Starr Cummin Bright 
Clayton participated in the Chester County Open Studio Tour last weekend, showing his work at Kinloch Woodworking in Unionville. Doug and Pat Mooberry, an excellent furniture maker and ceramicist respectively, are long time friends who were happy to have Clayton’s work displayed at their show rooms. Pat had painted the walls stunning colors which brought out the details of both Clayton’s sculptures and paintings. Thank you!
Spring means planting, or at least thinking about it, but also elicits pruning and cutting out dead branches. Clayton went to work on two apple trees that are next to our house. The one most visible had the most dead branches, but it also holds two birdfeeders all winter long, and the birds have favorite branches to perch on as they wait for openings at the feeders. Clayton only cut down branches on this apple tree where he didn’t routinely see birds perching. (What a considerate gardener!)
The other apple tree got a real trimming in order to prevent thick branches from cracking under the weight of unnecessary ones. All this opened up a clear space underneath, and Clayton, on surveying the carnage declared, “I want to plant a yellow flowering rhododendron right there – where the thin branch is angled back onto the tree – so that we have an attractive color in this area in future springs.” Then, having thought about our poor success with rhododendrons and azaleas, he modified his plans, “I am going to prepare the soil in that spot for a year before planting the rhododendron.” How a true gardener thinks.
I’ll report back in two years.
Clayton’s painting, The Last Pear, won first prize as a still life at the Philadelphia Sketch Club today. The painting is of the last Warren Pear from Clayton’s orchard and a couple of Sungold Tomatoes from my garden, capturing the essence of late fall. Clayton’s painting takes him from still lifes to street scenes to landscapes to portraits. See the Painting tab for examples of his work.
Museum visits!
Since both Clayton and I really liked the Joaquin Sorolla painting which we saw in November at Musee d’Orsay, we decided to go to The Hispanic Society at 155th and Broadway in New York City. Housed in their museum are not just a number of Sorollas on the second floor, but a whole room on the ground floor for which Sorolla was commissioned to paint 14 visions of Spain. The twelve to fourteen foot high murals range from a painting of a wharf scene to the rituals before a bullfight, to dances, harvests, herding cattle and more. They are spectacular and display variations in Sorolla’s painting styles and give a clear understanding of why he was called the Spanish “Painter of Light.”
Valentines don’t always have to be sent by mail or appear as candy or chocolates (two distinct food groups). Both Clayton and Starr make use of the property as it occurs with vistas established by Clayton’s careful planting and maintenance as well as features which were constructed by Clayton.
This year Starr took advantage of a snowfall to snowshoe a heart in a field which is visible from the house. And instead of removing the Christmas lights, Clayton reattached them in a heart shape in front of the poured concrete wall which he installed as a sound barrier for a noisy road (which also supports espaliered wisteria for the Japanese garden). Voilà, two valentines.
Twenty four inches of snow and drifting. The Equestrienne, a life size sculpture of a girl on her pony, sometimes fools people who catch a glimpse of her as they drive by. The piece pictured is actually a fiberglass waste mold. Though not evident from a distance, a fiberglass doesn’t hold up as a bronze would, and this piece is no exception. However, we keep it for prospective clients. When a person is deciding exactly where to place a bronze that weighs a few hundred pounds, a fiberglass version is much easier to move until the best site has been chosen. Meanwhile, she graces our property in all kinds of weather.
Clayton is the visual member of the family while Starr is more oriented to auditory delights. We visit museums but also often go into Philadelphia to listen to concerts presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Once while attending a concert Clayton was impressed by the visual balance of a quartet. Although the quartet itself wasn’t able to pose, Clayton was able to find people, some of whom were musicians, to pose for his String Quartet.
We are well into autumn, which means that the grass has suffered a few deep frosts and no longer has the nutrients to maintain horses. The small horse who can live on air is delighted to be rid of her muzzle. I now visit the hay loft daily, tossing down flakes for night feeding, when the easy keeper is kept separate from the others. Each time I open the door and smell the hay I think of Hay Brick Study, one of Clayton’s quick morning painting exercises of the large bales of hay which dot the fields around here after each cutting. The mare and I hold onto thoughts and smells of the lush Pennsylvania summers for as long as we can.
We are on the last day of a twelve day visit to Paris– our first without children in 28 years. We had a great time catching up with old friends from the two times when we lived in Paris for academic years. On those occasions Clayton painted, sometimes in an atelier, sometimes on the street, while our children went to French schools. On this visit, Clayton discovered a painting that was so amazing, he spent more than an hour observing it: Retour de la Pêche; halage de la barque painted in 1894 by Joaquin Sorolla.
In mid October Clayton drove the bison up to Penn State and installed it in the Children’s Garden within the Penn State Arboretum. The site that had been chosen was next to a “river bed” of stones representing the Susquehanna which wends through a section of the garden.
When the sculpture was unveiled on October 11 it was dedicated to Rodney Kirsch, vice president of development at Penn State originally from North Dakota, who has worked with a team of fundraisers (to whom he gave much credit) to raise money to create not only the arboretum but many of the buildings on Penn State’s campus.
One of the reasons the donors had wanted Clayton to create this sculpture was because they had seen children climbing on Miss Gratz at the Brandywine River Museum. Within half an hour of the ceremony, children were already climbing on Bison bison, perching on his neck just behind his massive head.
