It’s been a busy spring, with three classes at HSU/CR, and my Las Vegas project in full production.

I spent two weeks in Las Vegas in January, walking “a dashed line at the edge of Las Vegas.” This is literally where the city meets the desert. It is a place of destruction, construction, beauty, entropy. Piles of construction trash, fences, walls, and fortifications to keep water at bay (ironically); bullddozings, gravel plants, serene paths and ORV tracks, golf courses, the homes of the wealthy, the homes of the barely making it. My 7-mile walks were eventful, interesting, & beautiful, and I came away with intuitive maps, markings on published maps, natural and man-made souvenirs, color swatches, photos, and a prose narrative for each walk. These form the basis for my installation/exhibition at the Springs Preserve in September. Keep checking, lots more to come on that.

Family trip to NYC in March in time for Lindsay’s birthday. We walked all over the city (beautiful spring weather after we got through the major storm that made our trip there 36 hours long), enjoyed parts of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, saw “Fela!” on Broadway, spent a day at the Natural History Museum, messed around at Brighton Beach, saw Ross Bleckner’s paintings at Mary Boone, visited MoMA and the Tim Burton show & William Kentridge, the Whitney Biennial, and even took the train to Dia:Beacon on our final day. My family is incredibly supportive of my interest in art museums, let me tell you.

This is not to even begin to describe the amazing multi-cultural food! Spanish tapas, Turkish luncheon, Vietnamese apres-theatre, street food of all sorts, pizza to die for at Lombardi’s, and a fun trip to Brooklyn to Moto, kind of French-African in flavor, not to mention just regular American breakfasts. The change of scene was refreshing, enriching, inspiring and. . .no doubt, a bit hard on our cholesterol count.

After school ends next week, I anticipate being in the studio full time. Looking forward!

I’m in Las Vegas working on my project Periphery. It’s comfortable if you’re walking (60 degrees) and sunny! OK! I can handle that, especially when I hear it’s 19 degrees in Alabama. Here are some photos from the edge of Las Vegas.

A student forwarded me this inspiring music video about Love of Land from Bjork. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BML2JAFUIaw

Several of my good friends are included in exhibitions at the moment. An exhibition of Ferndale artist Jack Mays’ panoramic drawings of our town, “One More Line”, seems exactly appropriate for the circular Tom Knight Gallery of the Morris Graves Museum where it shows till November 8. Carrie Grant’s crisp film about Jack, “One More Line,” can be seen October 23 at 6:30 at the Morris Graves Museum, 630 F Street, in Eureka.

One of my mentors at SFAI, painter Jamie Brunson, has curated a beautiful exhibition, “Metaphysical Abstraction: Contemporary Approaches to Spritiual Content” at Berkeley Art Center, which includes mesmerizing paintings by herself as well as my classmates Lori Del Mar and Keira Kotler. I was able to enjoy this exhibition when I was in the Bay Area last weekend.

My colleague Julie McNeil’s complex paintings interweaving traditional Chinese mythology with the story of her adoption of a Chinese daughter grace, and I mean grace, the walls of Eureka’s First Street Gallery at 420 First Street as part of the show “Six Unruly Artists Paint the Town.” I don’t know exactly how this title applies to any of the artists or their work, but this thoughtful exhibition curated by HSU students is worth a visit sometime before it ends November 7.

Another Ferndale artist, Shawn Griggs, has appropriately been included in the Dia de los Muertos show “Eternal Sleep” at 1am:gallery in San Francisco, October 16-November 6. Shawn’s work at first seems lighthearted and full of humor but there is definitely a dark undercurrent worth exploring in it.

I’m delighted to announce my six-panel painting “Prospects” won Best of Show at the “Celebration of the Arts 2009 Juried Competition and Exhibition” at the Humboldt Arts Council’s Morris Graves Museum of Art. The juror was JoAnne Northrup, the San Jose Museum of Art’s Katie and Drew Gibson chief curator. The exhibition continues through the month and I urge you to attend. Read the Eureka Times-Standard’s article at www.times-standard.com/ci_13314423?IADID=Search-www.times-standard.com-www.times-standard.com.

Here’s an interesting article from the AP (through the local paper) concerning the importance of findings suggesting Ancient Egyptians had the chemistry know-how to extract madder from plants to use in their paintings:

AP
Monday, August 10, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) Four thousand years ago Egyptians had mastered the process of making madder, a red dye, according to a researcher who uncovered the earliest known example of the color still used today.

