Art and Experience

Today, October 15. I decided to write a post about my Art Experience and some recent shows. For anyone new to this blog or who hasn't known me for very long, I was a teacher for my adult work life. And I have been an artist all my life. First I taught high shool English after graduating from Glassboro State College, then I took a second college degree at Rutgers and taught Art in a grade school, and finally, after some years teaching in the Saturday Lab School at the University of the Arts, I took my Masters in the Art of Teaching and became an adjunct professor in the graduate program there. When I retired and my daughter had grown and gotten a career of her own, I had the time and energy to devote myself to painting. Through all the rest of the years, I did art work whenever I could get the time and I did a lot of wood but printing and drawing. As I got older and arthritis set in my hands, I switched to acrylic painting. I had done a lot of oil painting in my graduate art program but I wanted to move away from the solvents.

Fortunately, I discovered The Station Art Gallery and Cafe in Merchantville, the town where I had gone to High School. They have a running program of classes and group art shows through their Eiland Arts Center and I was delighted when I began to enter my work and was accepted for their shows. I have been showing my work there for about 10 years. During that time, for the last five years I also entered work in the annual Haddon Fortnightly March Women's History exhibition called Through A Woman's Eyes and I have won two prizes there. This year for the first time, I entered work in the Camden County Art and Cultural Heritage Show and won an Honorable Mention and also had work in the Croft Farm Spring into the Arts Show. In a week, I will be entering three photographs in their annual photography juried exhibition.

My major at Rutgers was printmaking, but I turned to painting because it is much easier than accessing a printing press, or, as I said before, woodcut printing which gets hard on the hands over time. Two prizes I have won were in works including fabric. For the celebration of 100 years of Suffrage, I did a panel of five fabric "handbags" each having a "page" of fabric with a small painted portrait of a woman in a particular field. One bag was women in sports, with Billy Jean King in front, another Woen in the Arts, with Judy Chicago on the cover, and another on Writing with Rachel Carson on the Cover. That piece of 20 "pages" won the first prize in the show. >p/> A show this Spring about which I was very happy was the Fundraiser for Fishtails Animal Rescue. Dozens of artists contributed 6 x 6 inch paintings of anomals, each one selling for $50 which went directly to the animal rescue. I contributed 7 paintings and 4 of them sold. I have cats and a dog and it made me very happy to do this charity event for a shelter and rescue group.

My latest fabric work was for the Haddon Fortnightly Show and it was a cork board with "Pennants" in blue felt with a "medallion" on each that depicted a "Modern Woman" of some fame and xuccess. It has been the joy and accomplishment of my retirent to follow half a dozen years of volunteer work at various Historic Sites such as Red Bank Battlefield, with this flourishing career in local art shows. I have met many wonderful people and enjoyed sharing my work and seeing the work of others Also during this time, I was able to get Friends from Woodbury Meeting to help me turn an empty area in an adjacent building into a small Art Gallery where two other Friends and I have held a couple of Art Shows. Our gallery is called The Friendship Gallery. We hope to do more with this site in the future.

I hope you feel inspired to do your art whether it is woodworking, stained glass, painting, quilting or whatever your media of choice, and that you, too, find a way to share that work with others! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Caves of Mystery - a review of documentaries

On pbs passport right now, there is a series called First Peoples. It has 6 episodes. It is not only utterly fascinating but also strikingly beautiful in the landscape filmed in it. The episodes cover the departure and arrival of waves of early humans from the cradle of humanity in Africa to - 1:The Americas, 2:Africa, 3:Asia, 4:Europe, and 5:Astralia. Naturally humans didn't arrive in those places chronologically, but it is the way they decided to open the series. Humans evolved in Africa over milions of years in many branches of hominids from primates. I can't remember many of the kinds of hominids, but some of them were Homo habilis, homo erectus, homo ergaster. The evolution is NOT a straight line but more like a shrub with many branches some of which existed at the same time as others.

This is such an evolving history, that even up to 2 years ago, new species and new information has been discovered. Some of the most recent discoveries have been Denisovans in the Balkans and Homo Naledi in Africa.

My introduction to this history was through the world of Art which begins with the art in famous caves like Lascaux and Chauvet in France, and Altamira in Spain among others. Anyone who loves art must be entranced by the cave art at Lascaux and Chauvet in particular. The animals depicted on the walls, both painted on with charcoal and ochre, as well as incised into the walls, are so alive they fairly gallop off the walls! They are truly splendid works of art. And they are the first works of art done by the newest and most successful branch of humanity, Homo Sapiens - US.

If you have the patience for it there is a fabulous book by Yuval Noah Harrari which was improbably enough, a NYT bestseller, called Sapiens. If not, watch these documentaries and you will be captured by this mysterious and evolving discovery of our human origins.

A good place to begin is the pbs series First Peoples. Passport costs a one-time fee of $60 which is a great bargain because you can watch EVERYTHING PBS - Masterpiece Theater, NOVA, Finding your Roots, every pbs program there has been PLUS Walter Presents, which is a European distributor that offers all the most popular tv series showing in Europe.

