Director's Note 12/1/12
As we head into an unusually warm weekend for December, I would like to urge you to stop by for a visit. We have plenty going on this weekend, and for the rest of the month. I Cellisti, the String Academy of Wisconsin’s cello ensemble, will offer a concert on Saturday, and we’ll be making terrarium pendants at our Holiday Giftmaking Workshop on Sunday. We will have a few Lynden gifts available this month (memberships, gift certifcates, artist-painted T-shirts by Ester Partegàs, among others) and hope you will consider giving the gift of Lynden. Yevgeniya Kaganovich and the grow crew return to the upstairs studio on December 15 for a Crochet-a-thon: join them as they crochet necks and tubes for the grow organisms, or bring along your own crochet project and enjoy the camaraderie. And don’t miss the last dog day of this year on December 16 before we close for the holidays from December 24 through January 1.
Whether or not you make it for one of these events, I recommend the late afternoon hours at this time of year, when the sun is so low in the sky and the sunsets are dazzling. There’s a time each day when the sun slips below the roofline but is still above the trees to the west, and I’m suddenly blinded. It would be easy enough to pull the shade, but I’m loath to obscure my view. I know that the sun will drop behind the bare trees quickly enough, leaving a world of palpable shadow and reflection that one only experiences as the days become very short. Then, the scene framed by my window flattens out and colors—joyous, ominous, muted depending on the day—fill the piece of the sky I can see from my desk. It is a daily drama, and one I cannot resist.
Indoors, we are fending off winter darkness with an exhibition of paintings by Leo Michelson. Michelson, born into Riga’s Jewish community in 1887, created the eight paintings on view in the early 1950s after surviving two world wars, arriving in New York (he became an American citizen in 1945) and entering into a late and happy marriage. Seven of the paintings reflect his love of Paris—his wife was French, he had established his studio in Paris in the 1930s and he had become a French citizen before fleeing the Nazis—and Venice; the eighth, from 1954, is one of a lifelong series of portraits of flowers, a subject that he approached with renewed energy in his late 60s and 70s. Michelson was fascinated by light in motion, and developed a technique of fixing powdered color in superimposed layers to create a surface that resembles fresco or pastel. These eight exuberant works from the Bradley Family Foundation collection are luminously yellow, with scenes sketched atop the mass of color or forms outlined in fluid black lines.
As you may have noticed, we have launched our first annual campaign with Five Quick Reasons to Support the Lynden Sculpture Garden. Your support will mean a great deal to Lynden’s future. It is inevitable, as we embark on this fundraising enterprise, that we ruminate about why people should or do support us, and as a result we are collecting more reasons to support Lynden on our Facebook page. Feel free to add yours.
Plenty going on in January, much of it up on our web site now. I promise to keep you informed. And a note to artists: the 2012 Suitcase Export Fund opens on December 3, so get your application ready if you have an exhibition or screening coming up thereafter.
