Dirt By Amy Stewart

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Chicken Paintings!

8 x 10 oil on gessoed art board.  Click here to bid on either painting.  Note that paintings will ship on May 20.

Several weeks ago, a woman got in touch with me and asked for a chicken painting.  I did two paintings and have a couple more in the works, but my latest emails to her have bounced back.  So I'm putting them up on eBay.  If you've been in touch with me about chicken paintings, here's your chance to bid on two!

This is also a good time for a chicken update.  The Rhode Island Red on the left, Eleanor, developed a very nasty female condition known as a prolapsed vent. I'll spare you the anatomical details, but you can follow that link to find out more.  Basically, some of her insides popped out, probably as she was laying an egg, and they would not go back inside.  A great deal of mess and distress followed.

Unfortunately, I was out of town, and Scott had to handle this by itself.  He felt, rightly so, that a delicate situation like this really could use a woman's touch. In addition to having to clean her up and try to get her anatomy put back where it belongs, a procedure involving more ointment and latex gloves than most of us would want to be involved with, he also had to separate her from the other chickens so that they would not peck at this newly exposed flesh. This involved a construction project that he really didn't have time for, and one that was hampered by wind and rain.

Finally, in desperation, he took her to the emergency vet over the weekend.  We both thought that she would have to be euthanized, and since we are  not farmers, there was no way we were going to wring her neck ourselves.

As it turned out, the emergency vet on duty used to keep chickens.  He gave Eleanor a cortisone shot, and within a few days she was as good as new.  I got back in town to do the final bit of nursing duty, and to see her anatomy put itself back in order. 

So Eleanor (on the left) is healthy and happy again, and I'm sure that Abigail (on the right) is glad to have her back in the coop.

That's the poultry report from here.  Everyone's laying, and we've got more eggs than we can eat right now.  Want some?

See You in Albuquerque!

I'll be at Bookworks on Saturday at 3 pm.  Come say hello!  Bring a friend!  Bring all your friends!

"Two Apples"

8 x 10, oil on gessoed art board.  Click here to bid. Go here to see other eBay auctions.

I'm getting ready to head to New Mexico for a week-long painting workshop with Carol Marine.  Don't ask me how I found the time--I didn't.  I just decided several months ago that if I waited until I had a lot of free time on my hands, it would never happen.  So I booked the trip anyway, and off I go.

And as I was ordering art supplies online to have shipped to the workshop, I realized that those of you who have bought paintings off this blog are funding a good portion of this workshop!  So thank you. I hope to have some good stuff to show when I get back.

This is a funny painting.  I wasn't happy with the background, so I kept wiping it off and starting over. Then I got down to this messy  blue-and-white surface and thought, "Huh. That's kind of cool."  It's not the kind of thing I could pull off on purpose, but it's an interesting accident.

See you at the LA Garden Show

I'll be there Sunday at noon--details here.

The Garden Coach, Part One

I blog with a group of opinionated gardeners at gardenrant.com; one of my partners in crime on that site makes her living as a garden coach.  At first I wasn't sure why the world needed one more kind of horticultural professional.  We already have designers, landscape architects, arborists, engineers, lawn care services, and landscape crews to choose from. But Susan’s stories about her fledgling garden coach career fascinated me. A movie star who spends most of his time in New York asked her to go to his mother's house in the DC area a couple times a month and just garden alongside her, to encourage her interest in the outdoors and to help with the heavy lifting. Gardeners who had spent years filling their yard with plants felt frustrated with the results and called on Susan to help them rearrange and fine-tune.

Pretty soon the media was calling too, and Susan was talking to reporters all over the country about garden coaching.  She didn't invent the concept, but she just happened to have a website (thegardeningcoach.com) that attracted reporters.  One day I was reading about Susan in the Christian Science Monitor, and there was a quote from Genevieve Schmidt, a garden coach in Arcata. I had met Genevieve a couple of times—she created a lovely woodland garden for a friend of mine -- so I invited her over to talk about why, exactly, a gardener might want to hire a coach.

NY in spring...sigh...

Lilies at Rockerfeller Center

Baltimore --view from my hotel

See You in Baltimore, CT, and NY

It's spring and I'm back on tour for the paperback of Flower Confidential.  If you're in Baltimore, CT, or NY, I hope you'll stop by and say hey.

Friday, April 4 12-1
Discussion & Booksigning
Walters Art Museum Art in Bloom
Baltimore, MD

Tuesday, April 15, 7 pm
Discussion & Booksigning
RJ Julia Booksellers
Madison, CT

Wednesday, April 16, 7 pm
Discussion & Booksigning
Horticultural Society of New York
New York, NY

Thursday, April 17, 7:30 p.m.
Discussion & Booksigning
EARTH NIGHT, Flowers and Food for Thought
Rye High School Performing Arts Center
Milton Road
Rye, NY

'Apple Trio'

8 x 10 oil on gessoed art board. Click here to bid.  Go here to see all eBay auctions.

