Binomen Art - Cornus omeiense

Cornus spelled out with bracts and flowers
 

This post’s binomen art subject is a member of the Cornus (Cornaceae, Dogwood Family) called Cornus omeiense ‘ Summer Passion’ COPF. Right up to writing this post we kept calling this tree Cornus kousa and then we found our notes on the purchase of the tree and discovered it’s true name. C. omeiese was introduced by Piroche Plants in 1990 from China. The Piroche web site describes the tree as:

Evergreen Dogwood 7-10m (23-33ft) USAD Zone: 7 Outstanding, glossary foliage and coppery-red new growth. 7-10 cm (3 - 4”) creamy-yellow flowers in June.

The “flower” is really the white bracts with the real flower in the middle. The fruit ressembles a raspberry in shape and color and comes later in the year.

The generic epithet - guessing here - refers to the location of where it was discovered, Mount Omei, Leshan, Sichuan, China. One common name for it is Mount Omei Dogwood.

Cornus mas or Cornelian Chery is the type species of Cornaceae. The generic name cornus, according to Quattrocchi, has its origin in “[t]he Latin name for the cornelian cherry, Cornus mas L.; Greek keras, Latin cornu, us “horn”, Akkadian qarnu “horn,” Herbrew qeren “a horn, point, peak.” The Learn2Grow site’s article on Cornus mas site gives more clue to the reference to horn:

The Latin word “cornu” describes hard and tough objects, such as the horn of a goat. From this root word we get “cornea” (due to the toughness of the lens of the eye), “cornet” (the shape of the instrument resembles the trunk shape) and Cornus, which Carolus Linnaeus, founder of the ‘binomial system of nomenclature,’ used when he established the genus name for dogwoods.

We planted the C. omeiense in 1997 when it was about 12 feet tall. We almost lost it one winter under a heavy snow which bent young plant to the ground. Now, 15 or so years later it is about 25 feet tall and is low maintenance. We don’t water it, we don’t fertilize it. It does drop a lot of leaves - though it is evergreen - and so cleanup underneath it is in order every few months. From inside the canopy, looking up the main trunk, there are a lot of dried, dead twigs and branches, so that view isn’t pretty unless you are a bird or squirrel perhaps. The real beauty are the mounds of foliage and flowers viewed standing away from the tree.

Cornus Spelled with Gold Sharpie (left) and Non-Graffiti Flowers (right)

Cornus Spelled with Gold Glitter Glue (left), and Mounds of C. omeiense Foliage and Flowers

Dry Storeroom no. 1 by Richard Fortey

Cover of Dry Storeroom no. 1 (left), British Museum 2001 – People Looking at an Easter Island Moai (right)

If you are a museum junkie or even the occasional museum visitor, then Richard Fortey’s book Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum will likely interest you. In the book, Fortey, writer and former paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, is your guide to the inner workings of the museum. In the book, you go behind the public spaces and into offices and forgotten corridors. Colorful anecdotes about people and events are part of the story explaining how science works, how science moves forward slowly but surely based on the work of dedicated people - famous, infamous, or neither. The book is stuffed with interesting facts, like the titular storeroom. For example, there is the story of Geoffrey Tandy, seaweed expert, and his role in World War II due to the similarity of the words cryptogam and cryptograms. “The code was cracked, thanks to the fact that the word Linnaeus used for organisms reproducing by spores was but one letter different from the word describing messages written in code.” (Location 2557. Chapter 5: Theatre of Plants.)

In Chapter 1, Behind the Galleries, Fortey starts with the interesting quote “All our lives are collections curated through memory. We pick up recollections and facts and store them, often half forgotten, or tucked away on shelves buried deep in the psyche.” Fortey concludes the chapter and completes the thought with “We are all our own curators.” This is an idea that has strong resonance with us. This blog, Travelmarx, is the visible tip of a much larger iceberg (storeroom) of a life of capturing, organizing, and curating events, people, and knowledge that comes into our life. Welcome to the Travelmarx museum or maybe it’s just a cabinet of curiosities for now.

