The Javelin: a classical weapon now suburban sport

cherry blossoms on a dying tree

why are so many spring flowers pink?

ballerinas

spring: promises

springtime debris floating on a pond

Final Act: exiting the stage

a bow and applause or unnoticed?

Seeds: static and in motion

under the lens

suspended without support

the tender leaf was born with spines

just as its progenitor was covered with sharp pointed needles
nature looks after its own

traumatized

Polluted Drinking Water: Tenafly, NJ, 07670 PETROCHEMCALS

I was almost felled by the stench of gasoline and or other varietites of petrochemicals that were leaking into the Tenakill Brook, Tenafly, NJ 07670, heading directly to United Water, where our town's water is processed for drinking, bathing and other uses in our homes. This is truly dangerous; a carcinogen and deadly. If the fumes were sufficient to make me feel faint, what happens when some of these chemicals remain in the water and we ingest them? Would you feed your baby, toddler, adolescent gasoline? Would you drink it and would you give it to an ill or elderly person. Clean our waterway and stop dumping these chemicals into the Tenakill Brook. Now that we have rid ourselves of geese let us turn to the pollutants that befoul and poison our water.

Tenafly 's Polluted Drinking Water, Bergen County, NJ 07670

seen in Tenakill Brook, a feeder to United Water, the source for Tenafly, New Jersey's water supply.
Do you want your family to drink this disgusting matter? What is it. Seen directly opposite Tenafly High School. See picture for location, on east side of school, near the Tenafly High School's Parking lot.

The Triumph of Spring: 2012

as if it were yesterday

greyness: when ash began to fall

and the promise of spring began to fade

the homely beet: behold

The World Upside Down: free floating

Beate Arnswalder Caspari-Rosen, MD, born 1910, March 14

In Rembrance
my dearest mother

Emma: more photographs

saying goodbye; Emma during the last month of her illness, and Emma with her favorite pillow during her health

Emma: more photographs

Emma: in memoriam, our beloved scottish terrier + March 9, 2010

Emma was a curious creature, both outgoing and shy, puppy wild in her first year and then settling down with her older brother Aesop, into a lengthy companionate relationship. Many were the things they shared together, yet each had their own preferences. Aesop preferred to be outside in the garden, Emma indoors until twilight when she sat on the deck and looked into the greyness of approaching darkness. Aesop died before Emma: cancers took him. And Emma developed diabetes and cancers. Looking back, though she had the best medical care possible, I would have chosen differently now. As I review pictures I see that prolongation of life was more for our benefit. Now that I have unremitting pain that cannot be relieved I understand her plight differently. In the end she was blind, probably could not hear or smell and her body pains and aches were non-ending as she went through the pharmacopia of medicines. From such a lively being to one in the end who was barely able to stand I regret our decision. Sooner is preferable to later if one cares for the wonder that one loves and admires, who is the being apart from us, yet who depends ultimately on us for well-being, care, comfort. Nevermore will this happen to another pup who is one of our family. Dearest Emma, we were so fortunate to have you with us and now you reside in the delight of a world without sorrow and pain with your brothers Aesop and Fala and your sister Kate, our very first. It is always mild spring and fields strewen with flowers are where you play ; a stream runs through the land and trees shade you when it is time to rest and seek cooling shelter. Emma and her pillow, a soft green pillow that she adored. We said goodby to her before she was injected and then her spirit departed to become one again with her body in the paradise of canines.

March 7, 1963: joy lost, suffering, fracturing, dissolving

all is in flux,: dividing day from night, earth from sky, water from air

A Sea Creature

The Lonsdale Produce Market by Susan Koslow

The Lonsdale Produce Market

Susan Koslow

Introductory Comments

The Lonsdale Produce Market is a major new addition to the oeuvre of the great Flemish artist Frans Snyders (1579-1657), whose magnificent still- life and animal pictures, both large and cabinet-sized, impressed his contemporaries and established models for future generations. This market scene came to light recently, in 2011. Although it was in the collection of the earls of Lonsdale, apparently it had gone unremarked by connoisseurs, scholars, and tourists. The flamboyant first earl of Lonsdale James Lowther (1736-1802), known in his day as “wicked Jimmy,” a tempestuous character, but one who had a great love for the arts, is said to have bought the work, but it was never exhibited and knowledge of its existence disappeared. Currently, it is with Johnny van Haeften, the London art dealer.
The Market patently derives from two of the four market scenes (The Hermitage, St Petersburg) commissioned by the Habsburg official Jacques van Ophem. Van Ophem ordered a set of four markets for the antechamber to his office in his grand mansion in Brussels around 1618-1620. It consists of pictures of stalls where fish, flesh, fruit, and vegetables are portrayed in large-scale canvases, each with one type of provision. For The Lonsdale Market, Snyders fused the compositions of the produce scenes to form a new image, reproducing motifs verbatim. Yet differences can be observed, most notably in the figures.
These changes raise interesting questions, most importantly why did Snyders integrate two separate compositions to form a new scene? This is not a pastiche, but a thoughtfully contrived invention intended, I argue, for a specific purpose. Unlike a seigniorial still life where a lordship’s riches for personal use are represented, for instance, game, cattle, aquatic creatures, produce, and poultry, The Lonsdale Produce Market portrays garden commodities to be sold at urban markets; it is an idealized picture of a commercial enterprise. Clearly a central theme is the provisioning network established to provide city dwellers with fresh produce. Thus, rather than an individual who wished to show an estate’s self-sufficency, the so-called “unbought meal,” as it was coined in antiquity, The Lonsdale Market emphasizes the importance of an institution that secures these foodstuffs for the benefit of those unable to possess great estates where such goods were available on the lords’ farms and in fruit gardens.
In this essay, I speculate that a gardeners’ guild in the Spanish Netherlands commissioned the picture for its guild hall. Reasons are given in the text for such a solution. Guilds in the Southern Netherlands had chambers, even buildings, where the business of the guild was carried out, its documents preserved, and where noteworthy occasions were celebrated. What better way to show the ideal of agricultural cultivation carried out by members of a gardeners’ guild then to have a monumental painting portraying an almost encyclopedic depiction of the fruits of their labor.
Additionally, the role of the guild’s members as wholesalers and retailers is presented in the persons of the painting’s staffage. Although men were the public face of the guild in municipal governance, women constituted the labor force, the gardeners, many of the wholesalers and the majority of the retailers. The Lonsdale Produce Market depicts them enacting these duties. But I must emphasize that my reading is speculative, yet evidence does point in this direction.
Further notions pertaining to the imagery are also considered within the text, not least the idea that the riches of the land connote a “golden age,” an era of peace, well-being, health, and productivity. The scene is no less then a paean to the good governance of the Archdukes, whose wisdom had secured the Habsburg lands a respite, a time to revitalize, and restore the prosperity that it had once enoyed. To introduce The Lonsdale Produce Market, I have written a prelude, a brief biography of Frans Snyders, that touches on the subjects he depicted as well as the issue of sets and series. This subject is of importance because the Lonsdale picture is derived from such a group, and it has been posited that picture of fish and flesh was a pendant to The Produce Market.

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Illustrations in pdf format
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Part 2
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Part 4