Loveliest of Trees

 

The last Friday of April is set aside annually in celebration of National Arbor Day, a holiday which encourages the planting and caring for of trees and other foliage.  According to our good friend, Wikipedia, it originated in Nebraska during the early 1870's and has since spread to a global level.

What better way to celebrate the greenest of holidays with a vertically integrated product: trees make paper, photographs are printed on paper, photographs on paper look FABULOUS on your walls!  See the logic there?

So in honor of the 140th Arbor Day here is a small forests' worth of the photography world's best trees!

Mitch Dobrowner: Wind Swept Tree

 

 

Maggie Taylor: Oh, Happy Day      |      Jerry Uelsmann: Untitled, 1969

 

 

Josef Hoflehner: Elephant Hill Pathway      |    Jeffrey Conley: Snow Covered Branches

 

Takeshi Shikama: Central Park #21

 

Jeri Eisenberg: Magnolia, No. 9

 

 

Susan Burnstine: Forever    |    Michael Crouser: Girl and Tree

 

Brett Weston: Holland Canal

 

   

Charles Grogg: Juniper Bonsai  |  Jefferson Hayman: Tree in Central Park  |  Keliy Anderson-Staley: Plum Tree

 

David Fokos: Haybales, Ripsa, Sweden

 

Henry Gilpin: Trees, Reflections    |    Dan Burkholder: Tree in April Snow, Catskills

 

Niniane Kelley: Palm

Brad Moore: Roosevelt, Huntington Beach, California

 

Pine-ing for any of these images?  Don't have a collection and looking for one to take root?  Already have one but looking to branch out?  Want me to stop with these ridiculous tree jokes? Don't be such a crabapple! Come into the John Cleary Gallery or give us a call and we'd love to help find that perfect photograph for you.

 

Artist: Bryn Terfel / Album: The Vagabond and Other English Songs

After the Fall

 

I’ve been meaning to do a Fall post for a while now, but since the word Fall is really quite meaningless here in the great nation of Texas then I thought now was as good a time as any.  Case and point… there is a forty degree difference between the expected high in Houston and Ann Arbor, MI for tomorrow.  At any rate, here is a menagerie of things that make me think “Fall.”

Subject to Change, by Maggie Taylor.  I mean come on, if ever there were a Mr. November in the Maggie Taylor twelve year calendar then this would be he.

 

Pianist/Comedian Victor Borge and baritone Robert Merill performing “Autumn Leaves”

I remember watching Victor Borge all the time on PBS fundraising drives when I was a kid and he has consistently made me laugh ever since then.

 

 

One of my favorite things about the change of seasons is the drop in temperature… the colder the better! Partly because I enjoy breaking out my coats and scarves but mostly because I can use my Pottery Barn faux fur throw without breaking into an instant sweat.  Seriously… this thing is amazing!

fur-mazing! (gross)

 

And finally, the advent of Fall means the approach of Thanksgiving and the wonderful inevitability of devouring a Greenberg smoked turkey!!!!  That’s right, these perfectly smoked—and mail orderable—birds out of our very own Tyler, Texas are one of my favorite things about the season. 

Oprah loves ‘em and, though that may be a deterrent for some of you, so should you!

 

Artist: Journey / Album: Frontiers

De fleurs

 

One of the perks of working at the John Cleary Gallery is that I have free reign to explore drawer after drawer of the gallery’s collection.  I have mentioned in a previous post my love of Maggie Taylor’s work and when I came across “The Patient Gardener” I was reminded of a song from Claude Debussy’s Proses Lyriques entitled “De fleurs” (The Flowers).

Maggie Taylor: The Patient Gardener

 

Debussy’s lyrics, which he wrote himself, are as follows.  (Translation by Faith J. Cormier via The Lied, Art Song, and choral Texts Page)

In the desolate green boredom of pain's hothouse, flowers surround my heart with their nasty stems. When will the dear hands return to delicately untangle them from round my head? The tall purple Iris cruelly violated your eyes by seeming to reflect them. They were the pools of reverie into which my dreams softly dove, absorbed by their colour. And the lilies, white jets of water with perfumed pistils, have lost their white grace and are but poor invalids who do not know the sun. Sun! Friend of evil flowers, dream-killer, illusion-killer, holy bread of miserable souls! Come! Come! Saving hands! Smash the windows of lies, smash the windows of evil spells, my soul is dying from too much sun! Mirages! Joy will never flower again in my eyes and my hands are tired of praying, my eyes tired of crying! In an eternal crazed noise, the black petals of boredom drip constantly on my head in pain's green hothouse!

But really… why reference a Debussy song and post the poetry without also putting up a stunning performance?  My friend Janai, whom I have mentioned here before, sang the set on her master’s recital at the University of Michigan a couple of years ago and her performance of this song in particular has managed to stay buried in my sub-conscience.  Pianist (and dear friend) Jeremy Reger also brings the requisite foggy lushness to Debussy’s accompaniment.

And as always I’ll add my caveat that the image above is only a representation of what it really looks like up close.  So come in the gallery and check out this piece or any others in our collection!

Artist: Janai Brugger-Orman, Jeremy Reger

A Snowglobe Christmas

 

Last night I went to yet another fabulous gallery row opening event at the John Cleary Gallery! It’s probably my favorite place in Houston and Catherine and the gang were just voted the best art gallery in the city.  I honestly could spend hours in there just going from photo to photo.

 

The gallery: (there actually were a lot of people there throughout the evening, I just took these after closing)

 

 

 

This time I actually remembered to get a picture of me and the hostess-with-the-mostest:

Catherine: (upon seeing me) “Well hello there Mr. Roberts, lookin’ all Kanye West on a Saturday night!”

Me: “Oh you know me and Kanye, we’re reeeeaaaaal close.  There’s nothing we like better than sittin’ around on a Tuesday evening listening to Stephen Sondheim and discussing Pottery Barn’s newest duvet covers. He loves a good pickstitch!!!”

Catherine: “Oh please, all he would do is talk about himself the whole time anyway.”

Me (lookin’ all Kanye) and Catherine (lookin’ all fabulous)

 

This new exhibit, aptly named “Deck the Walls” consists not of a singular photographer’s works, but of whatever the hell Catherine wants to put up. Following are my fav's of her fav’s (and please forgive the glare in the pictures… unlike the artists represented in the gallery, I am definitely not a pro!)

The Tree Show:

Jerry Ueslmann Untitled, 1969

Mitch Dobrowner Wind Swept Tree, 2006 (Archival pigment ink print)

 

Charles Grogg Bonzai 5 (platinum/palladium on Japanese gampi)

 

Not trees:

Jeff Charbonneau and Elliza French Dividing Suns (chromogenic print)

 

Elliott Erwitt France, Paris, 1898 (gelatin silver print)

 

Because of the John Cleary Gallery I have come to know—and fall in love with—the works of Maggie Taylor. For those of you who weren’t able to snatch up one of those twelve watches I begged asked for the other day, you can rectify this gift giving situation by buying me one of her prints!  K… glad we got that taken care of.

Girl in a bee dress

 

Just as you can’t get the whole experience by watching an opera on DVD as opposed to going to the theater, these snapshots are only a partial representation of the actual works themselves.  So as Hamlet so aptly puts it—GET THEE TO A GALLERY!! (or something like that)  Oh, and join their blog while at it to be kept up to date on when the next exhibition will be!

 

Artist: Pink Martini/ Album: Joy to the World