble bee rests on the lemon and underneath is a Chinese plate with the pattern called 10,000 butterflies.






GRAPES: Our son, Arno, loves grapes most of all when they become raisins. His intake can be so impressive that when he was visiting cousin Gladyce in Santa Monica, California, she took to rationing him to one bowl a day, hiding the rest of her supply. When he returned from India for the first time he brought many varieties of raisins home for a "tasting" event. Some families celebrate with a nice bottle of wine. We get out the raisins.
The black grapes in the drawing are coupled with a beautiful maple leaf found on the day of purchase.






CHERRIES: Now that there are only short gaps in the availability of fruits and vegetables, cherries remain a brief luxury. Here in Michigan they arrive at the farmers' markets looking like baskets of jewels. Probably due to fragility, sour red cherries are rarely seen in the supermarkets. Or, perhaps, people are less willing than my husband to pit them with an eye to a beautiful pie.
Four of the rare cherries rest on a piece of Indian textile.





BLUEBERRIES: Warned against potential poisons, I was once reluctant to eat anything growing wild with the exception of blueberries. On Deer Isle in Maine I found enough of the tiny berries to make a pie using a recipe from the New York Times that included sour cream. The woman from whom we were renting a room asked me for the recipe. It may have been my greatest compliment as a cook.
As an artist I have used blueberries as dark, dusky blue punctuation marks in my drawings. Here on the cabinet they fill a ceramic cup which is covered with pop art comic book dots designed by Roy Lichtenstein and produced by the Durable Dish Company.






PEAR: The pear may be the most difficult fruit to get right. It seems to go from being hard to being over ripe in a matter of minutes. A perfect pear is rare and a true joy.
This pear is a Bartlett, a standard pear found in the supermarket. The wings that make it look capable of flight are those of a butterfly, Pieridae Pheobis philea. The moth in front is an Arctiidae.






POMEGRANATE: When I was still not a student in the art school at the University of Michigan I signed up for a design class. The first project required us to choose a fruit or vegetable and use it in as many ways as we could think of: line drawings, watercolors, abstractions using color patterns on the skin, cross sections that were printed, etc. I chose the pomegranate which seemed a very exotic fruit at the time. I loved the project so much it was one of the reasons that I switched my major from English to art.
This pomegranate sits on a mola from Panama that depicts a fly.






PLUM: Wrapping or containing things in a surprising way has always appealed to me. Here a black tulip acts as a cup which holds a black plum. The plum is hiding in plain sight.
There are so many wonderful ways to use plums but my favorite remains my grandmother's plum kuchen. When I bake the cake I can always feel her presence in my kitchen.




CRAB APPLE: Crab apples, often called "wild apples", are small, very sour and woody. As food for humans they are not very appealing except in their pickled form or turned into jelly. However, as ornamental trees they are dearly loved for their blossoms in spring and their fall crop of elegant looking fruit.
This specimen was harvested from a tree in our neighborhood. It sits on top of a stack of objects beginning at the bottom with leaves from a choke cherry tree, a tile sample and a small piece of rusted iron of unknown origin.





APPLE: Recent information no longer supports the idea that the modern apple had crab apple ancestors. There is evidence that it was a separate branch of the family which began in the Illi Valley in China and Kazakhstan, whose capital, Almaty, translates as "father of apples". I was delighted to learn that alma, my grandmother's name, is Hungarian for apple.
There are now thousands of species of apple. The one featured on the cabinet is a Gala which is backed by a design from the Grammar of Ornament and comes from the pages devoted to the Middle Ages.

CHAIR OF HERBS

"It seems that we must be content to attribute the belated origin of herbaria, and their diffusion from a single centre, to the humiliating fact that amongst mankind the inventive spirit is rare, while the spirit of imitation is universal."

Agnes Arber






Finding a leaf or flower pressed in a book is like acquiring someone else's memory of the past - a souvenir of a place, an event, a discovery or the attraction to something beautiful. The earliest known specimen of a pressed plant is a set of leaves from an olive tree which were found in an Egyptian pyramid from the time of Ptolomy (305 BCE). They are now in the herbarium at Kew Gardens in London.

The organized collecting and storage of dried plants into an herbarium can be credited to Luca Ghini (1490-1556) who used them to instruct students of medicine at the University of Bologna where he was "Chair of Herbs".




When he was not supported in an attempt to start a garden for teaching and medicinal purposes, he left for Pisa where he joined with Cosimo I de' Medici who funded the design and building of the oldest botanical garden in the world. Later they also built the botanical Garden of Florence.

Ghini is considered the father of botany in Italy and counted among his students the greatest names that followed.

In his honor I have placed a chair on the top of my herbarium.
I gave William Frcka a few measurements and a raw little sketch and, promptly, he brought me a charming wooden chair. I sprayed it green and adorned it with dried ferns and rosebuds, made a cushion for the seat, and placed a plaque with pertinent information on the back. It sits on a rug that is embroidered and covered with dried plant material.

