Katherine Keenum

A post on a pastel portrait by the Norwegian artist, Asta Nørregaard, led me to an article, Revisiting Asta Nørregaard in the Studio, by Carina Rech, which contains a great deal of information about the artist and provides examples of her work. Among them is this self-portrait, painted in Paris, when Nørregaard was working on a commissioned altarpiece. While working on that painting (just visible on the easel to the left), she had moved into a new studio and wrote a friend about having to adjust to the new lighting. You can see how much light was on her mind from the way it slants through the window and illuminates her palette and her own right side. The painting strikes me as very concrete, yet mystical; a picture of solitude and dedication, of self-assurance and of questioning. Although it can supply details to the historical novelist, it's too good to try to turn into a story.

There are authors whose new books you want to buy as soon as they are published. For me, Natasha Pulley is one, yet I waited on The Mars House. Hard science fiction is not really a genre I follow, and this one was billed as a queer romance set on Mars. Yes, but it has woolly mammoths! and a goofy dog! and a principal male ballet dancer for the central character! This past week, I finally read a library copy—and bought my own at a local bookstore. Definitely on the reread list.

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Of course, from the get-go, it's more like fiction than a news story: Estate sale, item from attic, auction set at $10,000–12,000, and, blooey! bidders take risk that a painting is no copy but a real Rembrandt. Final price: $1.4 million. Waaaaaay too pat (even if true), and, yet—what would you do with it? What story would you tell?

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I am reading Winters in the World by Eleanor Parker, an exploration of the year as it was seen in England during the Anglo-Saxons period. Early on, that culture divided the year into sumor and winter, which is why the solstices are called Midsummer's and Midwinter's Days. When the equinoxes became the start of two more divisions of the year, nomenclature was less fixed. I was delighted to learn that our term, fall, comes from something like "falling into winter." Autumn derives from the French automne, and another frequent name was Haerfast, i.e., Harvest. Whatever you want to call it, welcome in fall—and Happy Frodo and Bilbo Baggins Birthday!

Castle Crag licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons License.

Exhibition alert: I've just learned about Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 from an article in the Autumn 2024 issue of American Scholar: Reborn in the City of Light. The show, which is up through February 23, 2025, is built around portraits of American women who found freedom to explore their art, beliefs, and sexuality in Paris in the early 20th C. They didn't necessarily know each other; but together they illustrate a time and place. Naturally, for this post, I chose a painting from my magic year of 1908. Ethel Mars, moreover, is new to me and I hope to explore her life and work in future—possibly in the exhibition catalogue if it becomes available in our library system!

A friend who is working on a scholarly article asked whether I knew of any Christian images of humans ascending to heaven. I didn't, but a little poking around turned up this one. Weird! I suppose it illustrates moving from darkness into light. And I've read of people who experience a near-death experience as resembling a tunnel that leads to light beyond. All the same, what would one do with this narratively?!?
Image via Wikipedia

Normally, I like to honor Labor Day with a focus on unions, women, and work. As early voting gets under way this year, however, the really big idea seems to be VOTE. (For Harris-Walz, of course.)
Image via Encyclopedia Virginia.

Here at the end of summer, perhaps one last run to the beach? For sure, a joyous book for us childless DOG ladies—Doug Salati's Hot Dog! I borrowed it from the library, read it, and went out to buy my own copy (from a local independent bookstore, naturally).  I've walked dogs in the city; taken them on country outings; known their stubborn moments, their devotion, and their joy. Salati's 2023 Caldecott award-winning book lets me relive vicariously the sweetness of life with a dog. That's one of the pleasures of children's picture books: they let you experience moments of delight over and over and over.

Exhibition alert: An upcoming exhibition, Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (at which viewers can elect to release odors that correspond to the imagery in a painting) set me thinking about how hard it is to evoke smells in words. A Simplified Guide to Using the Fragrance Wheel provides some vocabulary to set you thinking. But if colors are hard, how much harder are aromas to put into words!
 
For more about the Pre-Raphaelite show and other museum olfactory explorations, click here. And for another article on the evocation of smells in art, click here.

I'm rereading the four Fallow Sisters novels I discovered last summer. They're better with each rereading, and here's great news from Liz Williams in an article, How Running a Witchcraft Shop Helps Me Write Fantasy Book: "The Fallow sisters contain elements of me—they are not me, but they are also like people I know. The house in which they live, magical Mooncote, is not my house—but its orchard is my orchard, its beehives are my beehives. I'm definitely not done with it just yet." More to come? Yea!

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