Happy beginning of Summer. Celia Thaxter, Rachel Carson, Thank you for Service, lives lost, and First Line Responders. Winslow Homer, Artists of Appledore Island, Writers, Painters and Thinkers. Childe Hassam Impressionist
Tuesday
5/26Memorial Day has passed.
Thank you to all who have served and given the Ultimate debt of their lives for our Freedom.
Thank you to All who have contributed to the Mission of Front Line for the Covid19 Pandemic.
Thank you.
The beginnings of openings and Summer Adventures took place here on Cape Cod this weekend.
More people ventured out and took advantage of the incremental openings happening around town. Hope is palpable.
pal·pa·ble | ˈpalpÉ™b(É™)l |
adjective
1 (of a feeling or atmosphere) so intense as to seem almost tangible: a palpable sense of loss.
• plain to see or comprehend: to talk of dawn raids in the circumstances is palpable nonsense.
2 able to be touched or felt: the palpable bump at the bridge of the nose.
DERIVATIVES
palpability | ˌpalpəˈbilədē | noun
ORIGIN
late Middle English: from late Latin palpabilis, from Latin palpare ‘feel, touch gently’.
QUARANTINE RESTRICTIONS ARE STARTING TO EASE AND PHASES OF REOPENING ARE BEGINNING
The National Parks are beginning to reopen….
We want to acknowledge and thank the past, present, and future generations of all Native Nations and Indigenous Peoples whose ancestral lands we travel, explore, and play on. Always practice Leave No Trace ethics on your adventures and follow local regulations. Please explore responsibly!
FIELD TRIP TO JAPAN to see a Van Life Exploration.
Wabi Sabi
MUSIC
Violin or fiddle with the Boston POPS
ART and INSPIRATION
 |
| Celia Thaxter in her Garden, 1892, by Childe Hassam |
Isle of Shoals, and Appledore Island, Near Portland, ME
Celia Thaxter
Celia Thaxter
| |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Celia Laighton June 29, 1835 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, United States |
| Died | August 25, 1894 (aged 58) Appledore Island, Isles of Shoals, Maine United States |
| Occupation | poet, writer |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works | An Island Garden, Among the Isles of Shoals[1] |
| Spouse |
Levi Thaxter (m. 1851)
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| Signature |  |
Celia Laighton Thaxter (June 29, 1835 – August 25, 1894) was an American writer of poetry and stories. For most of her life, she lived with her father on the Isles of Shoals at his Appledore Hotel.[2] How she grew up to become a writer is detailed in her early autobiography (published by St. Nicholas), and her book entitled Among the Isles of Shoals.[3] Thaxter became one of America's favorite authors in the late 19th century. Among her best-known poems are "The Burgomaster Gull", "Landlocked", "Milking", "The Great White Owl", "The Kingfisher", and "The Sandpiper".[4]
Early years and education[edit]
Celia Laighton was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, June 29, 1835, but the family moved soon after to the Isles of Shoals, first on White Island, where her father, Thomas Laighton, was a lighthouse keeper of the Isles of Shoals Light, and then on Smuttynoseand Appledore Islands. The gradual addition of summer visitors to the fishing population came slowly, Thaxter's father being the first to establish anything like a modern hotel.[5]
The means of education were comparatively remote, and the permanent society of the islands for the greater part of the year offered very limited resources for a bright child.[5] During the period of 1849–50, she attended Mount Washington Female Seminary in South Boston.[6]
https://www.pinterest.com/sharoni3003/my-love-of-celia-thaxter/
American Impressionism was a style of painting related to European Impressionism and practiced by American artists in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. American Impressionism is a style of painting characterized by loose brushwork and vivid colors. The style often depicted landscapes mixed with scenes of upper-class domestic life.
ARTIST
Frank W. Benson, Eleanor Holding a Shell, North Haven, Maine, 1902, private collection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Weston_Benson
ARTIST
Childe Hassam
who did the above painting of Celia Thaxter on Appledore Island, Maine
who did the above painting of Celia Thaxter on Appledore Island, Maine
Childe Hassam, in full Frederick Childe Hassam, (born Oct. 17, 1859, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Aug. 27, 1935, East Hampton, N.Y.), painter and printmaker, one of the foremost exponents of French Impressionism in American art. Hassam studied in Boston and Paris (1886–89), where he fell under the influence of the Impressionists and took to painting in brilliant colour with touches of pure pigment.
1889
Watercolor
Homer was born into an old New England family. When he was six, the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, then a rural village, where he enjoyed a happy country childhood. His artistic inclinations were encouraged by his mother, an amateur painter. When he was 19, he was apprenticed to the lithographic firm of John Bufford in Boston. At first most of his work involved copying the designs of other artists, but within a few years he was submitting his own drawings for publication in such periodicals as Ballou’s Pictorial and Harper’s Weekly. In 1859 Homer moved from Boston to New York City to begin a career as a freelance illustrator. The following year he exhibited his first paintings at the National Academy of Design.