The Astronomers

"The Sun with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do."

Galileo Galilei




GALILEO GALILEI (1564 - 1642)

Like moons around the sky cabinet I have placed my tributes to astronomers. The most famous is Galileo. Brilliant and a notable egocentric, he was aided by the introduction of the telescope to greatly increase our knowledge of the universe. Unfortunately for him the publication of his "Dialogue," which promoted the Copernican concept of heliocentrism, ran him afoul of the Inquisition. After his trial in 1633 he was put under house arrest for the rest of his life. The Catholic church did not lessen his condemnation until 1992 and then only partially.

However, there were posthumous changes to Galileo's position promoted on a secular level. In 1737 the naturalist/historian Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti had Galileo's remains moved from an out of the way part of Santa Croce to a mausoleum in the main part of the church. According to the director of the Galileo Museum, it was accomplished "symmetrical to beatification."

During the transition Tozzetti removed two fingers, a thumb, a vertebra and a molar in the same way that relics were removed from the bodies of saints. The middle finger has been on display in the Instituto e Museo de Storia della Scienza (recently renovated and renamed the Museo Galileo) since its founding by the University of Florence in 1927.

In October 2010 the index finger, thumb and molar, which had disappeared in 1910, came up for auction as "unidentified human remains." They were identified by an astute person based on the reliquary containing them. Everything is reunited in the museum with the exception of the vertebra which is at the University of Padua.

For my drawing I used as a model a finger loaned to me by Dr. Felix Rogers from a hospital teaching collection. It is a cleaner, more attractive example than the original but still reminiscent.

The finger points to the sun, alluding to the issues of heliocentrism and Galileo's discovery of the existence of sunspots. Church doctrine stated the heavens were incorruptible. Only the space between Earth and the moon was subject to change. To say that the sun could change in any way was another heresy.

* * * * *

"Many a man's nose was broken by his mouth."

Irish proverb

TYCHO BRAHE (1546 - 1601)

Earlier than Galileo and less well known is Tycho Brahe. Considered to be Danish, he was born in Scandia which is now part of Sweden. His observations are described as the most accurate and comprehensive before the invention of the telescope. He was recognized early for his talents. The king gave him the Island of Hven where Brahe built Uraniborg, a renowned research institute. He conducted his business there till the king died and he had disagreements with the successor. He moved on to Prague where he worked with his assistant Johannes Kepler. Kepler based his theories on Brahe's work.

If you are looking for weird tales and scandal, Tycho Brahe's is a bizarre and riveting story. Just knowing that he had a pet elk (or moose) who supposedly died of a fall while drunk, or that he employed a psychic dwarf who always sat under the banquet table could be enough, but there are modern theories of how he was murdered by mercury poisoning. There is even speculation that it might have been Kepler. Or, it might have been one of his own relatives hired by King Christian the IV who may have believed Brahe to have had an affair with his mother Queen Sophie. Perhaps Brahe was his father? There are theories that Shakespeare was inspired to write Hamlet by the stories.

The work I have done to represent him is based on the loss of most of his nose in a duel when in his early twenties. For the remainder of his life he wore a prosthetic nose made of either gold, silver or copper or a combination of gold and silver. I was lucky to have in my possession a plaster cast of our son Arno's nose, made by his twin brother, Barrett. Since both of our sons are excellent scientists it seemed appropriate for them to work on Brahe's behalf. I applied gold leaf to this nose and mounted it on a background created with the help of Robert Edwards. Robert has developed his own method of creating stunningly beautiful paintings using layer upon layer of printer's inks and varnish, with inclusions of beads, glitter, butterfly wings, flower petals and so forth. The better the light the more amazing the painting becomes. Robert walked me through the steps that helped me create a feeling of the night sky where I could float the nose.

* * * * *

"However long I live, life is short, so I work.
And, however important man becomes he is nothing compared to the stars."

Caroline Herschel

CAROLINE LUCRETIA HERSCHEL (1750 - 1884)

Robert Mirek, a friend and excellent artist, literally put the book Age of Wonder into my hands and told me to read it. Despite its weight I carried it on a long trip that included a lot of time on an airplane - time to read consistently for hours. It was an exciting experience as the book pulled together so much fascinating information about the scientists I have only known about in bits and pieces. It made the Age of Enlightenment more cohesive for me and introduced me to many new ideas and people. Caroline Herschel was one of those compelling figures.

Tiny (4'3") Caroline was kept as a house servant by her parents until she was called from Germany to England by her brother William in 1772. He earned his living as a musician and was also a self-taught astronomer who worked through the night. He engaged Caroline to teach voice lessons. She could have been a professional singer but chose instead to work with her brother building telescopes and spending nights recording William's observations of the night sky.

William Herschel's work was so profound that he was recognized by the government and was made astronomer to King George III, with an excellent stipend.