I don't know what it is about apples.  They are fun to paint, and I can get totally absorbed in trying to get those splotches of gold and red just right.

I think I might do a whole series of these apples, but they won't be up for a while.  I'm off to the East Coast soon for some book tour events, and I'm sure that when I'll get back I'll have lots of Manhattan scenes I'll want to paint.

'Mr. & Mrs. Salt and Pepper Go to Fort Lauderdale'

8 x 10 inch oil on gessoed art board. Click here to bid. Go here to see all eBay auctions.

This is kind of a strange, silly little painting, but I'm putting it up here anyway.  I was in Fort Lauderdale by myself earlier this year, and I sat at a sidewalk cafe, looking at the beach, with only this salt and pepper shaker and a rum punch to keep me company. After a while, perhaps under the influence of the rum punch, it started to seem as if the salt and pepper shaker were on vacation at the beach and I was kind of a third wheel.

So I told them to get up next to each other and smile, and I took their picture, and then I went home.

'Refrigerator Dishes'--SOLD

SOLD.  8 x 10 inch oil on gessoed art board. Click here to bid.  Go here to see all eBay auctions.

I love these old Pyrex dishes.  They're the only thing we use in our fridge.  No Rubbermaid for us.  I thought it would be really fun and easy to paint these three primary colors, but it was surprisingly tricky to get them just right.

'Oranges and Lemons'--SOLD

8 x 10 inch oil on gessoed art board. Click here to bid.  Click here to see all eBay auctions.

Oranges and Lemons:  also the name of an XTC album I listened to constantly in college.

This fruit bowl was sitting on a friend's counter, just perfectly composed.  Took a rather poor photo with my phone, but it was enough for this painting.  I guess that's the trick: seeing paintings wherever you go, and getting just enough information down to let you reproduce it in the studio. 

'Bookshelf'--SOLD

SOLD.  8 x 10 inch oil on gessoed art board.  Click here to bid.

I thought this would be my last painting of books for a while, but just today I started photographing a stack of books on the table in my office, so I may be back at it.

I've been fussing over several paintings the last few weeks--I've finally decided to stop fussing and put them online.  Paintings are like books--they're never really finished.  You just reach a point when you decide to stop messing with them.  This one's very loose, but in a way that appeals to me.

See you at the Garden Shows!

This month, I'm in Boston and San Francisco.  If you're going to the shows, stop by and say hi.  In Boston, I'm also leading a tour of the show gardens at 9 am on Saturday.  Apparently my role is simply to provide witty commentary.  I'm much more witty at 5 pm with a glass of Champagne in my hand, but we'll see what I can manage at 9 am with a double nonfat latte.

Saturday, March 8, 1:30
Discussion & Booksigning
New England Spring Flower Show
Boston, MA

Wednesday, March 12, 12:00
Booksigning at Mrs. Dalloway's booth
San Francisco Garden Show
San Francisco, CA

Why Shop at Your Local Florist?

Check out my article about local florists on the Flower Shop Network's website. And by the way, their website makes it pretty easy to find an actual florist to order from--here, for example, is what I get when I search for florists in Santa Cruz, CA.

Ecuador: Flower Power

A very cool ten-minute documentary on Nevado Ecuador, one of the farms I visited when I was researching Flower Confidential.  Check it out here.

Sam's Club Sells Fair Trade Flowers

It's very cool to see a large company like Sam's Club get behind the Fair Trade program.  They're now offering Fair Trade flowers for sale on their website.  You can read all about Fair Trade flowers here, but the important thing to know is that in addition to labor and environmental standards, a portion of the purchase price goes directly to the workers for a community development project (like a microlending program, a program to supply families with livestock, computer education, etc.)  This means that people who work on these farms are not just guaranteed a good, safe job, they also have some new options to help them move out of poverty. 

It also tends to be the more "high-end" farms that participate, meaning that you may be getting higher quality flowers from Fair Trade farms.  Really, this is a winning situation for everybody, and the fact that Sam's Club is participating means that some very big buying decisions are being made that reward these farms that really make a difference.

Check the Fair Trade Flowers website for more sources of Fair Trade flowers, including 1-800 Flowers and Organic Bouquet.

The Paperback!

Complete with a new afterword.  Coming soon to a bookstore near you....

'Decapitated Eggplant'--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on board. Click here to bid. Go here to see all auctions on eBay.

Another eggplant from the same series.  I'm thinking about doing more fruits and vegetables with their heads cut off.  Keeps it interesting.

These are the last paintings that will be up for a while--I'm on the road doing book tour stuff for a couple weeks.

'Death of an Eggplant'

8 x 10 inch oil on board.  Click here to bid. Go here to see all eBay auctions.

