While I am in Saint Louis prostituting myself for plants at the Perennial Plant Symposium Horticulturist Geoff VonBurg is filling in for me. One of Geoff’s gardens here is the recently restored Orchard. But I have no idea what he is blogging about. Thanks Geoff.

Irvin Etienne, Aesthetic Czar, whose garden trowel I am not worthy to clean, is away this week.  He said something about a professional conference in St Louis, but I hear Dolly Parton is performing in Branson, so I’m not sure…

Anyway, he left me keys to the blog-o-graph and said, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

More and more this season, I have been enraptured with wonder at what nature does.  For the blog’s title, I turned to Jens Jensen, one of the great evangelists for the church of mother earth.   In the first chapter of Siftings (1939) he said that the “[natural world] about us has within it all the joy and happiness that we need.”  Amen.  As much as my life is enriched by the amazing work I see in our galleries, more nourishing for my soul is the beauty and humility of plants.  I want to offer three little samples.

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Filed under: Guest Bloggers, Horticulture

The following post was written by Charles Falco (pictured below), Professor of Optical Sciences; Physics and UA Chair of Condensed Matter Physics.

Professor Charles Falco

OK, yesterday Richard gave you his version of events.  Today, it’s my turn.

Part I: Making the Connections

My Background

The year: 1960
The place: Ft. Dodge, Iowa
Richard started his story ten years ago in Madrid.  I’ll start mine fifty years ago in Ft. Dodge.

I’ve been keenly interested in images since early childhood, starting with an old Kodak box camera, and advancing to my first “serious” camera when I was twelve. This involvement with creating and manipulating images using various processes — photography, cyanotypes, silk screening, etc. — steadily expanded as I got older, to the point that by age 30 I owned at least 20 lenses ranging up to a 800 mm super-telephoto, as well as had designed and fabricated various pieces of specialized photographic equipment for my imaging experiments.

The infrared camera described in this blog is the most recent piece of fabricated/altered imaging equipment dating back to an enlarger I made in high school by modifying an old bellows camera. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art, Conservation

My guess is that you’ve never considered what motorcycles, medical illustrators, Madrid, two cameras that can see into the Infra Red, and underdrawings in Renaissance-era paintings have in common.  Frankly, before last summer I hadn’t either, and now that I’ve started out this way it’s going to take some work to connect all of these things together.  To do it, I’m going to break this post into two parts. Today I’ll give my side of the story and tomorrow you’ll hear from my new friend, Charles Falco, who will tell his.

Group IR Shot. David Miller, Charles Falco, Richard McCoy, Zina Deretsky, Aimee Allen, Christina Milton-O'Connell, and Linda Witkowski

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Filed under: Art, Conservation

As my first time attending an organized multi-day movie experience, the opening week of the Indianapolis International Film Festival here at the IMA has made a great first impression. What’s left an impression so far? Well, I laughed my sad/happy heart out for the animated wonder Sita Sings The Blues, got my throat choked-up by the plight of a little orphan tyke in Prince of Broadway, and joined the cult of Best Worst Movie right after I got my picture taken with the dad from Troll 2!  Given my already stellar performance as film festival attendee and a personal must see list still containing multiple films, anticipation for the remaining days of the IIFF is high.

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Filed under: Current Events, Marketing, New Media

One thing we’ve learned from the recession is that movies are now considered “recession proof”.  People need the escape.  This can easily be seen from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which had a $160 million 5-day opening.  It was also the fastest movie to ever reach $350 million world-wide. I was somewhat surprised to find out that this movie would be offering an IMAX 3D experience as well.  Typically I think of the animated movies which can fairly easily crank out a 3D version of themselves.  However, digitally adding 3D scenes to a filmed movie requires a great amount of work from the production companies.  Why do it? Money of course.

Monsters vs. Aliens © Dreamworks Animation

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Filed under: Musings, Technology