Works featured by members of Common Art at Wellesley Library
The Wellesley Free Library is hosting an exhibition of more than 70 works of art by members of Common Art, many of whom are accomplished artists whose professional path was interrupted and suspended by calamity and homelessness. Every Wednesday at Emmanuel Church on Newbury St. in Boston, the Common Art program provides studio space, materials, and a caring support staff to people living in shelters, rooming houses, and on B0ston’s streets. Participants gather to draw, paint, sculpt, and share with other artists in like circumstances. When an artist finishes a work, her or she is encouraged to price it. The works are sold in multiple venues, with the artist receiving all of the proceeds. To purchase, contact Tim Green at 781-413-1793 or [email protected]
Wellesley Society of Artists show
The Wellesley Society of Artists is having a Spring/Summer Show of artworks from their members running now through early Fall. The show is being held at the Wellesley Community Center, 219 Washington St., and is free and open to the public.
Wellesley is as pretty as a picture
We’ve given Boston artist Michael William a mention in the past for his Wellesley-themed works. William paints on a small scale, not spending more than a few days on each piece, and that he chooses subjects that are simple and full of light. He often finds inspiration when he spots the light moving a certain way such as “…when I’m sitting by a lake and am suddenly moved by the warm summer weather and the natural beauty that surrounds me. I consciously try not to imbue these pieces with any more than the innate beauty of the subject and the many times simple but powerful emotions that it has inspired in me.”
One of his latest works depicts a swan whiling away the day on Lake Waban, and the beloved topiary gardens on Lake Waban (pictured above) is the subject of another.
In other art news…
Wellesley garden clubs crop up like weeds at MFA Art in Bloom
Students to honor WHS alumni ad staff veterans with art project
Congratulations to Wellesley’s 2016 Scholastic Art & Writing Award winners
Beyond Swellesley, a book review:
The Light of the World, a Memoir, by Elizabeth Alexander
The list of the author’s accomplishments is long: Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet, Yale professor, composer of “Praise Song for the Day,” which she recited at President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, mother, and wife. When her husband, a trim, 50 year-old health-conscious chef and artist, dies suddenly of cardiac arrest, leaving her a widow and their two children without their father, Alexander is plunged into shock and grief as she mourns the loss of their love which “began in an instant and progressed inevitably.”
Although a sobering reality, yet this 200-page memoir is not a walk through the valley of the shadow of death. It is instead a written still life of what she and her husband, Ficre, a man who was “profoundly peaceful and peace-loving,” created through their shared commitment to marriage, family, friends, and a conscious way of living. Her writing is full of images of the Eritrean food Ficre created in his New Haven restaurant, the art he created in his studio, gardens and poetry, books and music. It’s a life that revels in the kind of luxury that comes not from purchasing power but from two people practicing their own enjoyment and idea of what it is that constitutes life’s deep pleasures.
Alexander knows how to bend the language to her purposes, letting the reader into her life, but only so far. It’s not an orgy of oversharing, nor a demand for pity. Like a poem, the reader becomes privy to bits and pieces of a whole, a glimpse at days they shared that Alexander says she can “only call divine.” Perhaps the clearest picture that comes through is of a partnership that worked, and a suggestion of the secret sauce for its success: “Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly.”
Read The Light of the World and visit, “a house where the piano was played, a house where we sometimes read poetry at the dinner table…” a place where the inhabitants loved living in an organized and open way that always welcomed family and friends, yet where the author hopes that “noone is fooled by my competence.”
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