With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Homer made drawings at the front for Harper’s, but, unlike most artist-correspondents, he dealt more often with views of everyday camp life than with scenes of battle. As the war dragged on, he concentrated increasingly on painting. In 1865 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. Admirably capturing the dominant national mood of reconciliation, his Prisoners from the Front (1866) was warmly received when exhibited at the academy shortly after the war ended.
Although Homer’s studio was in New York City, the city was rarely his theme. During the warm months he traveled to Pennsylvania, the Hudson River valley, and New England, camping, hunting, fishing, and sketching. In 1866 he went to France for about a year. Although influenced by French naturalism, Japanese prints, and contemporary fashion illustration, his work after his return to America did not change markedly, except that his palette was generally somewhat brighter. Such early pictures as Long Branch, New Jersey (1869) and Snap the Whip (1872) depict happy scenes, the former of fashionable ladies promenading along the seashore and the latter of children frolicking in a meadow after school. In a few early pictures a disquieting note of human isolation is struck, premonitory of Homer’s later, more-powerful work.
LITERATURE
Generational connection, life Goals
If you see Lupines as you drive along the vistas in Maine, Miss Rumphius may have scatters these seeds as her 3rd mission in life.
The Literary Gardener
By Carol Howard
Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius (1982) is a picture book sure to charm gardeners and artists who enjoy reading to children or grandchildren. There is a vicarious pleasure in lingering over Cooney’s illustrations of an eccentric, middle-aged heroine, Miss Rumphius, hiking with her cat along fields brimming with spires of the pink, purple and blue lupine flowers whose seeds she has sown. A childhood admonition from her grandfather, which Miss Rumphius remembers throughout her life, holds wisdom that a gardener may readily affirm: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”
Casting lupine seeds here and there throughout her seaside town is Miss Rumphius’ gift of beauty. As the years pass by, the “lupine lady,” as she becomes known in old age, lives in a cabin overlooking the ocean and tells her story to the next generation of self-aware and environmentally conscious children. They learn that she was the grandchild of an immigrant artist who charged her with aesthetic responsibility. They learn, too, that her grandfather supported her education and accepted her desire to see the world at a time when women’s options were often limited to the domestic sphere.
Readers may sense that the unconventional biography of Miss Rumphius is too idiosyncratic not to be based in real life. The fictional character is, in fact, modeled on a woman named Hilda Edwards Hamlin, who in 1904 immigrated to coastal Maine from England. Unlike Miss Rumphius, Hilda married and had children, but separated from her husband in 1926. Like Miss Rumphius, Hamlin pursued a scholarly career and traveled widely. She eventually settled into long walks and gardening near her cabin in Christmas Cove, on Maine’s Damariscotta River, not far from where the author Barbara Cooney lived. Both women were Smith College alumna, although Cooney was a generation younger than Hamlin. One of Hamlin’s sons, Wilfred Hamlin, inherited his mother’s artistic and scholarly interests and came to study at Black Mountain College in the early 1940s.
Hilda Hamlin at first imported her lupine seeds (Lupinus polyphyllus, the “garden lupine”) from her native England. As the plant is native to North America, she likely purchased the seeds bred by George Russell, a British horticulturist whose tireless cultivation of Lupinus polyphyllus over the first half of the twentieth century gave him international fame and made his lupines a sought-after plant. Hamlin probably started out with later versions of Russell’s original hybrids—sensational plants with densely packed clusters of red, yellow and orange blossoms. As she preserved seeds from the mature plants and scattered them throughout the countryside, the showy hybrids must eventually have reverted to the loosely clustered flowers of subtle blues and purples that have naturalized along the Atlantic coast.
Lupines were originally introduced into various locales not for their beauty, but because their nitrogen-fixing properties strengthen soil. (In some areas today, they are considered invasive.) The summer lupine display to which Hilda Hamlin contributed began in the 1950s, when she was in her sixties. As she lived well into her nineties and was known to have scattered seeds in old age, it is fair to say that the real “lupine lady” fulfilled her promise to make the world a more beautiful place.
Carol Howard is Dean of the Faculty at Warren Wilson College.
FIELD TRIP ENGLAND
A wedding photographer took a course during Corona19 and found a possible lost Stonehenge like structure.
PROPAGATING AND GROWING
How to grow a pineapple from a top.
SCIENCE and INSPIRATION
Rachel Carson's Scientific Observation of the Natural World Brought about the First look at Pesticides, DDT and the Loss of Life.
In 8th Grade Summer my Summer Reading Included Silent Spring.
A look at evolution as the Pesticides that were being used were Silencing the World through Death of Birds in particular.
In 8th Grade Summer my Summer Reading Included Silent Spring.
A look at evolution as the Pesticides that were being used were Silencing the World through Death of Birds in particular.
Wrote Silent Spring, Researched in Woods Hole, MA, and her Ashes Rest in Southport, ME
Woods Hole, MA. Statue
Newagen Inn, Southport, ME where her ashes were spread after she died from Breast Cancer that Metastasized.
Enjoy this beautiful day.
Eliza
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