Garden Tour, Sunday June 14, 2009 from Noon until 4 pm.

(Copy of Newsletter sent to my emailing list.)

Newsletter Highlights:

Art, Blogging, Facebook and a Garden Tour

Bridge over the dry stream bed

I am really excited about the upcoming Garden Tour sponsored by the Northport Historical Society this coming Sunday, June 14, 2009 from Noon until 4 pm.

I am doing a comprehensive redesign of much of my garden this year and I’m really looking forward to showing and talking about this work-in-progress. I’ve been gardening on this little piece of ground for twenty years and I finally bit the bullet to tackle some real challenging gardening issues that develop as a garden ages.

Since my garden is such an integral part of my life as an Artist, this redesign and rethinking plays itself out over many of my artistic endeavors.

To see my garden and the other six magnificent gardens on this Tour please visit the Northport Historical Society home page to get your tickets, tour guide and map.

Social Networking

Stand out in a crowd

I have joined the millions of people who have embraced Facebook as a means of staying connected with friends from the past, present and future. As an Artist and a Garden Designer, I enjoy showing my Garden and my Art. If I don’t share it in words and pictures with the many friends I have from afar, I will only have me as an audience. All that beauty just for my eyes? Far too selfish for my taste. So please visit me either on Facebook and/or on my Blogs.

For my Blog enthusiasts I’m made some changes.

Since I found that different folks enjoy different subjects, I’ve split my Blog into 2 different entities.

For those who enjoy reading about Art I have this blog.

Art Naturally – Musings of My Life as an Artist.

This Blog talks about Art Shows, Influences, Reviews, New Work, Education and more.

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For my http://www.northporthistorical.org friends I have

The Garden-Artist – My Garden, My Art, Where Passions Merge.

http://maryahernartist.com/garden-blog

My Garden Blog shows where I grow the inspiration for my Art.

It also follows in words and photos the Garden Design projects I’ve created and worked on in the Garden I’ve enjoyed for the last 20 years.

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I hope to see you in my garden or if you can’t visit, I hope to share with you online.
Keep smiling!
…mary

Mary Ahern with her Digital Mixed Media Paintings

As an added bonus I will be showing some of my Digital and Traditional Mixed Media Paintings during the Garden Tour. Orders may be placed for pick-up after the Garden Tour ends at 4PM.

If you’d like to call to ask me questions about my work or would like to place an order for pick up please email me with your name and phone #.

I think about what style I’m looking for, what colors will work together, whether the scale of the placement works for me. I think about the type of flower and texture of the leaves. I make decisions about the 3D composition of the garden much like the 2D composition decisions on a painting.

The garden adds so many additional layers of complexity since the artwork is moving in time with nature, the seasons, the elements, and time. The painting remains caught in a moment.

Capturing that ephemeral moment is so gratifying to me in my Fine Art. I control it, unlike my Garden which is usually out of control.

You can visit this Watercolor painting on my website in The Work or you can buy a print of it in The Store.

Then I got down. Hands and knees down.

What a surprise! How intricate the little flowers are. Little bells dance around a central stem forming a small pyramid. This inflorescence changes shape as it ages and can be more and less tightly knit.

The individual purple doesn’t seem to change on each bell but the overall purple varies when viewed at a distance based upon the tightness of the overall flower.

I enjoyed these 4″ bulbs so much in my garden that I bought a bag of them from Costco one year and low and behold the next spring the flowers that bloomed were very different from my originals. They were more blue then purple and had a more rounded then pyramidal over shape.

So I googled Grape Muscari and found a world of cultivars I didn’t previously know existed. That’s one of the things that is so much fun about gardening. You are constantly in a learning mode. You are in for surprises every year and every season. The knowledge and information you acquire just keeps on growing, along with your garden.

So now I know that so far in my garden I have Muscari armeniacum and M. azureaum. Next year I’m sure to have more.

When I made my Digital Mixed Media Painting of my Grape Muscari I was careful to recreate the basal growth of the leaves. It would not have been accurate if I’d placed the leaves higher on the stem. The painting would have looked like a plant Frankenstein. As a Garden Artist, that is not what I’m trying to create.

You can view this Grape Muscari piece in my Store.

Dicentra spectabilis vignette

Isn’t that a fantastic name? Dicentra spectabilis. It just rolls out of your mouth in a lilting singsong kind of rhythm doesn’t it? I love to say it quietly under my breath as I walk around my woodland garden in May. Not too loud so as to scare the birds and the neighbors (and myself for that matter.)

