Pine Bush Area Library presents the Artist Salons – 2020
Doors open 6:30 and program runs from 7 – 9:30 pm Pine Bush Library Community Building – 223 Maple Ave, Pine Bush, NY 12566 Program Coordinator: Meadow, Library Director: Doris Callan, Event Coordinator: Karen Fox: 845-744-4265 X2
The Artist Salons are a series of public presentations and open discussions. We feel that art is vital to our community and an abundance of talented artists live and work in this Hudson Valley area and are part of out natural resources. We feel the Artists Salons are a valuable experience for the public to enjoy. This year nine artists will present their work and talk about their lives and careers as artists and innovators. The informal presentation will be salon style, after the famous 1930’s Coffee House Salons of Paris. Our purpose is to expose local artists living and working in the greater Pine Bush area. The lectures will take place in the Library Annex Community Building and are free and open to the public.
The Salons are the 2nd Thursday of the month from March-June and September – December, dates listed below. Doors open at 6:30 for an opportunity to network with community members and meet the artists presenting. Light refreshments will be served. The evening presentation will start promptly at 7 and end 8:30-9PM.
12 March – ART: of Mexicana Influence – Annie O’Neill 9 April – ART: of controversy – Rosary Salimanto 14 May – ART: feats of the feet – Brenda Bufalino 11 June – ART: of food – Jordanna Hysell 10 Sept. – ART: the second act – Bruce Piluggi 8 Oct. – ART: of living dolls – Meadow 12 Nov. – ART: of the horse – K. M. Copham 10 Dec. – ART: of passion – Liz Glover Wilson & Keith Buesing
This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
Rave Reviews by Jean E. Eustance February 2020
I watched the DVD of the movie Tolkien which is available through the Pine Bush Area Public Library. Doing a movie of a writer’s life can be problematic. As someone else said, if you film a writer writing, all you see is someone staring at a piece of paper in a typewriter. For a writer, the action takes place firmly between the ears. There isn’t much to see, and movies depend on what you can see.
I have read the authorized biography, and also some other books about J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and their friends. I found this film to be set before the times of the things I knew about, and I found it hard to slog through. It is set in his youth. It ends just as he is writing the first line of The Hobbit. I wanted to see him write wonderful things, and instead the film is about the time before all that. The movie is hard to understand and it’s dull.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s life there were three things. The first and greatest of these was the Story. He was a writer and he had stories to tell. He himself said, “This tale grew in the telling.” If you look at The Lord of the Rings you see it runs over 1000 pages. It took him years to finish and he drove his publishers mad, because he was a world-class procrastinator.
The second was his never-ending group of men friends. In boyhood, he had several friends who with him formed a group called the T.C.B.S. This is important in the movie Tolkien. They stuck together, even into the carnage of World War I, where two of the young men were killed. In later life, he had the Inklings who were his friends at Oxford, and they read their unpublished writings to each other every week. They concentrated on what was giving them problems right at that moment. These people turned out to be important writers, including C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. And Tolkien, of course, Tolkien.
The third thing in his life was Edith Bratt, who married him. In the movie, she is important. In the biographies and the commentaries about Tolkien, she comes in a poor third.
These three remain: Faith, Hope and Love. (First Corinthians, Chapter 13.) In Tolkien’s world it was Friendship, Edith and Story, and the greatest of these was Story.
The movie Tolkien is set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s early life before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Some of the movie is about when his mother took the two boys (John Ronald Reuel and his younger brother Hilary) from the English countryside to the industrial mess of the city of Birmingham. For the young J.R.R. it was like being torn from The Shire and stuck in Mordor.
After that, he went to a school called King Edward’s. In the movie, there was a bit of a scrum during a rugby match, and the headmaster punished a boy called R.Q. Gilson, and J.R.R. Tolkien by decreeing that they must do everything together. This would either make them hate each other forever, or make them into friends. The other boy happened to be the son of the headmaster, so it was a surprise to me that he would be punished. But those two, and two others became firm friends. They went to war, and two died, and Christopher Wiseman and J.R.R. Tolkien lived. Tolkien later named his third son Christopher.
I wish we could see how J.R.R. Tolkien came up with his ideas of The Shire and Mordor and Sauron. In the World War I scenes, there is a tower going up in flames, and when a bomb bursts, the red blast grows eyes and a snout and becomes a dragon. There are images of what could be the Nazgul mounted on their dreadful horses. There isn’t as much foreshadowing of Middle-earth and The War of the Rings as I would like to see. As said, the action really takes place between a writer’s ears.
I enjoyed seeing Colm Meany play Father Francis. I did not recognize his voice, but finally thought that the shape of that man’s head looked familiar. Sure enough, it was him. (He was in Star Trek’s Deep Space Nine.) Another fascinating actor was Derek Jacobi playing Professor Wright who helped J.R.R. get into the correct place in Oxford University.
