landscape

Israel’s wildflowers of spring

A collage of Israeli wildflowers. (MathKnight/Wikimedia Commons)

Every year, spring returns like a miracle and Israel is carpeted with wildflowers. There are nearly 3,000 types of wild plants in this tiny land, a wonderful profusion – among the most abundant on earth, growing in deserts and marshes, mountains and forests, and open fields.

We protect the wildflowers in Israel. Nature reserves prohibit picking any flowers, even the most common, which helps them propagate over wider areas. In turn, this brings the sunbirds, who feast on their nectar.

The Song of Songs, which we read every Passover, is the most beautiful love poem in the world. King Solomon wrote it as a dialogue between a young shepherd and his beloved: “Rise up, my love, my fair one and come away / For lo, the winter is past / The rain is over and gone / The flowers appear on the earth / The time of singing is come / And the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.”

The flowers he refers to, nitzanim, still carpet the fields – red poppies flaunting scarlet beauty in the grass.

In the Jerusalem Forest, cyclamens bloom in the crevices between the rocks. Called “Solomon’s Crown” in Hebrew, they lift their pink, cream or lilac heads on slender stalks. Clumps of wild violets, the dew shimmering, add their touch of magic.

We had good rains this winter and they have left a bequest of green. The Sharon Valley is dotted with tulips and narcissus – “I am the Rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.”

It is believed that King Solomon was referring to the black tulips of the Galilee. In spring, even the weeds are beautiful – the milk vetch (gadilan), which is just a common thistle, adds purple blooms to the roadside. The rock rose (labdanum) flowers abundantly in forest glades, and the orange ranunculus bursts forth. Like its velvety cousin, the anemone, it is a protected wild flower in Israel.

The perfume of daffodils, which delighted our winter, still wafts on the breeze, and the white, cream, yellow and blue noses of lupins are pushing through the soil. Oleanders are in bud, growing wild by the banks of the River Jordan and near streams in Galilee, promising summer. And the blue statice reminds us that we, too, have a Mediterranean coast like the famed Riviera – this sea plant flowers from spring until mid-summer, when its corolla drops off and only the sepal remains.

When you see the splendour of the land’s spring glory, the wildflowers glowing, you’ll echo the poet’s words: “Had I but two loaves of bread, I would sell one of them and buy white hyacinths to feed my soul.”

Dvora Waysman is a Jerusalem-based author. She has written 14 books, including The Pomegranate Pendant, which was made into a movie, and her latest novella, Searching for Sarah. She can be contacted at dwaysman@gmail.com or through her blog dvorawaysman.com.

Oberlander Prize established

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (photo © Charles A. Birnbaum, courtesy the Cultural Landscape Foundation)

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), a nonprofit, Washington, D.C.-based education and advocacy organization, announced last month that award-winning Vancouver landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is the namesake of a recently established prize.

The Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize (“Oberlander Prize”), which will be conferred biennially beginning in 2021, is the first and only international landscape architecture prize that includes a $100,000 US award, along with two years of public engagement activities. The naming announcement was made at an event at the Consulate General of Canada in New York City.

The 98-year-old Oberlander has been in practice for more than 70 years. Her notable projects include the New York Times building courtyard (with HMWhite landscape architects and urban designers), the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, the Canadian chancery in Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Canadian embassy in Berlin, Robson Square in Vancouver, the Vancouver Public Library, and many others. Oberlander has worked on public housing in the United States and Canada, pioneered playground design with the Children’s Creative Centre at Montreal’s Expo ’67 (and designed 70 other playgrounds), was an early champion of green roofs and, for decades, has advocated for landscape architecture’s leading role in addressing environmental, ecological and social issues and the impact of climate change.

Oberlander is held in high regard both within and beyond her profession, as is reflected in the early results of a campaign to raise $1 million to help endow the Oberlander Prize, with commitments of $10,000 each from and/or on behalf of 100 women, part of a broader campaign to raise $4.5 million. The 100 Women Campaign launched in July 2019 and its website includes information about each of the more than 70 women who have contributed to date.

“It was the consensus of the prize advisory committee, which helped shaped the prize, and TCLF’s board of directors that Oberlander’s inspiring and trailblazing career in the field of landscape architecture exemplifies the critical values and ideals of the prize, and that she is someone who embodies the prize criteria of creativity, courage and vision,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF’s president and chief executive officer.

