Lilac Monday

Journal entry for 09 May 2011 | Link

Upcoming Residency Among the Cranberries

Late last week I learned that I was awarded a residency at the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation.

It was the wish of Jack Heliker and Robert LaHotan that their home and studios on Cranberry Island in Maine continue to be used by artists. To this end they left their estates to the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, with a mandate to operate the complex of buildings on Cranberry Island as a place for artists to live and work. The three-to four-week residencies are designed for mid-career artists of established ability, not emerging talents.

I will attend in August and I'm very much looking forward to it. I first learned of the foundation from a 2009 New Republic essay by Jed Perl (now in a rather sad state of linkrot, but so it goes; I found a single page of an associated slide show here) about Heliker's drawings of Merce Cunningham. It's a touching piece.

In the summer of 1949, Heliker was living in Rome, and went with [John] Cage and Cunningham to a music festival in Palermo. Later, they spent time together in Paris, where they went to visit Alice B. Toklas and the great collection of Picassos in the apartment she had shared on the Rue Christine with Gertrude Stein, who had died three years earlier. There was always a catch in Heliker's voice when he spoke about seeing those paintings in that place, as if for a moment he had stepped back to the beginning of the century, when Picasso was a young man and the Rose Period was climaxing and Cubism had not yet been born. There was also that summer, if I remember correctly, a dance performance in the Montparnasse studio of the painter Jean Helion, with Toklas sitting in the front row. I am holding in my hands right now a letter from Cunningham to Heliker, written from Amsterdam on April 4, 1949, in which he is making plans for them to meet up in Italy. Cunningham regrets that Heliker isn’t "here to see the landscape, you would love it so."

The landscape of Cranberry Island comes with high recommendations as well.

Lilac Monday

It's like Lilac Sunday, but without the crowds or creepy Morris dancers. My beloved's weekend runs Sunday to Monday, so mine does as well, and after a stop at Rox Diner we trundled over to Arnold Arboretum. Getting out in the morning was crucial because this is a typical afternoon of late circa three days ago:

Peters Hill, Arnold Arboretum, May 6, 2011

No disappointment, mind you, especially with the crabapples peaking, but beset with a haze that rolls in at four in the afternoon and serves no purpose except to ruin the photographic value of the light. Even the day after the party there were plenty of lilac admirers about, but not so many that we couldn't have them to ourselves here and there.

Lilacs, Arnold Arboretum, May 9, 2011

Even the Linden Path was in handsome display.

Linden Path, Arnold Arboretum, May 9, 2011