Upcoming shows + New Work

this month:

June 20-21 – Brookdale Park | Bloomfield, New Jersey

June 26-28 – Amagansett Fine Arts Festival | Amagansett, New York

Time Passes in Flowers

First tulips, then the iris, then roses, now lilies. Time is moving quickly this spring and we make sure our paintings get as much time as we do sunbathing in the garden, soundbathing in the ring of nearby church bells. In this letter today we are here with a quick hello, how are you? And a tour through some new work.

This piece was inspired by a bed of irises we planted in 2023, the year before we started traveling to share our work. I was working at the dyehouse and came home one Thursday evening, after spending three days working and sleeping out in amish country. I was tired. I wanted dinner. I came inside hoping to find Dan cooking but instead found him in our backyard, digging. He was surrounded by nearly 50 faded iris plants, all of which he transplanted from the garden that blooms behind our current studio. They stood tall like slender swords, poking out of a dozen or so plastic bags.

Can you help me plant these? He asked. They’ll bloom next may. In the late evening light I felt my post-work exhaustion transform with a sigh.

What do you say to a man who fills your backyard with flowers? You say yes and join him in the dirt.

We spent an hour or so trimming the sword-like grasses to daggers, fixing the flower bed just so, weeding, tinkering, placing a horse shoe I found in the field behind the dyehouse amongst the rhizomes for good luck.

Ever since, loyal as flowers are, they return every year and grace us with that indescribable feeling of beholding something beautiful. We hope you feel it too.

In Other News…

Dan and I took a quick trip to New York on Sunday to install pieces from the Sunrise series in our client’s home in Williamsburg.

Our orignal plan was to visit two exhibitions in Manhatten, only to find that both the Helen Frankenthaler Retrospective at the Gagosian and Katherine Berndhardt’s show at Canada Gallery were both closed on Sundays. Go figure. But without much effort we realized we were close to the Isamu Noguchi museum, and what luck we were! We had a dreamy afternoon exploring the gardens and showrooms there, held in the quiet and powerful beauty of rocks and stones. I was excited to learn Noguchi was involved with making sets for plays choreographed by Martha Graham, and touched by his devotion to designing public spaces like playgrounds and fountains. There is always so much more to artists than we realize….

If you can’t make a visit there yourself, I recommend exploring the museum’s website. The images alone will make you sigh. To sign off, a quote from Noguchi himself on our likeness to stone and the value of change:

There is a time passage to stone not unlike our own. A mellowing takes place that would not otherwise be possible. Time stops not by contest but by becoming a part. The changes add and do not subtract.

The changes add and do not subtract. The changes add and do not subtract. The changes add and do not subtract.

With care,

Bixa