Capturing the rainbow

I don’t think we can count on them sending the helicopters any time soon.

By the Rio Blanco in the rain, by Carol L. Douglas, 9X12, available.

My friend Barb made it back to Maine from Thailand and slept for 19 hours straight. Then she woke up and tried to figure out how to wash her travel-tainted laundry without access to a laundromat. Not that she’s going back to work any time soon; she works in a pre-school.

It’s good to know that somewhere in the world there are flights moving. Why they’re moving in Asia, the epicenter of this disease, and not in South America, is beyond me. But our carefully-laid plans of the weekend are now thrown into confusion. We have ascertained that we can take the cars to Rio Gallegos but we have no idea if we have a flight when we get there.

Jane Chapin is having vivid dreams, all reflecting her anxieties. She dreamt she was trying to keep a box of baby hedgehogs alive, and that she was naked at the mall. During the day, she’s her usual level, funny self, of course. In the dark hours, the fruitless effort and endless conversations are starting to wear.

We have no idea whether flights in Argentina will resume on the 28^th or the 31^st or some date in the future. Nor do our representatives at the Embassy, who are now in regular contact with us. Yesterday, the State Department sent out a survey to collect information about American nationals stranded overseas. There are some 13,500 of our fellow citizens who have requested help to get home. I don’t think we can count on them sending the helicopters any time soon.

We use WhatsApp to communicate with our Embassy reps. “That’s the same group as Doug Perot?” they asked each of us. How Doug became the point man for our group, none of us know, but I felt very important being married to him.

Painting by the window.

Some of my friends back home have told me that I don’t know how bad it is in the US; that I’ll be coming home to a police state. We have exactly the same news as the rest of you. With that, exile in Argentina isn’t markedly different from exile in Maine. I prefer the chipper attitude of my Uncle Bob, who’s in his eighties and immunosuppressed from cancer treatments. I couldn’t go see him before coronavirus, either. Instead of complaining about my absence, he said, “I’m not going anywhere near anyone!” and then told me all the news from Buffalo.

Also in Buffalo, my technologically-impaired brother-in-law saw Kellee Mayfield’s interview with an Arkansas television station. Stuck at home, he’s learning to surf the internet. I didn’t think the old boy had it in him.

Downpour, by Carol L. Douglas. That's the first rainbow I've ever tried to paint.

Yesterday started with a halfhearted rain and moved to a downpour. It’s impossible to paint outdoors in these conditions, so we painted from the windows, or read, or played Scrabble. David Diaz set up in the greenhouse, where he was nearly deafened by the roar of rain hitting the plastic roof. Natalia Andreeva painted Lynn Mehta; if the bad weather continues, she’ll have painted us all by the time we go home. Katie Cundiff taught two university classes.

I spent a lot of time looking out the window, like a child deprived of her recess. The meteoric weather shifts remind me of Frederic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes, that magnificent, show-stopping canvas that now resides at the Met. Even though it was painted in the northern parts of the continent, it captures something of the character of Patagonia as well.

Celebrity intellectuals

The Heart of the Andes, 1858, Frederic Edwin Church. It is useless to imagine this painting from a photo; it has to be seen. You can do that at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

There’s a Humboldt Street in Rochester, a Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, and various fixtures named Humboldt across our country.  I had the vague idea that he was a famous explorer, but last week it clicked that he was the fellow whose work inspired Frederic Church’s The Heart of the Andes.

Alexander von Humboldt was the last of that breed of brilliant scientific generalists, largely self-taught, who contributed so much to the world’s knowledge of botany and geography. Between 1799 and 1804, he traveled throughout South America, exploring and describing it in scientific terms.

Humboldt is the first person to have realized that the coasts of South America and Africa dovetail, and he proposed the idea that they might have once been joined. He noted that volcanoes fall in linear chains and demonstrated the fallacy of the idea that rocks were formed from the world’s oceans. He laid the foundations of modern geography and meteorology. In his spare time, he surveyed Cuba and stopped to visit President Thomas Jefferson at the White House.

Self-portrait, 1815, Alexander von Humboldt. Gentlemen-scientists once knew how to draw.

Humboldt saw the physical world as a unified system and the physical sciences as interlinked. He understood that botany was dependent on biology, meteorology, and geology. To prove that required the time-consuming analysis of the data he’d collected in South America.  This took him 21 years and he never felt it was complete, but it changed the way we see the world.

He expected artists to play a part in the collection of natural data, by accurately portraying the landscape. Humboldt recognized landscape painting—then in its own infancy—as among the highest expressions of love of nature.

Enter the brilliant American painter and entrepreneur, Frederic Edwin Church. In 1853 and 1859, Church traveled to South America to replicate Humboldt’s journeys. While Humboldt had used family money to finance his explorations, Church enlisted an American financier, Cyrus West Field, who wanted to encourage investment in his South American ventures.

Isothermal chart of the world, cartographer William Channing Woodbridge, made using Humboldt's data.

The Heart of the Andes is a composite of South American topography and botany. Its monumental scale and detail can’t be appreciated through photographs; you really need to go to New York to see it in person.

But that was pre-Civil War America, where there wasn’t even a decent railroad system. The painting went on tour, visiting seven American cities and London. At its opening in New York (April 29 to May 23, 1859) 12,000 people paid a quarter apiece to see it. People swooned. It was the talk of the town.

Geography of Plants in the Tropics, 1805, Alexander von Humboldt and A.G. Bonpland.

At the end of its tour, Church sold the painting for $10,000—at the time, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living American artist.

Both Humboldt and Church were famous in their day. A world that reveres science and art is a world that is well-read, disciplined, and thoughtful. Compare that to our current fascination with the Kardashians, and you might get the idea that we’re in trouble.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.