My editor asked for an eggplant painting.  You'd think it would be easy to make eggplants interesting, but I was having a hard time coming up with something compelling, so I cut its head off.

Much better.

I ended up doing a whole series of these, so here's one that didn't go to my editor.

Eco-Friendly Flowers in the New York Times

"And as in other industries with increasing demand for green products, the floral industry is debating what is environmentally correct. Should flowers be organic — that is, grown without synthetic or toxic pesticides? Or should the emphasis be on fair trade, meaning that the workers who grow and cut them are safe and well paid? Or should consumers favor flowers grown locally, not flown or trucked over long distances? In other words, what, exactly, is a green flower?"

Read the whole article here.

Book Tour Dates

I'm headed back out on the road soon.  If you're in Spokane, Springfield, IL, Virginia, Baltimore, New York, or New Mexico, check the Events page for details. 

More dates coming soon...it's going to be a busy spring...

Luxury Flowers

One of the things that comes up a lot when I talk to florists is the idea of a 'luxury' flower.  There is such a thing as a high-end, high-quality, bigger, better, bolder, and more fragrant flower.  And those flowers cost more.  Why?

Some of them are hard-to-get new varieties for which breeders charge a premium.

Some of them take more time and effort to grow. To get a really extraordinary, baseball-sized rose on a five-foot stem, you have to prune the plant in such a way that you might only get one rose every couple of months.  A smaller supermarket rose, on the other hand, might come from a plant that produces two or three blossoms per plant for month.  If a rose bush is only producing one rose every few months, you'll have to charge more for it.

Same is true of lilies.  A bigger, bolder lily will come from a bigger, more mature bulb.  That bulb costs more.

To make a flower last longer, you will invest more in refrigeration and handling.  A flower that sits in a bucket at room temperature in a supermarket, or out on a sidewalk, won't last as long as one that's been in exactly the right climate-controlled facility.

But consumers, when they buy flowers, usually shop based on price.  A dozen pink tulips cost seven bucks at the supermarket, so why should I pay more?  We don't really know how to tell a high-end flower from a regular flower.

Contrast this to, say, how we buy wine or chocolate.  Most of us know the difference between a Hershey bar and a Vosges truffle.  We know the difference between a bottle of Two Buck Chuck and a nice Alexander Valley Silver Oak.  Even if we're not connoisseurs, we have a general notion that there is such a thing as premium wine or chocolate.

So why not flowers?  Here's a florist in Charleston, SC who is trying to sell customers on the idea of luxury flowers.  They've created a brand called 'Black Market Designs' (OK, I'm not so sure about the name), and the idea is to offer up the ultimate flowers and the ultimate design. Check it out!

"Stack"--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on gessoed art board.  Click here to bid. Go here to see all eBay auctions.

The weather's been pretty gloomy lately, so it's hard to get the warm, clear light that I think old books deserve.  But every time the sun comes out I start yanking books off the shelf to photograph them.  I've got some interesting ones in progress--stay tuned...

"Books and Vase"--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on gessoed art board.  Click here to bid. Go here to see all eBay auctions.

I set up this still life at our bookstore.  I took the photograph at kind of an odd angle, which made this oddly-shaped vase look even more off-kilter.  I decided to really just let it look crazy. The store is full of funny little objects like this vase--I don't know whose it is (well, I guess it's mine now) or how it got there.

More book paintings to come.  I'm having fun coming up with other objects to paint with the books.  The other day I thought it would be fun to paint an ashtray sitting on a stack of books (a familiar scene from my childhood) but then I thought, where would I get an ashtray?

Ft. Lauderdale --not too sunny, but WARM

"Books, Again"--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on gessoed art board. Click here to bid. Go here to see all eBay auctions.

Another bookish painting. I fussed with this one for several days, which hardly makes it a daily painting, but in the end I was happy with it.

More books to come...they turn out to be a good subject in winter, when there are no flowers in the garden to paint and even the chickens don't want to stand still and pose for the camera.

Some Thoughts on the Weather

At last, the winter solstice will be over and the days will be getting gradually and imperceptibly longer. That's fine with me: having a few minutes of daylight and a few degrees of warmth snatched away from me day by day has left me feeling irritated and impoverished. I should be in tune with the season, but I’m not. I have not surrendered to the darkness, I have not found stark beauty in bare branches and frost on the windows, and I have not rediscovered the joys of a crackling fire and a cup of hot chocolate. It just didn’t happen for me this year.

A little over a month ago I was in Miami, drinking mojitos on the beach after midnight. I had brought along a sweater, which is the sort of silly superfluous thing that people from Northern California do when they visit a beach. We simply can't hold the idea of a reliably warm, tropical coastline in our minds long enough to leave a sweater at home. New Yorkers shed their overcoats at the Miami airport with the confidence of someone who knows how to trade in a cold place for a warm one, but not Californians. We cling to the idea that any ocean could turn cold and unfriendly; we come prepared.