In tandem with the naming of the prize, all of Oberlander’s publicly accessible works are being added to TCLF’s What’s Out There landscape database; on June 20, 2021, the centennial of Oberlander’s birth, TCLF will host a What’s Out There Weekend of free, expert-led tours of Oberlander’s landscapes in the United States, Canada and Germany; and an update to TCLF’s 2008 Pioneers Oral History with Oberlander has been produced. More public engagement events will be announced later. See tclf.org/prize.

Responding to the landscape

“ReView 2” by Ian Penn.

Ian Penn is not a new name for regular visitors to the Zack Gallery, which has exhibited his work before. “I like this gallery,” Penn told the Independent. “It’s like a public marketplace. It’s transparent and open. Children come in. Older people. People on the way from their lunch or the gym. The gallery is accessible, the way art should be. I could show at a traditional gallery, but I don’t want to.”

Penn makes one exception to this statement – for his homeland, Australia. “I have a gallery in Australia that represents me, and I exhibit there frequently, once or twice a year,” he said. “Last year, I was an artist-in-residence at that gallery. I gave artistic workshops to high school children. It was fun.”

His current exhibition at the Zack, From the Deck: View and ReView, is dedicated to landscapes, specifically the scenery he sees from the deck of his house: trees and mountains, water and clouds. Penn has painted these landmarks in different lights and different seasons. “I tried to capture different moods,” he said. “Some are grand, panoramic. Others are smaller, more intimate.”

He explained his idea behind the show. “View and re-view are two parts of the process. I look at the view from my house deck, have been looking at it for years. I enjoy the landscape from a single view. I take photographs. I sketch it multiple times. It’s my immediate response to the landscape. I’m part of it. I’m mapping it. This is ‘View,’ but it is not the territory, just a map. It is my understanding of the place.”

Penn’s View paintings are more abstract, sometimes just splashes of colour. What is important to the artist is that every element appears in the right size and shape in relation to the other elements. “I measure all the distances at this stage and mark the proportions. How far is this treetop from that ship passing through? How large are these bushes compared to that shoreline? I make lots of drawings.”

The second part of the process, the review, is done in the studio, later. “This is the second part of my response,” he explained. “I’d think: what is important in that idea? A ‘ReView’ is my emotional and physical answer to the ‘View’ and the landscape. It’s all about the place itself, the place and the painting. At this stage, I’m recreating the territory.”

photo - Ian Penn at the opening of his latest solo exhibition at the Zack Gallery, which runs until April 28 — Ian Penn at the opening of his latest solo exhibition at the Zack Gallery, which runs until April 28. *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

Unlike the bold brush strokes of his Views, most of his ReViews are more detailed, while still exploring the same landscape. And the ratio of abstract versus figurative slants towards the figurative. “I’m interested where representation and abstraction interact,” he admitted.

In his ReViews, a tree becomes a more detailed tree, not just a blob of yellow, even while maintaining its impressionistic abstract profile. A ship becomes more identifiable as a ship, not simply a dark squiggle. And a cloud can’t be mistaken for anything else.

In fact, clouds play a huge role in most of the paintings on display: light and fluffy in one image, heavy and menacing in another. “Clouds change constantly; that’s why they interest me. I’m fascinated by change, by periods of transition,” said Penn. “That’s why most of these paintings are done in spring or autumn. Those are the seasons of change. In summer, the landscape is full and the sky is clear, but, with autumn, comes change. The colours of the leaves change. When the leaves fall, the shapes of the trees change. The bones of the landscapes are transformed. The weather changes. Same in spring. By exploring those changes, I’m addressing the changes in our lives.”

By the juxtaposition of constant change within the same view – from one location – Penn follows in the footsteps of one of his favourite artists, Paul Cezanne. “I studied Cezanne. He painted Mont Sainte-Victoire countless times, all different,” Penn said. “He changed the landscape genre forever, took it apart and re-created it.”

Penn’s investigation of the landscape as an art form goes further. “A traditional landscape is horizontal, with certain set dimensions,” he explained. “I’m challenging those dimensions, trying landscapes of different formats. A portrait shape. A diptych, which is much wider than a traditional landscape. I’m playing with different geometry. What if the two parts of a diptych are of different widths: one square, another a wider rectangle? What if both parts are off-squares?”

Penn’s experiments with the shapes of his paintings, with the changing of weather and seasons, makes the show diverse. The exhibition demonstrates the richness of landscape as an art form.