Caroline was also recognized for her importance to astronomy and was the first woman to receive a salary from the government, albeit very small by comparison. She was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Astronomical Society in 1882. No woman received that honor again until 1996. An asteroid and a crater on the moon are among the things named for her.

I chose to represent Caroline, the great observer who identified nine comets, with the eye of Caroline Rogers, another remarkable soprano.

Sphingid moths

"I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."

Galileo Galilei


I am very comfortable at night. It is my best working time. During the day it is hard to ignore the tasks that should be dealt with, but after seven or eight in the evening there seems less that is imperative and I am more at ease sitting down at my drawing table. Perhaps that is why I am more drawn toward moths than butterflies. Most of them fly at night.

When I was young I thought I had to choose "my favorite color" or my "favorite song". Now I can say that I love all colors and don't find any of them offensive. I love yellow and I love green and I love red and blue. I have no favorite song and no favorite city....but I do have a favorite insect. Or, rather, a favorite family, the Sphingidae, commonly called hawk or sphinx moths. The first one I remember seeing in the "wild" was hovering around our lilac bush at dusk. I was sure it was a hummingbird. Then I was sure it was a huge bee.

The Sphingids have very streamlined shapes with more narrow wings and robust bodies. I have looked at all the drawers with specimens of hawk moths at the University of Michigan and marveled at the complex patterns and amazing colors. I can't imagine why they are so dressy when they fly at dusk and into the dark but I am thrilled that they exist.

In the drawing of Sphinx Moths and Star Map I chose sixteen of my favorite specimens and coupled them with my version of a 17th century Dutch star map.
I am not good at identifying constellations in the night sky and I can't keep straight all of their complicated and sometimes goofy stories, but I am immensely charmed by the early drawings and actually hopeful of remembering some of the information stored in them.

In the corners of my drawing are four phases of the moon. The new moon is replaced by a black hollyhock which is a reminder of the link between the changes in the sky and the changes in the earth.

This drawing now hangs over the Sky Cabinet.

SKY CABINET INTERIOR

"Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel."

Samuel Johnson




The inside of the SKY cabinet's doors also have drawings - which will seldom be seen. I forget they are there and am usually surprised when I open the doors. The cabinet will function as a bookshelf like the piece of furniture it has replaced. I am starting a collection of things for the cabinet should there come a time when it no longer needs to hold books.

There is a small drawer which has begun to collect objects that relate to the night sky -
a small box of antique buttons that have images of the moon, a beautiful star ornament from India, a copper star-shaped cookie cutter and a rock with a natural image of a star.
Presently I am producing an artist's book that will reproduce images from the doors of the cabinet paired with poems and prose by writers I know.




The drawing in the top door is a combination of the Milky Way and a group of "migrating" birds. All the birds are from the collection of the Cranbrook Science Museum.

Several years ago while on a quest with my brother John to see the Tecumseh slab, a war stick in the museum collection, I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin Kelly who is in charge of the collections. In a bold moment I asked if I might be allowed to draw from specimens in the drawers of birds. Not only have I been allowed to draw but I have been allowed to check out birds the way one would check out books from a library. It is a unique opportunity for me to draw birds under the conditions that best suit me....at my own desk, with good light, an excellent pencil sharpener at my elbow and, most important, at the times that are good for me. My studio doesn't close and is often in operation until 1:30 am.

Migration is a fascinating concept and one I hope to learn more about. The few facts that I have learned are amazing. For instance, a bird can continue to fly while half of its brain is asleep. When that half wakes up the alternate side rests.



The bottom door of the cabinet features the Eastern Screech Owl, Strigidae Megascops asio.
The specimen I drew from is in the collection of the Cranbrook Science Museum.
This small owl is very common even in urban areas. One would, however, never see so many stars in the sky over the Detroit area where I live. I have been witness to that kind of display only when camping out west. Sleeping under the stars is one of the greatest pleasures I have experienced.

The comet is in honor of Caroline Herschel, a remarkable woman who assisted her more famous brother Sir William Herschel. On her own she discovered nine comets.

STARS

"How lovely are the portals of the night, when stars come out to watch the daylight die."

Thomas Cole



Our planet, Earth, is represented here by a number of plants and animals named for stars. We seem to accept the shape of the star as having points when what we see in the heavens are just pin points of light - oblate spheroids of hot gas. The points are probably references to the emission of light and appear in very early images.


SUGAR STARFISH resting on top of a WHITE FINGER STARFISH; both are very common and belong to the family Asteriidae, with Supernova remnant, SN1987a


SUNFLOWER STARFISH, Asteriidae Pycnopodia helianthoides, with Star cluster Hodge 301.



STAR FRUIT, Averrhoa carambola, with reflection Nebula Chameleon complex.


The spice STAR ANISE, Illiceae Verium, with the Star forming region DR21.



LONG- SPINED STAR SHELL, Asteriidae Astraea phoebia, with Emission nebula NGC346



The wildflower SHOOTING STARS, Primulaceae Dadecatheon medadia , with Supermassive black hole Sagittarius A.