Tag Archives: Maine

August 10, 2011

Edible Art

By daseger

While up in York for a long weekend I went to the Stonewall Kitchen company store to get some ingredients for a recipe and ran into a huge crowd of people and some absolutely stunning display gardens. The gardens are always beautiful at Stonewall, but this time they were particularly impressive: unusual combinations of colors and textures, perennials and annuals, vegetables and flowers. There were also screen-printed banners, indicating the tie-in between the Stonewall gardens and an ongoing art exhibit at the nearby George Marshall Store Gallery: From the Garden to the Kitchen. Part One of the exhibit was on display earlier in the summer; Part Two is on view now. So here we have another two-part (digital) exhibition: first the gardens, then the gallery.

Lots of Clary Sage, a very under-utilized grey garden plant.

A close-up of one of the banners in the gardens, depicting “Purple Podded Peas”, an archival pigment print in Lynn Karlin’s Pedestal Series. Below, more prints in the series, displayed at the George Marshall Store Gallery, and exterior and interior views of the Gallery.

The George Marshall Store is a Victorian building located on the York River, adjacent to the John Hancock Wharf and Warehouse. Both properties belong to the Museums of Old York, though the Marshall Store functions as an independent art gallery. I vaguely remember it operating as some sort of “ye olde” shop when I was a little girl, and today, the combination of river, old building and modern art makes the gallery a nice afternoon destination. Here are a few of my favorites from the current exhibition, although I definitely could have included many more pieces.

James Aponovich, Trasimeno Artichoke

Tina Ingraham, Rainier Cherries and The Grocer

Carey Armstrong-Ellis, When Vegetables Go Bad

Susan Wahlrab, Unfolding Fiddleheads

Rosalind Fedeli, Nine Bright Persimmons

Stonewall Kitchen Company Store gardens by JNL Inc. Landscaping: jnlinc.com; George Marshall Store Gallery, 140 Lindsay Road, York, Maine 03909. 207.351.1083

6 Comments | tags: Art, Garden, Maine | posted in Design

August 1, 2011

Tiny Street People

By daseger

I’ve received quite a few emails about a photograph of an installation of bronze bathers in the Hartley Mason Park in my hometown of York Harbor in a post from about a month ago, and I’ve been thinking (and looking) at those figures quite a bit myself. Here are a few more images as a reminder.

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about these little figures is that I neglected to mention the artist, Sumner Weinbaum, who has been active in the Seacoast arts scene for some time. Another reason is that they remind me of a photograph I purchased about a decade ago of another little bronze figure, placed on a McIntire fence here in Salem. The artist (who was local and whose name I cannot remember! It is nowhere to be found on the photograph; if anyone knows please tell me) cast the figure, took the photograph, and (of course) made the placement. Here’s an image, not very good, because it is a photograph of a photograph.

There’s something about really small human figures placed in real-sized settings that is quite captivating. I like the York Harbor bathers both because they are small and active, engaged in familiar human activities, but the little Salem figure (not quite as detailed) also look alive even though he’s not doing anything. This piece is also interesting because it’s kind of the reverse of the Renaissance man-is-the-measure-of-all-things ideal.

Two London-based artists have really run with the little-people-in-a-big-world theme. An anonymous artist who goes by the name of Slinkachu creates images of sequenced street scenarios with the miniature figures used in architectural models, and Isaac Cordal places his cement street figures on streets all over Europe. Here is a sample of Slinkachu’s work entitled Boys Own Adventures; you can find lots more at The Little People Project (Abandoning little people on the streets since 2006).

Cordal’s work has a strong environmental theme, as illustrated by these images (Remembrances from Nature) from his recent book, Cement Eclipses: Small Interventions in the Big City.

8 Comments | tags: Art, Culture, England, Maine, Photography, Salem | posted in Design, Home

July 20, 2011

Diverse Door Knockers

By daseger

We’re doing some work on our front entrance, or I should say Dennis (the man who seems to be able to do anything) is doing some work on our front entrance. Living in a double house means that if your neighbors paint anything that is immediately adjacent to your house, you must paint or be shabby by comparison! As you can see, our entry differs from theirs anyway, as the guy who bought our half of the house in the 1860s was determined to “update” it in as many ways as possible, and so we have a much more Victorian entrance. I like the window and portico feature, but as it juts out a bit there are always some weathering issues, which Dennis is addressing.