“Landscape as we know it is relatively new in the modern Western art,” he said. “Before the Renaissance, landscape was mostly a background for figures in the composition. It only became a separate art form in the 16th and 17th centuries, after the paint tubes became small enough that artists could take them out of the studios, to paint on locations. That was what the Group of Seven did. That is what I do.”

Penn’s show runs until April 28 at the Zack. For more information about his work, visit ianpenn.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.

Exploring winter landscapes

Ian Penn’s exhibit Winter Paintings: The Figure in and on the Landscape opened March 10 at Zack Gallery. (photo by Olga Livshin)

The theme of Ian Penn’s solo show at Zack Gallery is winter. The artist’s love for winter, for the mountains of British Columbia and for skiing reverberates through the gallery.

“I’m affected by the seasons, by my surroundings,” said Penn in an interview with the Independent. “I only paint current seasons. In summer, I paint summer; in the fall, I paint its rioting colors. In winter, I paint snow and skiing.”

Penn spends lots of his free time in the mountains. “Our whole family likes to ski,” he said. “When we first moved to B.C., we bought our first place in the mountains before we settled in Vancouver.”

Penn has been skiing since his youth in Australia, but it was cross-country skiing until he immigrated to Canada and saw the mountains. At the age of 35, he started alpine skiing – and loved it.

Around 2000, he went a step further. He joined the ski patrol in Whistler, volunteering part-time his professional skills as a doctor. He still does that. “I like the ski patrol community. They are nice people,” he said.

About the same time, he also became seriously interested in painting, which eventually led to a degree from Emily Carr.

Penn has a general fascination with landscapes, especially mountain scenes, as an art form. He has painted dozens of landscapes, in every season, and some of his favorite areas to paint are around Whistler and the Callaghan Valley.

“I was always interested in mapping a territory, but a map and a territory are not the same,” he explained. “The painting of a landscape is not the same as if you stand in that place, experience it with all your senses. Or with devices – photo cameras and cellphones. I wanted to capture that difference in my paintings. That’s why I started a series of diptychs. My diptychs are like a single painting in two parts.”

There are several diptychs on display in the gallery. One is a landscape, a vista with the majestic mountains and forest, with tiny human figures. The second affords a closer look. The human figure is larger, the artist’s focus has narrowed, and the people in these paintings are doing something, engaging with the mountains. They whip down the slopes on their skis. They stop to take photos. They enjoy the invigorating exercise and the beauty around them. They laugh and horse around.

Penn captures their movement in his paintings. His objects are not static. They don’t pose. They are just going about their business, and the artist is going about his.

“Initially, I wanted to paint on location,” he said. “I want to paint everywhere I go, but I couldn’t do that in winter. It’s too cold both for my hands and for the paints. Or it might snow. What I do when I’m in the mountains skiing, I take photos and make quick drawings.”

The drawings provide him with the first impression, the emotional subtext. The photographs he uses for details.

“All the details in my landscapes are accurate. The precision is important to me. I want to be able to navigate by them. I want the ski patrol to be able to use my paintings when they have to rescue someone,” he said, only half-joking.

Many of his paintings have personal stories attached, some of which are more obvious than others. In one painting, there was to have been a person but there isn’t; the close-up view is surprisingly empty of life. “He got erased. I erased him,” Penn said. “He was a vain fellow. He was dancing around, making selfies of himself with his cellphone, turning so he would get every possible angle. He didn’t notice anyone else, almost stepped on my ski. At first, I wanted to show it, as a portrait of self-absorption, but I disliked the fellow so much, I finally erased his figure from my painting. But, mostly, I want my paintings to tell your stories, not mine.”

The dominating color in all of the paintings is white, of course, overset by green forest and dark mountains. Only people provide splashes of color: a red jacket or a yellow parka.

“I use five different whites for the snow,” Penn said. “And then there are color patches reflecting the surroundings. Snow is never simply white. It’s complex and a challenge. It’s always different. And so is the sky: blue but different in each painting. But I never used black in any of these paintings. When I needed the dark, I mixed colors.”

Penn paints landscapes because they are endless. “Wherever I go, there is a new and amazing landscape waiting for me. Painting them, making drawings, photographing slows me down, allows me the time to look, to see the beauty around me.”

Winter Paintings: The Figure in and on the Landscape will be at the Zack until April 3. For more information about Penn and his work, visit ianpenn.com. An interview with Penn about his exhibit last year, called Pole, can be found at jewishindependent.ca/memorials-to-millions.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com.