Tag Archives: garden

Short Story (Flash Fiction) Of the Day, Staying Alert by Janet Gogerty

Posted on by Bill Chance

Without thinking she tiptoed to the wild corner of the garden, her haven created for butterflies and bees, not mythical creatures. A noise startled her and the dreadful cat from next door shot out from under a bush, across the lawn and up onto the fence. She felt a stab of fear, birds were not the only creatures in danger from the cat, she tried to dismiss the image of thin green legs dangling out of the cat’s mouth.

—-Janet Gogerty, Staying Altert

Young Faun, by Brenda Putnam, Dallas Arboretum, A Woman’s Garden

During these times I have been working on my shade garden in front of my house. I had to give up on our back yard – the five dogs that belong to us and the neighbor have trampled and dug and killed everything. They will not allow for new green shoots.

The front yard is dominated by large trees and the lawn is dying there from lack of sun. So under the trees I am building a small patio where I can sit and read in dogless quiet and am spreading mulch and planting ivy and ferns – other shade loving plants to follow. My neighbors on both sides have professional landscaping in front – it looks very organized and symmetrical. Mine is a jumble. Hopefully, in a few years, once everything has had a chance to grow a bit (shade plants grow very slowly) it may look natural but now it just looks confused.

It is interesting to start finding fiction inspired by the current lockdown.

Read it here:

Staying Alert by Janet Gogerty

from Times and Tides of a Beachwriter

 

There Is No Such Thing As Time

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Buddhist Center of Dallas

Buddhist Center of Dallas

Buddhist Center of Dallas

Seated Woman

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again.”
― Willem De Kooning

Willem de Kooning “Seated Woman”
Nasher Sculpture Center

Her Heart Were A Green Flame

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Doesn’t it seem as though her heart were a green flame? Perhaps it’s the cold green heart of a small green snake, with a minute flaw in it, the kind of small green snake that slithers from branch to branch in the jungle, passing itself off as a vine. What’s more, perhaps when she gave me the ring with such a gentle, loving expression, she wanted me to draw such a meaning from it some day.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

Spring Snow, Richardson, Texas

Spring Snow,
Richardson, Texas

We Got Close Once In New Orleans

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’s all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’m not jealous
because we’ve never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched.
—-Charles Bukowski

Fountain in a cool interior garden, New Orleans, Louisiana

Fountain in a cool interior garden, New Orleans, Louisiana

The sculptor carves because he must

Posted on by Bill Chance

Barbara Hepworth
Sea Form (Atlantic)
Bronze, 1965

Dallas Museum of Art, Sculpture Garden
Dallas, Texas

Sea Form (Atlantic) Barbara Hepworth (click to enlarge)

Sea Form (Atlantic)
Barbara Hepworth
(click to enlarge)

“The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms the material is found at once. […]
I have always preferred direct carving to modelling because I like the resistance of the hard material and feel happier working that way. Carving is more adapted to the expression of the accumulative idea of experience and clay to the visual attitude. An idea for carving must be clearly formed before starting and sustained during the long process of working; also, there are all the beauties of several hundreds of different stones and woods, and the idea must be in harmony with the qualities of each one carved; that harmony comes with the discovery of the most direct way of carving each material according to its nature.”
—- ‘Barbara Hepworth – “the Sculptor carves because he must”‘, The Studio, London, vol. 104, December 1932

“I have always been interested in oval or ovoid shapes. The first carvings were simple realistic oval forms of the human head or of a bird. Gradually my interest grew in more abstract values – the weight, poise, and curvature of the ovoid as a basic form. The carving and piercing of such a form seems to open up an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension, changing in accordance with the contours of the original ovoid and with the degree of penetration of the material. Here is sufficient field for exploration to last a lifetime.”
“Before I can start carving the idea must be almost complete. I say ‘almost’ because the really important thing seems to be the sculptor’s ability to let his intuition guide him over the gap between conception and realization without compromising the integrity of the original idea; the point being that the material has vitality – it resists and makes demands.”

“I have gained very great inspiration from Cornish land- and sea-scape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one’s sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a greater whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is vitally important to me. I cannot feel it in a city.”
—-Barbara Hepworth ‘Approach to Sculpture’, The Studio, London, vol. 132, no. 643, October 1946

Natural Sculpture

Posted on by Bill Chance

Vegetation growing on the wall near the entrance at the Dallas Museum of Art Sculpture Garden.
Dallas, Texas

Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas

Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas

“We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Cisco and Generac in Frisco

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor?”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure Of The Dying Detective

Sculpture by Mac Whitney, Cisco
Emergency Generator by Generac
Frisco, Texas

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Cicso, by Mac Whitney, Frisco, Texas

Cicso, by Mac Whitney, Frisco, Texas

“Invention is the most important product of man’s creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.”
― Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

Cisco, by Mac Whitney, Frisco, Texas

Cisco, by Mac Whitney, Frisco, Texas

“Is it a fact – or have I dreamt it – that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

More Blooms

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flower’s fragility, to it’s ethereal quality, something almost human ,in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldn’t destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-…”
― Irène Némirovsky

Dallas Blooms, Dallas Arboretum

blooms4

“The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing.”
― Dan Simmons, Drood