Refining a technique that allows the study of microscopic bits of pigment, Marco Leona of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was able to analyze the color of a fragment of leather from an ancient Egyptian quiver.

The discovery that the color was madder is the earliest evidence for the complex chemical knowledge needed to extract the dye from a plant and turn it into a pigment, Leona reports in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The find is some 700 years earlier than any previously known use of madder, which became highly popular in the Middle Ages and provides many of the red shades and glazes in the work of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

“Tracing the use of organic colorants offers a way to follow trade routes, identify relations among archaeological objects, detect forgeries and attribute works of art,” Leona wrote.

Leona refined a technique called Raman spectroscopy, which relies on the scattering of light to study materials. That process is not generally suitable for studying madder or some other dyes, but Leona enhanced the result using tiny metal particles that could amplify the findings and detect even very low levels of chemicals.

In addition to tracing madder, he was able to identify as kermes the red in the painting “St. John the Baptist Bearing Witness,” from the workshop of Francesco Granacci in the early 1500s in Florence, Italy. Kermes was a dye made from the bodies of insects and was common in Europe before the importation of cochineal from the New World.

And the red color in the Morgan Madonna, dated at between 1150 and 1210, turned out to be based on lac dye, which originated in Asia and may have been imported to southern Europe by Muslim traders.

This is the first documented example of lac dye in European art before the 15th century, according to Leona. He noted that this sculpture was originally housed in the French region Auvergne, which borders Provence, where commercial records from a few decades later record importation of lac.

Karen Trentelman of the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles welcomed the findings.

Such work demonstrates how “fundamental scientific research of works of art and cultural heritage materials can impact our understanding of past societies and cultures,” said Trentelman, who was not involved in Leona’s research.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the David H. Koch Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

On the Net:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: http://www.pnas.org

Back to Richard V. Francaviglia’s “Believing In Place: A Spiritual Geography of the Great Basin.” I don’t know how he wrote the entire book without one reference to Carlos Castenada. . .

The book opens with a quote from Einstein: “The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”  Toward the end, he quotes Yi-Fu Tuan: “Strange to think that the question ‘Who am I?’ can be answered by a landscape.”

Sandwiched between these two quotes runs a well-researched survey of spiritual sense of place, from Prehistoric petroglyph artists to Native animists, to Mormon settlers, to the atomic tests perpetrated on the southern Nevada desert during the 60s, to films set in the Great Basin (obviously a film buff, Francaviglia gives an intriguing personal commentary on the movie “Vanishing Point”).

In the end, the book resolves with a tribute to his wife, when Francaviglia romantically refers to her as his “There”. The personification of landscape morphs smoothly into landscapification of a person.

Sometimes kids in my classes, when I was teaching little kids especially, would forget my name. But they remembered the sense of it. I’ve been called “Mrs. Gold,” “Mrs. Crystal,” and, my favorite, “Mrs. Sparkle.”

Mrs. Sparkle is a sensation more than a person. A sparkling body of epiphanies. During the day she’s a sparkling mirage, and at night she lights up desert. Mrs. Sparkle is a “There”, person as landscape. . .I think she’ll fit right in at Burning Man.

Anyone have any aerial or satellite photos of dendritic drainages in deserts? Or at the edge of Las Vegas? Or even aerial shots of Las Vegas? Could you share them with me? I will only use them as resources for my paintings, no other use. Send them to me at eas@emilysilver.com. Thanks!

My heart is full from my reunion with my high school classmates. This group has seen history made together: Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Woodstock, the Vietnam War, the beginning of the women’s lib movement (we must have been almost the last high school class where women didn’t participate in any varsity sports), the Summer of Love. I had an inspiring trip.

I’m flying to Boulder this weekend for my high school reunion! Internet waves have been buzzing with excitement as the Boulder High School Class of **bleeep!** makes plans to celebrate the march of time! As usual, I’m planning to walk all around town to revisit my old haunts, not just BHS but the “Hill”, Beech Park and Mrs. Rose’s old place, Pearl Street, the CU campus and the former geology department, and of course my old neighborhood which is also the location of the newly-discovered Clovis site! [Check it out at: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uoca-1ct022509.php.]

Can’t wait to catch up with old friends.