If you have Netflix, you can also watch Unknown Cave of Bones. It is a great voyage of discovery that the viewer can make with the archaeologists down a cave network where early hominids, not quite apes, not quite humans, carried their dead and buried them. This is a shattering discovery because until this cave was discovered in the 21st century, it was thought that burying the dead and making and using tools was what separated us from early branches of hominids. But these small brained hominids not only carried their dead through a maze of tunnels to a burial chamber where they dug the graves and arranged the bodies, but they also buried one with a stone tool! It wasn't ever thought that hominids this primitive made tools. To go along on this journey with the archaeoogists, anthropologists, and the many kinds of experts working in radiology and scanning technologies as well as forensic reconstruction, tune into this great documentary. I felt the reverberation of their excitement at each discovery.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, is a beautiful documentary by a long time favorite German filmaker of mine, Werner Herzog. He has the balance of being just a bit eccentric and different without losing the plot, so his films are just that little bit out of the ordinary but not so much off track that you get lost. In this film, his own personal engagement is palpable. It is like exploring with a lively friend. The filming on all of these documentaries is gorgeous but most so in this one. Also, the caves filmed by Herzog are no longer open to the public due to damage by outdoor air and breathing which brought mold and erosion to the ancient wall art, so this is your chance to see spectacular cave art that you can't see any other way.

Each of these documentaries is so engaging that I have watched them more than once. Some I have seen three or more times like Cave of Forgotten Dreams. And if you are captivated, you may want to rent a most gorgeous film which I saw three times in the theatre and half a dozen times on tv called Quest for Fire! It is beautiful in the landscape and totally immerses you in a past that is gone forever. I believe the film was loosely based on the novels of French author Jean Auel. The books were surprising best sellers at the time they were released in 1980. I read them all, but if I remember correctly the first was Clan of the Cave Bear. I gave them all away years ago.

I am always engaged in trying to pare down my enormous collection of books. Every room in my small house has a floor to ceiling wall to wall book case and living here is like living in a cosy little dusty book shop. Well I hope you are tempted to watch one or all of these documentaries and if you do and want to talk about them contact me at

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Happy Trails - even back into the millions of years ago! Jo Ann

ps. If you want to visit a museum into our South Jersey pre-historical past, go to Greenwich Prehistory Musseum and see the immense collection of stone projectiles and the clay pots reconstructed from those left behind by Indigenous people. This little museum is in a town worth your visit on its own merits. Most of Ye Greate Street houses are from the 1700's.

A Child Leads the Way - 7 year old Volunteer, award winner

Naomi Fife of Louisville. Kentucky has fostered roughtly 95 animals in her short life, obviously with the support of her family. She has recieved special recognition from several National Organizations for her volunteeer work, including PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) which awarded her the Hero to Animals Award. She is certainly a hero in my book!

Another encouraging news item that I cam across recently was that in Spain they have just passed legislation to protect animals but stating they are no longer to be considered "things" but sentient beings and famiy members. The law has many provisions a good deal of which pertain to animals in families and their care as well as their disposition in disputes, but mainly what it does is it shows that people are evolving in their concepts of the rights of animals. Animal Rights groups as well as many celebrities have pleaded with the Pope to stop priests from giving blessings at bull fights. Most agree that this is a cruel and depressig show of inhumanity. Bulls are stabbed and tortured by men on horseback to make them mad with pain and weaker before they are stabbed to death by a matador, for entertainment. There is nothing brave about stabbing a weakened and tortured animal. Once, in Spain, many years ago, I went with my then-husband to a bull fight and I was crushed to see the animal trying its best to climb the fence around the ring trying to escape its tormentors before it was stabbed to death. The spectacular left me sickened and in despair that anyone would find this entertaining.

From my earliest childhood in Philadelphia, as a shy child, I found friendship and comfort in the companionship of our neibghborhood cats and dogs. In those days, animals, like children, were let out in the morning and came home for dinner (of course we chidlren went to school in the hours between). Many afternoons I spent in the gravel yards in front of the garages in an alley at the end of our street in the brick canyons of South Philadelphia. The gravel gleamed in the sunshine like gems. I sat there digging in the gravel while cats and dogs did their daily walk-about and stopped to sit with me and visit. My family has always had a few cats and a couple dogs at all times. I currently have five cats and a dog. Even though, now, as an accomplished and confident adult, I happen to have many human friends, my animal companions are the closest to my heart as well as in my life. My cats sit with me as I read or paint or watch tv, and my dog makes me take a walk every day whether I want to or not. The only sad part is when they die. One of my ways of resolving my grief at the loss, is to adopt another fur friend who needs a good home and to honor the love of my lost friend by sharing it with a new one.

Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Camden County Historical Society

Camde County Historical Society not only provides and excellent magazine for members, it has a great on-line list of events:

:https://cchsnj.org/history-mon...

One of the many useful features in the magazine is the middle section map and list of all the myriad historical sites in Camden County. October is South Jersey History Month and there are a great nuber of very interesting events coming up beginning this Saturday with a tour of the Haddonfield Friends (Quaers) Meeting House and cemetery from 1:00 to 4:00 but check the time, please! I hope the link I copied and pasted works, if not, just try the cchsnj.org address and take it from there. I strongly suggest you rsubscribe to the online e-mail notification. I have tried a lot of the events they have listed over the years, most recently the railroad station visits that I enjoyed with a friend of mine. We met so many nice people and I have been a big local railroad fan since childhood.

Happy Trails my South Jersey fan friends! and in particular Happy Halloween! Oh, and before I forget ifyou are a Camden County Senior, Mount Ephraim has a huge listing of daily free classes now available at the Charles Dougherty Senior Center on Lambert Ave and the railroad. Parking is in the back and it is handicap accessible. I took the Chair Yoga class on Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. and will be taking the Chair Yoga class again today at 1:00, but there are dozens of other free classes to sign up for. You can get the brochure at the Mt. Ephraim Borough Hall on Black Horse Pike or drop in around midday during the week when classes will be in session and you can get a brochure and sign up for a class. You will find gardening, games, fitness, chair yoga, tea party, and many other classes, don't miss out on this free opportunity!

wrightj45@yahoo.com