Art Drop #16: The Meadow Beckons...

More than just the view from our house, it's angling to become our new muse.

Seen from afar all is still, but up close there’s a thrum of energy, buzzing, fluttering, hovering with an intensity so strong it almost hits you in the face. We catch grasshoppers, beetles and small toads for closer examination. Crickets hop out of the way, spiders scurry into the longer grasses. Linger too long in one place and mosquitoes whisper in your ears and gnats fly into your eyes. Welcome to our meadow!

The gift amidst the chaos of moving to a new state, a new town, a new house, means the senses are sharpened – we’re taking it all in, and nowhere on our property is there more to take in than this meadow of ours. When we first moved here in July there was nothing in bloom, but since then there’s been a yellowing.

This emergence of yellow, clumps of goldenrod taking turns to bloom and probably ragweed too, and now foliage threatening to turn autumnal in the woodland beyond, has intensified with each passing day. The yellowing was all the motivation I needed to head out with my camera and some scissors to see what I could harness from this meadow to add to my ongoing hand bouquet series.

As I walked through the meadow I saw much more than just yellow. Once I looked past what was obvious, unusual textures and subtle shades of colors began to reveal themselves. Weeds I know from the garden were elevated to the status of wildflowers in this context, lobbying for their chance at a close-up feature within my palm.

When I make a hand bouquet, my process is essentially wrangling the natural world to my wishes, editing as I go, tossing out wilted foliage and refreshing with sturdier clippings over and over again. It sometimes feels like a two-steps-forward, one-step-back situation. I might grow attached to a particular element only to have to discard it. In many ways, making a hand bouquet is not unlike the act of writing itself.

As I battled back and forth with this composition, pushing it towards an elegant beauty that belied the difficulty involved in putting it together, my mind wandered. I thought of a few people I know having a particularly hard time right now, people who would much rather be in the meadow looking, observing and creating rather than faced with the uphill battle ahead of them. If they open this email and need an escape, I thought the hand bouquet must be deserving and worthy of their attention. It took two attempts, on two separate days, to get this arrangement right. I hope I succeeded here.

Art Drop #16

This month’s art drop showcases what the meadow had to offer in a particular moment at the end of August, on the cusp of Autumn. It’s a handful of a few familiar species and a few I need to look up and identify. Maybe you see some you know or maybe it’s all exotic to you?

Meadow Hand Bouquet, Late Summer 2024
West Stockbridge, MA, USA
by Diana Pappas

Prints of this photograph are only available through September 7, 2024, with no further production of this work for at least a year. To learn more about the paper, sizes, and pricing click the button below to visit the art drop page on our website.

Thank you for reading and looking! There are people in this world who notice, who observe, who take in the details, and there are people who don’t. We know where we stand, and if you welcome this newsletter into your inbox and mind, then we have a good idea where you stand as well, fellow observer. We’ll be back next week… would you like to see more of the meadow?

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