TINY GALLERY, NORTH ASHEVILLE
Susie has been working on preparing the an apartment to be rented at their house in town. So she stayed overnight at my house.
On a rainy morning we went out to breakfast at Home Grown in North Asheville. But on the way there we took a wrong turn which led to Susie wanting to show me The Tiny Gallery. It is a little open gallery right on the street where artists can display and sell their art work. Donna Price, who once went to India with me and who lives now in Switzerland had a small show there last year. It is also an example of people directly reaching the public with little display cases, often with glass doors, in their front yards where people can leave books they have read or can pick up books they would like to read at no cost. I saw little free book display cases like this in Haarlem and in Winsen.
Little galleries like this tiny gallery often function on the honor system. Art is on display at a nominal price and if you like a piece you put your money in a box and take the art work with you.
This time the show was of paintings of plants with a artist’s statement describing why the artist painted the paintings.
ARTIST‘S STATEMENT
This is part of a collection of small mixed media drawings (pen, watercolor, hand-carved stamps, and monotypes) that I’ve made during the past few months as part of a project of shining a lamp on some of the most important, yet least noticed, beings in the forest near my house.
Last vear I did a similar project that began as drawings of flowers, buds, leaves and seed pods; that collection changed as the year progressed and I began to notice more of the subtle relationships involving the plants and pollinators, fungi, humans, the moon. I wondered ‘Where does the forsythia begin and the bee end? What’s the thread that ties the bee to the sun to the forsythia to the honey to the human and the bear?’
That collection culminated in a little book that I called Rhizome, and it follows the changes in my consideration of the connectedness of everything.
This exhibit is of some of the drawings I’ve made in the past year. It includes members of the collective that are much harder to notice than, say, a red nasturtium, and the drawings are among the 40 drawings that will be in Rhizome 2 (working title), to be published this spring.
I photographed some of the paintings but it was only when I photographed a little display which included a visitor’s book and the Rhizome book itself then I noticed that the author was Gwen Diehn who lives a few doors down from me and that her plants must be my plants, the ones she mentions no one, including me, noticing.
Her first Rhizome book is on sale at Amazon and other places and I just bought a copy. The second one is coming out this spring. You might consider buying it yourself. You can contact Gwen Diehn about the second book at 828-777-8499.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 