"Puck has TB?"

As I said, July is the jewel in our crown.

This jewel is constantly polished, refined, and reformed by creative vision, inspiration, and downright out-of-the-box thinking. Or, how about, out-of-the-theater?

Outdoor theater is not a new idea, by any means; as a student, I was awed by many memorable performances in lush college quads, parks, and an amphitheater; my New York City nephew is a 10-year-old veteran of Central Park performances. Many other cities and college town boast similar opportunities.

But here is a new twist: how about Shakespeare in the Adirondack Park-?!?

While Central Park is a restful haven of nature for Manhattan, and college quads and parklands offer refreshing respite from the numbing grind of academia - well, they're pretty small compared to the 6 million acres encircled by the Blue Line!

No problem.

Stephen Svoboda, the executive director of the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts, is not one to be cowed by fickle mountain weather. His heart does not quake at the logistics of moving a show 12 times in 7 days, over hundreds of miles of twisty mountain roads. A Midsummer Night's Dream is to be performed between July 25th and August 1st at an array of locations to make you reach for a map: Thendara, Tupper Lake, Blue Mountain Lake, Long Lake, Old Forge, Raquette Lake, Minerva, Indian Lake, North Creek, Paul Smiths, Inlet, and Speculator.

This I gotta see!

The nearest performance to my location is July 31st at the Adirondack Park Visitor Interpretive Center (VIC).

Click here to see when and where it will be near you.

And no, Puck does not suffer from tuberculosis! My 15-year-old son (who aspires to comedic greatness) posed the question when he learned this play is being staged outside in the clean mountain air so often prescribed to victims of that disease. But the show promises to cure lots of other, more modern ailments: ennui, indifference, worldliness, apathy . . .

Our North Country summer is the more luscious for its brevity. Make the most of its opportunities, and rejoice in creative invention!

The Greatest Piece of Work

What a piece of work is a man,

how noble in reason,

how infinite in faculties,

in form and moving how express and admirable,

in action how like an angel,

in apprehension how like a god...

Thus says Jean-Luc Picard to Q, when the latter disparages humankind ... indeed, Picard is quoting one of humankind's most god-like writers, in any century: William Shakespeare.

And of course, what Shakespeare writes, what Picard quotes, is true: people (of any gender!) are amazing pieces of work. It seems that each week scientists and psychologists announce new discoveries about the mechanics of our bodies and minds - and usually these discoveries open new fields of wonder, revealing yet more unknowns.

As an artist, I consider the rendering of human figures to be one of the most challenging, stimulating, and frustrating objectives possible. When my children were tiny, I would sometimes draw blank figures of people for them, so that they could design clothing and equipment to suit their imaginings - but these were little more than gingerbread cookie-cutter figures. Did my sketches display realism? Maybe a little. Proportion? In a mechanistic way. Individuality or expression? Not at all.

In his book Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters (1964), Robert Beverly Hale writes:

It has always seemed to me that if you really wanted to excel in drawing the figure, you should go and study with the greatest living master of figure drawing. But the trouble is that there is no one living today who can draw the figure very well; there is, perhaps, no one alive today who can draw the figure even as well as the worst artist represented in this book.

I would beg to differ. True, the style of drawing used by most artists today differs from that of "old masters" - but a drawing, a sketch, a painting which captures even a glimpse of real, human nature is, in my mind, little short of miraculous. It takes work, practice, study, practice, time, practice, patience, practice, and then more practice - but even modern artists can learn to create evocative representations of the human form.

In case I hadn't mentioned it, practice is very important. Sometimes I will try to sketch from photos of models in catalogs, but I find all those standardized physiques can get dull. (When did you see a woman with hips as a model?) Also, of course, unlike in the wizarding world, our muggle photos can't move or change position.

Fortunately, here in the North Country, we have a better opportunity for practicing the human figure: twice a year, the Lake Placid Center for the Arts hosts a Life Drawing workshop. These are not "classes" per se: no instruction is given. But the organizer/moderator, Diane Leifheit, arranges for a live, nude model to present different poses for set periods of time - beginning with very brief poses and progressing to longer ones. Participants bring their own materials of choice - many work in charcoal or graphite; some use large newsprint pads while others bring smaller, higher quality paper.

In referring to the Life Drawing experience, Diane writes:

... Life Drawing is embedded in my art and philosophy: if I work at observing and recording the figure, and work at capturing the models' moods, I can translate that in to any subject matter I try to tackle.

This spring's Life Drawing sessions being next Monday night, April 20, and cost $55.00 for six sessions. (This is a change from the information given on the LPCA website.) To register, or to get more information, call the LPCA at (518) 523-2512.

Growing Art

Change is inevitable.

Look at a newborn, compared to a toddler; consider the toddler alongside a teenager.

Those of us past the age of such dramatic developmental growth still change in one way or another; and while the body continues to mature, a mind open to to quests and experiments can grow in vital, energizing ways.

Some time ago I wrote about Lee Ann Sporn, a scientist and artist, whose powers of observation and interpretation remind me of the great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. I included an image of one of Lee Ann's botanical watercolors, a study of springtime trillia.

How artists can change and grow! Reproduced above is one of Lee Ann's recent works!

One obvious difference is a change in media: Lee Ann adventurously broke away from watercolor and began working in acrylic. However, acrylic is enough like watercolor that, had she chosen, she could have continued in the precise, carefully observed style of her earlier pieces.

Instead, look at what she has been doing! Without sacrificing a strong sense of realism, her work is now much more emotional, more expressive. The sweeping strokes of color, the dynamic energy, the freedom of line - these remind me much more of the Group of Seven than of any scientific illustration!

Although this is but a copy of a photo of a painting, you can still see how Lee Ann has layered her colors - in the lower left side, the grain of the canvas is yet visible, revealing the burnt sienna undercoat. This is a technique for imparting warmth and depth to a painting, espoused by the multi-media artist and teacher Meg Bernstein. In fact, Lee Ann just spent a semester in Meg's Acrylic Painting Class at Paul Smiths College (where Lee Ann herself teaches science).

To paraphrase, with suitable apologies to Shakespeare: "What a piece of work is a human! How noble in reason - how infinite in faculty!"

For just as the infant synthesizes perception into thought and language, so as adults can we learn new forms of expression. Lee Ann's latest work is every bit as expressive as her earlier pieces - but she is learning, and using, a whole new language!