images 1: flower macros
images 2: flowers and bees
essay 1: *** Flowers and Flight ... Blossoms and Bees ***
external links:
Short-amplitude high-frequency wing strokes determine the aerodynamics of honeybee flight - PNAS - 2005
Robot Bee: flying like a real insect - Kurzweil AI - 5/10/19
John J. Audubon's Birds of America - unabridged, digital, hundreds of high-res prints
John James Audubon - Wikipedia
Audubon - excellent biopic - 2017 - Amazon Prime
excerpt:
As the summer of 1821 began, John James Audubon's ambition to create a comprehensive pictorial record of American birds was still largely a dream. Then, out of economic necessity, Audubon came to Oakley Plantation, a sprawling estate in Louisiana's West Feliciana Parish. Teeming with an abundance of birds, the woods of Oakley galvanized Audubon's sense of possibility for one of the most audacious undertakings in the annals of art.
A favorable combination of climate and geography made Oakley a birding haven, and Audubon completed or began at least twenty-three bird paintings -- among his finest work -- while staying there. A Summer of Birds will inform and delight readers in its exploration of this eventful but unsung 1821 interlude, a fascinating chapter in the life of America's foremost bird artist. It is an indispensable pleasure for birders, Audubon enthusiasts, and visitors to Oakley House.
…
Bird-watching, like all other forms of pursuit, has a lot of near-misses. Hearing a wistful trill, or glimpsing a flurry of feathers from the corner of his eye, the observer pivots in the direction of his prize, only to find an empty branch still trembling like an arrow fresh from its quill. A sense of narrowly eluded encounter also touches Oakley House, a plantation home in Louisiana's West Feliciana Parish where the legendary bird artist John James Audubon lived from June through October of 1821, and now operated as a historical site by the state of Louisiana. Though Audubon left Oakley nearly two centuries ago, it can seem to the visitor as if the renowned artist has just slipped out the door.
Audubon's memory looms large at Oakley because he did big things during his stay. Summer beckons us all with its promise of discovery. For Audubon, the summer of 1821 would be just such a season of eye-opening ing experiences-indeed, one of the most formative summers of his life.
Auubon's life was on a hinge when he walked to the door of Oakley House, near the Louisiana community of St. Francisville, in June of 1821. The effect of that summer on Audubon reminds us of what David McCullough Cullough has said about the intrigue of history. History is interesting, said McCullough, because things did not have to turn out the way they did. They might have gone the other way.
They might have gone the other way. In 1821, Audubon was at just such a turning point. An aspiring bird artist since childhood, he had sketched and painted American birds as a sideline to his real occupation, that of a prosperous Kentucky merchant. But a national economic slump in 1819 had destroyed Audubon's business, ness, a tragic turn of events that was also oddly liberating. With his store and fledgling mill operation bankrupted, Audubon believed that financially, cially, at least, he had little else to lose. Freed from the constraints of the merchant and mill trade, a livelihood for which he had been groomed by his businessman father, the thirty-six-year-old Audubon felt at greater liberty to pursue the art that had always been his true passion.
Thus began Audubon's odyssey to document the birds of an America still covered in woodland, but which was rapidly giving way to expanding settlement. The impoverished Audubon set out, like a biblical prophet wandering the wilderness, to paint as many birds as he could locate and compile his findings into The Birds ofAmerica, his ambitious omnibus of American ornithology.
It was an audacious task, and even Audubon, who had a high opinion of his own genius, suffered inevitable doubts. Money entered into his anxiety. While collecting material for Birds ofAmerica, a project expected to take years, he would also have to find a way to support his wife, Lucy, and their two young sons, Victor and John Woodhouse Audubon. As Audubon's enterprise unfolded, Lucy helped to feed the family, often as the major breadwinner, by teaching. Audubon supplemented the household hold budget by selling portraits, and he also offered his services as a tutor, which brought him to Oakley House.
His job at Oakley House was to instruct Eliza Pirrie, the fifteen-year-old old daughter of Lucretia and James Pirrie. He would be paid sixty dollars a month, along with room and board. In 1821, the annual per capita Gross Domestic Product, a rough indicator of average annual income, was just seventy-three dollars, "so Audubon was very well paid," says economic historian Samuel H. Williamson. According to his arrangement with the Pirries, Audubon could spend half his time instructing Eliza in "drawing, music, dancing, arithmetic, and some trifling requirements such as [styling] ing] hair," and half his time combing the plantation's woodland for birds.
Flight of Bees
It's that they fly, you know ...
As a metaphor for freedom,
stretching wings and lifting into air
is a powerful sign of what they do so easily
… while for us, it is the stuff of dreams.
Walking to the threshold, each bee launches herself
straight out and up
toward distant fields, gravity beaten in flight.
Returning foragers hover in mid-air,
waiting to land.
If they crawled out of the hive
and then scurried back
- ants instead of bees -
their honey might still be sweet,
but the magic would be gone.
They would then be us:
a laboring multitude, proud of their work,
but trapped by circumstance
in a two dimensional world.
It's that they fly …