I love their color pink. I have some white ones, , but the pink ones are just so luscious. They reseed very freely for me and I’m able to reposition the offspring into springtime vignettes.

Dicentra spectabilis close-up

When I bought this property in 1989 there was one plant of Dicentra native here and I’ve managed over time to spread the wealth around my own garden and also with other gardeners. What a treat!

I don’t mind that they die back in the summer because it gives me another planting opportunity but some of the holes they leave behind can be very BIG planting opportunities…all the more opportunity for creativity to kick in.

I made a Digital Mixed Media Painting, which I call, “Dicentra Necklace”. I think of these joyful little gems in my garden, decorating the light greens of spring with their pink heart shaped “jewelry”.

Dicentra spectabilis necklace by Mary Ahern

The abundant shade in my garden causes challenges to many of my daffodil plantings but I still crave the color in early spring. One of the fun parts of designing gardens is figuring out how to hide the declining leaves on the daffodils as they absorb the chlorophyll for next year’s growth.

I’ve been known to hide them using daylilies, Siberian iris and ornamental grasses. I’ve stopped braiding the leaves since it seems so demeaning to their dignity.

I created a Digital Mixed Media Painting from one of these white daffodils. I love the way daffodil leaves have a slight twist to them. One of things I kept in mind when composing the piece is that the stem is offset where it enters the back of the flower, unlike a tulip which is a straight up vertical.

Another issue is making sure that I paint the shadows different from when the “light” hits the round stem vs. when it hits a flat leaf.

You can see this Single White Daffodil in my Store. I created various sizes for purchase. I think it has a rather heroic feel to the composition.

Single White Daffodil by Mary Ahern

Springtime is such a hectic time since I’m always late uncovering the perennial beds. These jolly yellow daffodils came up in my entry garden and I was lucky enough to catch the early morning light behind them.

My entry garden is still in need of some tidying but putting the pansies into the pots and baskets takes my mind off the leaves from last fall.

Though I like to create gardens and like to create Fine Art using my garden, in the garden I get messy and dirty while my Botanical Art is clean and stylized.

This Digital Mixed Media Painting is a very popular piece that surprisingly sells all year long, not just in the spring as I would have imagined. People buy this Single Yellow Daffodil as an individual piece and also as a grouping along with some of my other daffodil Art Works. You can see them in my Store.

The author of the article, Arlene Gross, wrote about the choices, decisions and sacrifices of five different individuals. The various paths we chose to explore in our second careers are as different as our paths in our initial and primary wage earning pursuits.

Noel Rubinton, the editor of the Act Two section of Newsday, however, hit on a different issue when he encouraged people to use the New Year as an opportunity to explore yourself even if you couldn’t at this time make the giant leap of a whole new career.

Noel wrote that, “A line that really resonated in our cover story came from Mary Ahern… finding that switch took work. ‘The hard part at first was trying to find inside myself what that dream actually was. You spend so much time marching forward and doing what you do, you lose the essence of yourself’.”

When my husband Dave gave me as a wedding gift, which coincided with my 50th birthday, the opportunity to re-invent myself you would think I would have immediately jumped into my studio. Instead I whined and anguished for a months over what I wanted to do with this great new vista open to me.

I was so overwhelmed with the immense possibilities I now had available to me that I suffered each day trying to make the right decision with this precious gift. I spent so much time trying to fathom what makes me tick, what intellectually interests me, what direction would support my value system, what new career would be feasible and sustainable for the next 30 or so years, what would not impinge on the home life that we had just found together and cherished so much.

I talked about it endlessly. I beat it to death. I’m sure there were times that Dave wished he hadn’t made the offer since I was so annoying in my pursuit of the “what if’s”. Massage therapist? Lawyer? Chiropractor? Quite frankly, I never even considered Artist.

I knew one thing for sure. I was tired of computers and wanted to become a Luddite. And then one Saturday morning, sitting on our deck, having coffee while surrounded by the gardens I designed and have worked on for decades, Dave suggested that since we loved the gardens so much and they gave such joy to people, why not design gardens for others.

BANG!

Ten days later I was enrolled as a full-time student in the Ornamental Horticulture Program at Farmingdale. I knew I wanted to be a landscape designer and this was the best beginning. Two years later I graduated with my degree and a new career.