TWO SHORT STORIES

Maud's House

Dog Painting:Winter

IT’S A HARD KNOCK LIFE

Go see the movie “Maudie” when you get a chance.  It’s a biopic about Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis and stars Ethan Hawks and Sally Hawkins. 

Maud (Dowley) Lewis is the Canadian version of Grandma Moses. Born in 1903, she was physically deformed, a result of childhood illness, and lived with her parents near Digby, Novia Scotia, until they both died in the early 1930s. With no other prospects, she answered an ad for a housekeeper, moved to Marshall and married the cruel, miserly fish peddler, Everett Lewis, whose 10 ft. X 12 ft. house she was meant to keep.  

The house had no electricity nor running water and she was no housekeeper.  She could, however, paint and began painting flowers and animals - greeting cards and tiny pictures - that her husband sold door-to-door along with his fish. She also painted every available surface in and on the house itself. (The house in its entirety sits inside the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax.) 

Time passes….recognition comes….she still sells her little paintings for not a lot of money…The Nixon White House even buys one! (She requested payment in advance; did she know something?) Maud died in 1970. Her widowed husband continued to sell her paintings, forging her name when “absolutely necessary.”  (Life in Nova Scotia was probably hard for a fish peddler. Should we condemn him?)

One of Maud’s little paintings sold at auction in 2016 for $20,000. I’m betting her prices will go up after the movie comes out. In fact, there’s renewed interest among museums, collectors and investors in “older female artists” according to a piece recently on Hyperallergic.  Explanation: younger artists are not making the cut and established artists’ prices are insanely high with the world chasing after those that show up at auction. By default, women are coming into their own.

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IT’S ALIVE!

I admit I can’t escape my craft-based roots.  I want public art to “do something.”  I want beautifully designed streetscape furniture, clever signage, public art that lifts the spirits through sound, shape, texture and/or color.  I want socially conscious design!

Not too much to ask, do you think?

So here’s the latest idea that I just stumbled across:  is it public art or is it living sculpture? Or both?  It’s call “CityTree,” a 13 ft. wall of living moss, created and built by Green City Solutions, a Berlin based design firm.

Because of the specific moss culture, it “eats” particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxide and ozone, offsetting 240 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. Or to measure differently, it does the work of 275 urban planted trees.

So far, about 20 of these CityTrees are installed - Oslo, Paris, Hong Kong, Brussels and Glasgow - at a cost of about $25,000 each. 

Yes, they require some tender care - primarily water - but so do planted trees. And they have some shortcomings. They don’t supply shade. They don’t offset through scale some urban masses. And they may not survive extreme temperatures - hot or cold. But for areas where planting trees is not an option - and for the sheer softness moss covered anything can infuse! - this looks pretty cool. 

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HAVE A SAFE JULY 4TH EVERYBODY! I’m going on picnic #3 - #4 tomorrow. That diet we started 10 days ago? On “hold” for awhile.