October 2012 Newsletter

October 2011 Newsletter

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It is part of our website indigostreetpottery.com , which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, studios of our friends, garden musings, and whatever else strikes our fancy. Hope you enjoy it!

August 13, 2011: 2011 Annual Art Auction, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, Colorado www.andersonranch.org

May of 2012: Jeff Reich and Farraday Newsome, 2-person exhibition, Plinth Gallery, Denver, Colorado http://plinthgallery.com/

1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

2 New Studio Dog, Skye!

email: indigostreetpottery@me.com

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email: indigostreetpottery@me.com

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October 2012 Newsletter

Archived Newsletters

Indigo Street Pottery Newsletter

In this Issue

1. Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

2. New Studio Dog Skye!

3.Farraday Newsome: Emotional Terrain,

November 12 - December 21, 2012, Kean University Art Galleries, New Jersey

4. Indigo Street Pottery Kitchen Garden

5. Indigo Street Pottery Landscape Note: Velvetpod Mimosa

Welcome to our monthly newsletter! It is part of our website indigostreetpottery.com , which you can browse from this page if you click on the subjects in the header. We write here about our studio, arts events, projects, studios of our friends, garden musings, and whatever else strikes our fancy. Hope you enjoy it!

June 9 -September 29, 2012: Collecting Arizona: Selections from the ASU Art Museum, Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe Arizona http://asuevents.asu.edu/collecting-arizona

July 26 - October 21, 2012: Contemporary Ceramics, Tohono Chul Park Gallery, Tucson, Arizona http://www.tohonochulpark.org/wordpress/

November 12 - December 21, 2012: Farraday Newsome: Emotional Terrain, Nancy Dryfoos Gallery, Kean University Art Galleries, Union, New Jersey http://www.kean.edu/~gallery/Welcome.html

November 9 - December 31, 2012: The Artisan Gallery Cup and Mug Invitational; Consider the Cup 2012, The Artisan Gallery, Northampton, Massachusetts http://www.theartisangallery.com/exhibitions.html

December 1 & 2, and 8 & 9, 2012: Indigo Street Pottery 2012 Annual Holiday Studio Sale, Indigo Street Pottery, Mesa, Arizona https://indigostreetpottery.com/Site/Home.html

October 2013: SOFA Chicago, Katie Gingrass Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

1 Indigo Street Pottery Calendar

4 Indigo Street Pottery Kitchen Garden

email: indigostreetpottery@me.com

5 Indigo Street Pottery Landscape Note: Velvetpod Mimosa

Our new studio dog Skye, a German Shorthair Pointer rescue, enjoying the good life in her new home with us!

The warm, humid weather has brought on the lovely pink bloom of the native Velvetpod Mimosa (Mimosa dysocarpa) in our native wildscaping. This is butterfly-attracting perennial shrub is found in the upper elevations of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts.

Photo above left: With all the rain we had in late summer (our monsoon season, which is when we get most of our rain for the year), it has been a fantastic season for our Italian Sweet Basil. Basil pesto is a dinner mainstay now, at least once a week. People ask us how we make pesto on our whole food, plant-based diet. Well, it is easy and delicious!

We put a couple cloves of fresh garlic, 2 TBSP white miso, 1 TBSP nutritional yeast, 2 TBSP pinenuts or walnuts, about 1/4 c lemon juice, then fill the food processor up with basil leaves. Process to a liquidy paste. Add water if necessary. Toss the bright green pesto onto hot pasta. We usually toss the pesto pasta with fresh chopped tomatoes and steamed peas for more color and nutrition. Heaven in a bowl!!

The miso & yeast replace the parmesan cheese for the salty, protein umami flavor notes. The nuts replace the olive oil. We don’t use any pure oil in our diet at all since it is nutrient poor and calorie dense. Not even olive oil! Instead, we eat nutrient and fiber rich whole food sources of oil like nuts, whole grains, soy, corn, olives, etc.

Photo above right: Garlic cloves just planted, ready to be covered with soil and watered in. Early fall is the time to plant garlic here in the desert. The cloves planted above are organic silverskin garlic (softneck variety) from the grocery store. Just break up the entire garlic bulb into cloves, leaving the papery skin on each clove. Plant each individual clove with the pointy tip up, about 3” deep and 3” apart. We’ll harvest them in May when the above ground leaves wither. The reward will be a big new bulb produced by each clove. The whole crop will be ready for braiding and hanging in the shade to “harden” for a couple of weeks in the dry desert air.