Looking at the front door focused my attention on its hardware. We really need a new doorknob and I’ve never been happy with the door knocker, although it seems to be a match to the one next door.

Any opportunity to ditch daily responsibilities and dash up to Old House Parts in Kennebunk, Maine to look at bins of door knobs and knockers is welcome, but first I thought I’d look around for some inspiration. So here’s my door knocker tour of Salem, beginning with the more whimsical door knocker creatures, familiar and a bit more exotic.

Some Arts-and-Crafts-looking ladies. The red door opens the Chestnut Street house which formally belonged to the Salem artist Philip Little. The same door knocker is clearly present (especially if you use the zoom feature) in a 1910 Frank Cousins photograph that I found in the great digital archive at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Some inanimate door knockers around town, including the more conventional (pineapple) and some unique (a harp?) examples. I like the “knocking hand”, though the Old House Parts website informs me that this is a Colonial Revival knocker, not quite right for our house.

3 Comments | tags: design, Home, Maine, Shopping | posted in Home

July 17, 2011

A Turned Out Tavern

By daseger

This major fundraising event for the Museums of Old York, the annual Decorator Show House, opened this weekend and runs through August 13. This is the 22nd Show House, and it’s a bit different from previous ones in that it is not a Shingle cottage on the coast but rather a former colonial tavern turned homestead in York Village. Very appropriate both for York and for Old York (as we used to call this 100+ year-old museum/preservation organization), which stewards 9 colonial structures.

The house that has been referred to as the Emerson House since its acquisition by a family of that name after the American Revolution began its life as the Woodbridge Tavern around 1719. It has been adapted and expanded in quite a dramatic fashion over the centuries, but you can still see the tavern origins in the house’s front rooms. I went to the preview party the other night and particularly liked the front paneled parlor, decked out in black-and-tan. Above that room is a “bedchamber” with an eighteenth (or early nineteenth-?) century stenciled floor which you can see peeking out from under its protective floor-covering.

A few pictures of the exterior: one from circa 1880, when the house was situated (like all old houses) right on the main road; it was moved back after the turn of the century and also considerably expanded, so much so that it almost resembles a Colonial Revival house rather than a Colonial one. The others I took last week. The doorknocker decorates a particularly beautiful tavern door with original hinges, which you can only see from the interior (and I wasn’t allowed to photograph!)

1 Comment | tags: Historic Preservation, Maine | posted in History, Houses

July 5, 2011

Independence Day Idyll in York Harbor

By daseger

We spent the long holiday weekend in my hometown, York Harbor, Maine, with family and friends. Part of the larger and older town of York, the Harbor is a former Gilded Age “summer colony” where wealthy families from Boston, New York and Philadelphia whiled away their summers in 20-room shingle “cottages”, most of which still stand. I grew up in one of these cottages, only partially winterized then and now, even though we lived in there all year long and my parents still do. Like much of coastal York, York Harbor was and is a very different, much livelier place in the summer, and it seems to have been specially created for a warm, sunny and celebratory time such as this past weekend.

Some very random views of York Harbor, past and present, beginning with displays of the weekend colors, on a meticulously restored building on York Street, our family house (front and back, morning and early evening), and in our neighbors’ patriotic garden:

More color, and more cottages:

The first (real) cottages in York Harbor, built in the early eighteenth century, today and in the 1920s.

Historic New England’s Sayward-Wheeler House (1718), where I interned in college.

Lots of antique cars were out and about this past weekend, including a BMW 2002 which I have long coveted.

The York Harbor Reading Room, built in 1910 as a place for men to read newspapers, smoke cigars, and generally escape their families, and some men doing just that from the New England Magazine of that same year.

Artistic impressions from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries: Martin Johnson Heade’s luminescent painting and small bronze beachcombers in the park overlooking York Harbor Beach.