In this movie, Tolkien meets his true love, Edith Bratt, and is separated from her by his guardian, Father Francis. There is much made of the love affair and how she influenced him. There is a scene with Edith dancing for him, in the forest. J.R.R. cast her as Luthien Tinuviel, the immortal elf maiden, and himself as the mortal man, Beren. This shows up first in The Fellowship of the Ring, when Strider is reciting a long poem about doomed love. The full story is found in The Silmarillion.
If you have read much about J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith you would see how he neglected his family when he taught at Oxford. Some of this was for the sake of writing his books, and some so he could go talk to his men friends about writing. There is a brief scene in the movie about how he would not eat with his family because he was in his room, writing.
We see a little about him neglecting his family while writing, but nothing about neglecting them for the sake of the Inklings in Oxford. In real life, he was reading his work to the Inklings but it was not shown in the movie. The emphasis here is on his earlier life, and the T.C.B.S. group.
In fact, the film ends just where it should be finally getting interesting: Tolkien sits down and writes by hand, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” And that is where the film ends. I was disappointed. I wanted to watch him create Middle-earth.
He put his wife on a pedestal and left her there. Tolkien had his own life in Oxford, and did not always pay attention to Edith, or come home and help out around the house. He had better things to do. In his books, likewise, the women are put on pedestals and abandoned there. The books are filled with men, active men, and very few women. In this movie, that is not obvious. Edith seems more influential than she appears in books about Tolkien. There is more of a love story with a satisfying feel to it, in the movie Tolkien, than you will find in the books about him.
But maybe how the real story ends is what matters. In England, if you go to the graveyard where they are buried, you will find her name carved on the gravestone, and then “Luthien” and under Tolkien’s name is carved “Beren.”
Maybe it’s true. Maybe these three remain: Faith, Hope and Love. But the greatest of these is Love.
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January 2020 Rave Reviews by Jean E. Eustance
Cornelia Funke has written a children’s picture book, The Princess Knight. It is illustrated by Kerstin Meyer. Find it downstairs in the children’s department of the Pine Bush Area Public Library, under JP FUN for juvenile picture books.
The king has three sons, whom he is raising as he had been raised—how to ride a horse, and fight and yell very loudly at everyone. The queen gives birth to a daughter, and then the queen dies. The king raises his daughter, Violetta, the same way he has raised his sons.
Violetta is a game little girl, and goes along with it. Her brothers think this is hysterically funny. “And they would laugh and laugh at their little sister as she struggled to mount a horse in her heavy armor, as if it were the funniest thing they’d ever seen.”
She is a determined little girl, and “From that night on, Violetta slipped out of the castle in secret, while the rose gardener’s son kept watch for her. She started to practice all the things her brothers could already do so much better. Violetta practiced in her own way, without shouting and without using her spurs. Indeed, she was very quiet about it—as quiet as the night itself.” You can see her riding her horse, and then, on foot, practicing with her sword. She gets much better at it, and is able to slip past her brothers without them touching her, and she can cut the roses out of the strawman’s hands, when the boys could only cut the strawman’s head off.
In the charming illustrations, you can see the rose gardener’s son helping to keep an eye on the princess. And the princess has another ally, her nursemaid Emma, who knows how determined Princess Violetta really is.
Eventually, her 16th birthday arrives and the king wants to do something grand for it, but he gets it wrong. A big tournament is planned—this sounds good to Violetta who is wondering which suit of armor to wear—and the king wants her to just watch the tournament, and then to marry the man who wins it. Violetta explodes. She “turned as red as the roses beside the castle moat. What!” she cried,” You want me to marry some dimwit in a tin suit? Just look at your own knights! They whip their horses and they can’t even write their own names!” For having let loose with this, Violetta gets locked into a castle tower for half a day.
When the day of the tournament arrives, someone (Emma) wearing Violetta’s best dress and a veil is seated next to the king. Guess what? Violetta is wearing all-concealing black armor and is seated on her favorite horse down on the tournament grounds. She gives her name as Sir No-Name. Of course she beats the other knights, and wins the tournament. She cannot marry herself so she has gotten herself out of that little problem.
She says, “I hereby proclaim that no one will ever win Princess Violetta’s hand in marriage without first defeating Sir No-Name.” Then she …rode away, far, far away. And she didn’t return for a year and a day. And when she did? Why, her father, King Wilfred the Worthy, gave her a horse as black as her armor. And nobody, not even her brothers, challenged the princess ever again.”
“And who did she marry? Well, if you must know, many years later, she married the rose gardener’s son and lived happily ever after.”
This is a satisfying book. It tells the story in an economy of words, and the pictures are just right for the action. It’s nice to see a gutsy woman solving her own problems. Find The Princess Knight in the picture book section under Cornelia Funke’s name, in the Children’s Section of the Pine Bush Area Public Library. And in your life, wear your own armor and ride your own horse.