More pic’s of what’s up this time of year in our desert garden:

Above left: Lots of jalapenos ripening - soon it will be time to mesquite-smoke them into chipotles. The plants are waist high! The ground cover is strawberries, which have filled in deliciously over the past year.

Above middle: Shiso, a new herb to us this year. It is used fresh and dry in Japanese cuisine and has a nice, nutty flavor. We’ve been drying it to make furikake, a Japanese rice seasoning mixture that can include chile pepper, toasted sesame seeds and crushed dried seaweed. You sprinkle it over a bowl of rice or roll rice balls in it.

Above right: Fall in the desert is like spring everywhere else! It’s time to seriously get down to sowing seeds. Amidst the still productive summer plants, like the swiss chard in the photo, we’ve been sowing kale, lettuce, beets, endive, carrots, radishes, cabbages, broccoli, arugula, etc. Before each season’s planting, we enrich the soil with well-composted goat manure and regular kitchen compost. After years of this gentle, organic soil-building you can see how dark the soil in the beds is getting, as compared to the tan native desert soil of the paths.

Jeff has been missing having a dog since Penny, our sweet Golden Retriever, passed away over three years ago. Now that we are running, Jeff wanted a dog that could run with him. It turns out that certain breeds are very well suited to distance running, like the 10+ miles we sometimes do, and the regular 3-5 miles that we frequently do. The breed Jeff settled on was the German Shorthaired Pointer. He knew he wanted a rescue dog, and when he learned about Skye, he knew she was the one!

Skye was being cared for by a rescue group called Utah’s Perfect Pointers, so off to Utah we went!

Above, more photos of Best Friends Animal Sanctuary:

Left: The Visitors Center at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.

Right: Beyond the Visitors Center is the beautiful, expansive horse rescue area.

Photos:

Above, left: Director of the Utah’s Perfect Pointers, Marylin Segall, with our rescue dog Skye. Marylin’s “other job” is as a University of Utah Professor of Engineering!

Above, middle: We met up with Marylin and Skye at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in stunning Angel Canyon, outside of Kanab, Utah. Best Friends is the nation’s largest animal rescue facility http://www.bestfriends.org/index.htm. Marylin needed to drive there from her home in Salt Lake City, six hours to the north, to deliver some cats. It turned out to be perfect for her to bring Skye with her, thus meeting us half-way.

Above, right: A lovely koi pond at the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary Visitor Center in Kanab, Utah. This is a beautiful facility with guided tours, a video viewing room, gift store, and a deep list of endowments and benefactors.

Photos above: Our drive to get Skye took us through some beautiful areas of Arizona . Here are two snaps of us at the historic Navajo Bridge that spans the Colorado River at Marble Canyon, upriver from the Grand Canyon.

Farraday will be having a one-person show at the Nancy Dryfoos Gallery, Kean University Art Galleries, Kean University, New Jersey, November 12 - December 21, 2012.

The show, entitled Farraday Newsome: Emotional Terrain, will consist of a tryptch of boxes (photos above) and an assortment of curvilinear, wall-hanging boxy tiles she calls “cloud tiles” (photos below).

Farraday writes in her exhibition statement:

My idea for the show “Emotional Terrain” is to create a landscape exploring the duality of our emotional experience and understanding of life. I am interested in Carl Jung’s assertion that “Man’s life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil.” Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, p.75.

The hanging cloud tile forms are non-containing, untethered places: they are air. The boxes are grounded, contained space: they are structure.

The black and white backgrounds are opposites as well: light and dark. These dual backgrounds support imagery relating to life and death. The fruit, songbirds, seeds, and eggs co-exist with an egg-eating snake, empty seashells, and shark teeth.

Interwoven with these opposites are ideas of time (watch imagery, ephemeral butterflies), chance (dice, playing cards), and danger (poisonous datura seed pods, thorny brambles).

My imagery is a drift of emotional symbols. I find it curious that when I am asked to explain the imagery I often feel like I am doing so after the fact (of it’s making), which makes me almost feel like an outsider. I strive to accept that the source of much imagery is the unconscious (nonverbal, evolutionarily very old), and is offered to the conscious (verbal, evolutionarily new) to examine and explain.