What is storeroom No. 1? It’s a room in basement of the Natural History Museum that contains a “motley collection of desiccated specimens.” Fortey draws the connection between the storeroom and the inside of one’s head, the room is the physical analogy for the jumbled room of memory. The memories make the person and so the storeroom makes the museum, in a sense. Fortey unravels the behind-the-scenes working (and at times intrigues) of the museum with the storeroom as a touch point.

In Chapter 2, The Naming of Names, Fortey talks about the foundation of the museum as we know it today under the leadership of Richard Owen (famous for coining the term dinosauria and being an outspoken critic of the theory evolution by natural selection). In that time period, the “Victorian sense of self-improvement through knowledge” was an important consideration for designing the museum. Later in the chapter Fortey writes: “The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world. Museums grew up everywhere, as a kind of symbol of seriousness.” While this growth had its darker side as Fortey points out, the idea of self-improvement by going to a museum is more than a pleasing thought to us; we routinely seek out museum experiences to learn and more importantly be inspired.

At quite a few points in the book, Fortey talks about how the Natural History Museum and other similar museums have changed in time and what might lay in store in the future for them, in particular in regard to the Internet.

• On the prevalence of Internet search engines to pull information from all sources, good or otherwise: “What these images do not necessarily have is the imprimatur of somebody who really knows their stuff, because there is little quality control on the identifications placed on the web.” (Location 2722. Chapter 5: Theatre of Plants.)
• Musing on the role of the Internet in the potential return of the modern, botanizing vicar. “If the early phase of systematic learning was mostly powered by privilege, the middle phase by support from government for professionals, maybe the third phase will be immensely democratic, and driven by the freedom of information exchange thrown up by the web.” (Location 4558. Chapter 9: House of Muses.)
• On watching BBC1 Horizon programme about the Natural History Museum broadcast on 7 September 1970 and realizing that he didn’t remember some of the people featured in the program and that worked at the museum at the same time he did: “In a strange way this demonstration of the limitations of memory proves the importance of collections in museums. They defy time; they transcend what any one scholar might make of them; they are outside our own little personal histories.” (Location 3830. Chapter 8: Noah’s Ark in Kensington.)

Rothko: Portland Art Museum

Entrance to the Portland Rothko Exhibit (left), Rothko Self-Portrait –1936 (middle), Hierarchical Birds – 1934 (right)

Watching People Watching Rothko at the Portland Art Museum, May 2012

The exhibition Mark Rothko was at the Portland Art Museum from Feb 18 to May 27, 2012. We caught the exhibition in its last few days. The exhibition featured 45 works by the Russian-American artist Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970). Rothko (born Marcus Yakovlevich Rothokowitz) emigrated from Russia (now Latvia) at the age of 10 and came to Portland, Oregon. He would return to Portland several times throughout his life. Rothko’s first museum exhibition was hosted by the Portland Art Museum in 1933-1934. And, the recent exhibition is the first retrospective of his work staged in Portland.

The exhibit was compact, with just a few interconnected rooms, but it did not disappoint. In the exhibit, Rothko’s works were arranged chronologically so you could really see how his style changed, from figurative, to surrealism, to transitional “multiform” paintings, and finally to his “late” period of stacked, translucent rectangular forms.

We were unfamiliar with some of Rothko’s early work, in particular his subway series with their attenuated figures and bleak settings. And even more surprising were the works in the early 1940s that deal with myth. An exhibition description described this Rothko period as

1941-1943 “Works closely with [Adolph] Gottlieb to develop an aesthetic based on Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian myth. They share an interest in Jungian and eternal symbols, the power of myth, and psychological content in art.”

It was fun to see and perhaps would have been pleasing for Rothko to see people standing before his late period works, lost in the expanse of color. There is something undeniably powerful about the floating color fields. In the book Mark Rothko by Jeffrey Weiss et al., Rothko is reported on one occasion to have advocated a viewing distance of eighteen inches. For some of Rothko’s works the effect can be like getting lost in the color.

After the exhibition we purchased the book The Artist’s Reality - Philosophies of Art. It is a collection of essays by Rothko discovered in 1988 and eventually organized and edited by his son Christopher Rothko and published in 2004. The essays are estimated to have been written in between 1940 - 1941. In the essays we get a peek at Rothko’s ideas on art, beauty, myth, and more. We are warned in the introduction that “Rothko has no patience for anything that did not aspire to the highest ideals.” and “[h]is own feeling of deprivation adds an extra bite to his words.” For example, in the essay Art as a Form of Action, he states: “In fact, the man who spends his entire life turning the wheels of industry so that he has neither time nor energy to occupy himself with any other needs of the human organism is by far a greater escapist than the one who developed his art.” (We read this as we sat, early one morning before heading off to one of those wheels.)

