Sage Sisters

Sage Sisters

Art Gallery and Gift Shop

Like so many introductions these days, I met Joyce Peltier through the internet.  Joyce is the proprietor of Sage Sisters, a wonderful art gallery and gift shop at 1516 West First Avenue in Grandview Heights, an inner-city neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio.  She saw some of my artwork on Facebook and invited me to be a guest artist in her art gallery, specifically at one of Grandview’s annual Art Hops.  Since she contacted me early in her planning season, she gave me my pick of dates.  I am proud to announce that during the Grandview Hop on Saturday, June 30, from 5 to 9 pm, I will be the featured artist at Sage Sisters Art Gallery and Gift Shop.  I will present an exhibition of several of my paintings and prints at the artist’s reception that evening, a display that will be on view through the following month.  The music for the soirée will be provided by SmallTalk. 

Through my activities in the fine arts in this region, I was familiar with Joyce.  Her status as a staunch supporter of artists, artisans, musicians, and writers in our area preceded her, a reputation that has grown through her many years as an artist and art teacher, as well as in retail management.  Needless to say, I was thrilled that she was interested in adding me to her entourage of favorites.  Of course, since then, by and by, I stop in to say hello to her and usually to purchase an aromatic candle or two.  At times, I bring in a friend or family member to meet Joyce, and to experience her unique shop, a place replete with original artwork, an assortment of fabulous, one-of-a-kind handmade crafts, pottery, jewelry, accessories, decorative items, CDs, as well as books, and more, all the products of people from our local talent pool.

Joyce and I will look forward to seeing you during the evening of Grandview’s June Gallery Hop on Saturday, June 30 from 5 to 9 pm at Sage Sisters, 1516 West First Avenue in Grandview Heights.  It is just half of a block west of Grandview Avenue and there is plenty of parking in back of the gallery and along the street.  If you already own a copy of my new novel, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS please bring it in and I will be happy to sign it.  And if there is anyone in your contact list whom you think might like to attend the gallery hop, please forward this notice to them. 

I thank you so so much.  This is going to be a very big night for me because it will mark the first time that I’ve had the nerve to step out and do an exhibition all on my own.  Heretofore, I’ve had the security of being in art shows where I am only one among many other artists.  Although I’m excited, I’m also scared, and I hope that lots and lots of my friends come out and support me.   

Transit of Venus

There is something infinitely intimate and at once utterly universal about the transits of Venus across the Sun, those twice-in-a-century matings of the principle of the world and the loveliest of his orbiting partners.  It’s like watching a love story unfold on the widest possible screen – The Same Time Next Year, the Ellen Burstyn/Alan Alda movie comes to mind, a star-crossed, but touching affair – inevitable, sanctioned by the gods, an irreplaceable cog in the wheel of the universe, but predestined to meet only briefly, a sweet and wonderful set-aside among the real workings of their daily lives. 

Venus and Sun, those ancient, but perpetually young lovers, get only seven hours together twice in a century – the last time was in 2004, and before that a hundred years ago, and back and back and back through unknown ages – and yes, although on June 5, 2012, beginning precisely at 3:09 pm in a spectacular rendezvous in the exquisite sky over the South Pacific, those hours will be a whirlwind tour above seven continents and even a splinter of Antarctica.  “Why do they bother when they know they won’t meet again until the year of 2117?” those among us with little romance in our hearts might ask.  And I rejoin, “How could they resist each other – Sun, wildly and reliably aflame with dominance and passion, and Venus, evolution’s main event of love; beauty; romance; harmony; prosperity?”  Love is not in our choice, but in our fate. - Dryden   

Use caution when viewing this coupling lest its lure bring harm upon you for it will burn your eyes and possibly blind you if you observe it directly.  Getting too close to any private love affair will have a similar influence.  These two lovers cloak their surreptitious trysts in protective, hazy cocoons of fire, never meant for the inferior eyes of mortal man.  In 2004, one photographer captured a ménage à trios taking place – that low-caste, corporeal interloper, the International Space Station was of a mind to join in on the fun, or perhaps split them up – one can never predict the runaway ambitions of humankind – producing an unparalled photograph of the spaceship and the circular planet linked in dark silhouettes against a swollen, an angry red Sun.  One wonders if Venus was up to no good eight years ago.  We’ll see if this year the immortal two have returned to the exclusivity of their relationship of former times.  But to find out, be sure to avail yourself of projection techniques such as a camera or other appropriate devices. 

The comings and goings of Venus took hold in earnest in the imaginations of scientists in the 18^th Century when astronomer, Edmund Halley suggested that the then- deep mystery of the distances between planets could be solved by observing the transits of Venus from widely-spaced locations on Earth and triangulating the distance to the planet using parallax.  To observe the transit of 1769, the legendary, British explorer, James Cook was dispatched to Tahiti, at that time a place as alien as is Mars in this day and age, an exploration that has been dubbed by some historians as “the Apollo Program of the 18^th Century.”  Unlike Apollo, Cook’s undertaking was deemed inconclusive, yielding little more than fuzzy sketches of the difficult-to-see phenomenon.  Real answers, and proof of Halley’s theory, had to wait for the following century and the invention of the camera.  Sealed orders urged Cook onward to search the South Pacific for the then- proposed rich-in-natural-resources southern continent of Terra Australis.  He found it as well as the Aboriginal tribe known as the Gweagal.  And the rest is yet another bloody history of the European expansion far beyond the borders of their homeland. 

Having grown during the following two-hundred years to a place nearly as diverse in population as is the United States, Australia produced, in 1980, a third occasion of a transit of Venus in the 20^th Century, but rather than astral in nature, it was in the form of a love story in a book by Australia-born author, Shirley Hazzard, and in its own way, as spectacular as its namesake.  Her The Transit of Venus, the winner of the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is one of the best books I have ever read, and reread, and reread as is evident by the well-worn book cover shown in this piece.  It isn’t my favorite book by this, my favorite author, however.  That distinction belongs to another of Hazzard’s love stories, The Bay of Noon, her 1970 novel that was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize.

A New York resident holding dual citizenships in Britain and the United States, this 81 year old literary giant is proof that it is never too late to follow one’s dreams.  The Great Fire, her 2003 novel, a book on which she worked for twenty years and was published when she was 72 years of age, won the National Book Award for fiction.

Transits of Venus are very rare, as are authors of the caliber of Shirley Hazzard, a storyteller who writes blissfully intelligent prose as if it were poetry, and who invents plots that leave the reader breathless with every possible emotion.  Reading her is not only a primer of great writing, but it is also a seminar on human behavior; culture; history; geography; politics; philosophy, and with all of that, nobody tells a love story like Shirley Hazzard – Venus and Sun would be proud.                  

The following is the link to Linda's latest novel, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS

http://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Other-Angels-Linda-Greene/dp/1897512562/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338336762&sr=8-1