Art
Heart-shaped art brings love, hope to virus-ravaged hotspots – WellandTribune.ca
FALMOUTH, Maine – Donald Verger has been putting heart into his art during the pandemic.
And images of those intricate hearts made from vibrant sea glass are flowing back to schools and hospitals that have been hard hit by COVID-19 during the pandemic.
“The hearts hit a sweet spot for people,“ Verger said. ”People love sea glass, the colour, the patterns.”
Across the country, many artists find themselves struggling during the pandemic, but they’re also finding ways to give back during a health crisis that has claimed more than 465,000 lives in the United States.
Verger’s efforts represent his small but colorful contribution to the effort to bring people a smile, or maybe a moment of calm and peace, amid the isolation of the pandemic.
He’s sent about 25,000 postcards of his hearts and landscape photography to schools and hospitals. He delivers them at 1,000 or 2,500 at a time. Employers and teachers give them to staff, students and patients.
Recently, he’s donated at least 10,000 with LOVE superimposed on them. Another 10,000 had HOPE superimposed on them.
“It seems like a great privilege to do something that supports happiness and some sense of hope,” said Verger, whose studio is in Falmouth, Maine.
In Boston, Shriners Hospital Administrator Eileen Skinner was handing out cards with hearts with the word LOVE to more than 400 workers ahead of Valentine’s Day.
“You have to be in a health care organization to understand the COVID fatigue,” Skinner said. “It’s just encouraging to the staff that somebody is thinking of them.”
Verger, 72, grew up in New York but considers himself a New Englander. Living in Massachusetts, where he raised his family, he founded the Children’s Discovery Museum and Science Discovery Museum in New England, in the town of Acton, Massachusetts.
As a photographer, he’s renowned for his stunning images of landscapes and lighthouses in New England. His best known photo is “Dawn of Peace,“ which depicts sea smoke greeting the sunrise on a subzero morning on Thompson Lake in Otisfield, Maine.
He merged his photography with colorful sea glass that he began collecting on the coast of California. He began arranging the sea glass into images reminiscent of a Monet or Renoir painting.
His first donations came about after a brush with a tornado in Missouri while photographing the dramatic storms in 2011. The storm chasers became the ones being chased by a massive tornado that left the town of Joplin, Missouri. More than 150 people were killed.
After returning to Maine, he put some of his images meant to soothe and to calm onto postcards with a message and the name Joplin. All told, he sent about 25,000 of them to the Red Cross, schools and other organizations.
During the pandemic, he’s sent postcards to schools and hospitals. He recently donated to Northern Light Mercy Hospital in Portland and other facilities, in addition to Boston Shriners Hospital for Children.
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Skinner and Verger first met in Maine, when he donated framed photos to be used at Mercy Hospital when she was CEO.
“Donald is a warm and generous person,” she said. “He shares what he does best.”
What’s the deal with Leonardo’s harpsichord-viola? Why were Impressionists obsessed with the color purple? Art Bites brings you a surprising fact, lesser-known anecdote, or curious event from art history. These delightful nuggets shed light on the lives of famed artists and decode their practices, while adding new layers of intrigue to celebrated masterpieces.
Beauty is pain. Elizabeth Siddal, one of art history’s most famous muses, had intimate experience with this adage. Siddal first met artist Walter Deverell in 1849, the year she turned 20, while working for a London milliner and soon became a favored model of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artists. She was featured in William Holman Hunt’s A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1849–50) and most famously in John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52). It was during her contribution to the latter painting, that she fell ill.
Beauty was a matter of pain for Millais, too. In a rare move for artists of the era, he spent five months painting scenery for Ophelia in a hut along Surrey’s Hogsmill River. “My martyrdom is more trying than any I have hitherto experienced,” Millais remarked, describing “muscular” flies and powerful winds. “The painting of a picture under such circumstances would be a greater punishment to a murderer than hanging.”
The Tate notes that Millais devoted only four months to portraying Ophelia herself. Siddal agreed to stand in for the doomed beauty. She spent long hours in a bathtub at the artist’s Gower Street studio, wearing a cheap gown Millais acquired. “Today I have purchased a really splendid lady’s ancient dress—all flowered over in silver embroidery,” he wrote. “It cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds.” The dress is still in the Tate.
Millais arranged oil lamps beneath Siddall’s tub to keep her bathwater warm. One of those lamps went out. Millais didn’t notice, and Siddal didn’t complain—by then she knew that beauty means pain. The water grew so frigid that Siddall fell ill with pneumonia. Siddall’s father ordered Millais to cover her extensive medical bills. The artist allegedly made off paying the least possible amount.
Siddal in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866–68; 1872–73). Collection of the Delaware Art Museum.
Siddal made a full recovery from her Ophelia-induced illness, but the bout proved foreshadowing. Siddall likely met Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti while they both sat for Deverell’s massive oil painting Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV (1850). Siddall fell for Rossetti, who made her his sole model. In 1853, Rossetti took Siddall on as an art student. He taught her to draw, and advised her to drop the last letter from her surname. By 1857, Siddal became one of the only women to exhibit alongside the Pre-Raphaelites. Over the next 15 years, she produced numerous drawings, paintings, and poems, often inspired by Lord Tennyson, her favorite poet since discovering his verses on a butter wrapping as a kid.
As time wore on, Siddal grew fearful that her philandering beau would abandon her for a younger muse. While Rossetti resisted their marriage due to Siddal’s working class background, the two wed in 1860. It wasn’t enough to stave off her consumptive melancholy. Siddal died from a laudanum overdose, a rumored suicide, in 1862—decades before 1894, when Ophelia was included the original Henry Tate gift. It’s one of the museum’s most popular paintings today, due in no small part to Siddal’s sublime beauty, the pain it brought her.
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TORONTO – The union representing hundreds of striking Art Gallery of Ontario workers says it’s reached a tentative deal with the museum.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says they reached the deal late last night, after 16 hours of bargaining.
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The union representing hundreds of striking Art Gallery of Ontario workers says it’s reached a tentative deal with the museum.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says they reached the deal late last night, after 16 hours of bargaining.
The downtown Toronto museum has been closed for a month while more than 400 workers represented by OPSEU – including assistant curators, archivists and food and hospitality staff – were on strike.
They walked off the job after rejecting an offer from the AGO, which the union said failed to address key issues such as wage increases, protections for part-time workers and contracting out positions.
The union didn’t share details about their new tentative deal, which will soon go to a vote among the members, and the AGO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
No information was immediately available about when the AGO would reopen.
The union has previously said that part-time employees make up more than 60 per cent of the AGO’s work force, and they earn an average of $34,380 per year.
Art Bites: Millais's Muse Fell Ill After Posing for 'Ophelia' – artnet News
Striking Art Gallery of Ontario workers reach tentative deal with museum – Toronto Star
Striking Art Gallery of Ontario workers reach tentative deal with museum – The Globe and Mail
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