Honestly, the thoughts expressed in the essay are beyond us and are for scholars of Rothko. However, the introduction is a good read and filled in some of the background we were missing. We also suggest watching Simon Schama’s Power of Art (2007) Rothko episode.

In the end, our reaction to Rothko’s late pieces remains the same as the day we walked into the Rothko Rom at the Tate Gallery: wonder, sadness, hope, peace, agitation - emotion and feeling - not really thinking, but feeling and emotion. Yes, at times, the colors are pleasing to look at but that’s more an aside. Hopefully, Rothko would be pleased. Schama in the Rothko episode says this of the viewer’s reaction: “emotionally stirring, sensually addictive”.

To visit the exhibition, we took a day trip to from Seattle to Portland, following the bone-rattling and noisy Interstate-5 for a couple of hours each way. A bright spot was finding a nice French restaurant in Olympia called La Petite Maison where we ate at on the way back.

Milton Avery - Bathers, Coney Island – 1934, An Important Influence on Rothko (left), In the Middle of a Red Canvas (right)

Entrance to a Subway – 1938 (left), Subway c. - 1937 (right)

Three Rothko Works Showing the Progression of His Work in One View (left), Untitled 1941-2 (right)

The Artist’s Reality – Philosophies of Art Front (left), Back (right)

Fremont Dragon

 
On the way back from the Fremont Sunday Market - where we go to eat Sunday afternoons - we came back by way of the small alley (between N 34^th and N 35^th) behind PCC and saw this mural of a dragon, the Fremont Dragon.

Lonesome George - Adiós

Lonesome George Photographed January 4, 2012

El Solitario George or Lonesome George died today. We saw him back in January 2012 one of countless tourists visiting the Galápagos and passing by his pen. The sign near his pen read:

Lonesome George is the last survivor of the dynasty of land tortoises from Pinta Island. He was found in December 1971 and taken to the Charles Darwin Research Station in March 1972. All efforts to find other specimens from that island have been in vain. He is now sharing his pen with two female tortoises of the population from Wolf Volcano.

Scientists estimate that George was about 100 years old and that his subspecies (Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni) had become extinct. George’s carapace or shell is saddled-shaped which means that his species had to reach their necks up high to get at food - typical of tortoises found on drier islands. Tortoises with dome-shaped shells get their food close to the ground. The name of the islands comes from the word galápago from the old Spanish name for saddle, inspired by likely by the site the saddle-backed tortoises like George.

Silly yes, but when I saw George for the first time and now when reading the news of his death, a Rickie Lee Jones song comes to mind. The song is A Face in the Crowd from her 2003 album The Evening of My Best Day:

I know what it takes to be loved by you
Talk like you talk
Think like you do
You never were human so
How could you know?
We fall so hard, we can’t let go

I am the last of my kind in this town
Everyone else has gone underground…

You can find our trip overview Selected Plants of the Galápagos Islands.

Sign Near Lonesome Georges Pen (left) and a Distribution of the Galapagos Giant Tortoises at the Charles Darwin Foundation (right)

Lonesome George Photographed on January 4, 2012

Monique Lofts - NKO Mural

Crystalline Forms on the North Wall of the Monica Lofts
    
The mural on the north wall of Monique Lofts, a Capitol Hill condo between Pike and Pine streets on 11th Avenue), was created as a response to the routine tagging that occurred on the building. The thinking is that if respected graffiti artists, in this case Scratchmaster Joe (aka Joe Martinez) and partner NKO, created a piece of art on the besieged wall, then they would less likely be the target of tagging. The piece was finished in September 2008 and when we passed by it on this sunny Saturday in May 2012, it looked great.

The 100 foot high by 65 foot wide mural sports crystalline geometries which grow on the building. The epiphytic-looking jagged shapes leave a fair amount of the building’s concrete showing and result in a spacious feel to the mural.

Concrete and Mural