🧃The Juice🧃

Spinach, Cucumber, and Mango.

Monday.
Monday is for getting down to business…

It was heather grey in that way but the sun still managed to peek through clouds to warm a spot for lite pilates on the yoga mat. A green juice was had before putting on jeans and a button down to start the day’s paseo.

A paseo is a walk through city streets and squares that reinvites old customs and/or memories to present new perspectives.

After the paseo, a ride home was spent finding patterns in the hand rods along the aisle. Penciled in blue. The same color as the chambray shirt I was wearing. As if light was going through my hands and reflecting upon the page per the color I chose to wear that day.

As the pencil extends its strokes upon the paper, a gaze towards the glaze of the color fastens into focus as the writing tool meets the risen particle of parchment. Like pixels of matter that give way precisely for such action; for color to appear so near and tangible. In this moment on Monday, rods of blue.

Landing upon the avenue, martians gather in the community garden.

The gravel upon entrance is of shredded mulch so soft, it feels as if it’s made of a sponge. A bouncy treadway that had congealed with the rain and the fallen bark from the trees above to form an earth sponge. Adjacent in a border that has seen some spring time trimming, an arch of tulips from early April bloom back into stalk. The tulips make a trumpet sounds that sings in a buzz to the evening garden happenings.

“Hi,” one of the bee keepers lets out in a friendly tone as they simultaneously taking off the soft-caged helmet of their suit by a nearby picnic table.

There appears to be a gathering of an apiary group tending to a colony of bees. Those on duty are welcoming.

“Hello,” I smile. “Are you a bee expert?” I ask.

They fully take off the helmet to the all-white suit that appears distinct to the one piece worn by an astronaut. An astronaut in a galaxy garden.

“In training,” they answer kindly in an out-of-breath way, as if catching more oxygen.

Expanding the conversation orbit, a woman in the background offers more details as she makes her way to the picnic table.

“We can’t find our Queen!” the woman reveals. But this group hasn’t reached a final conclusion regarding the wheraabouts of the Queen yet so they don’t seem too worried.

“The bees are all still in there...” one of them trails off.

If the Queen leaves the hive, the rest usually follow.

I smile in response as a means of acknowledging I am listening but mostly, learning.

The patio facing the back wall reveals a patch of urban lawn turned to raised beds. Ears of lacinato kale peek out from edges. Catnip grows steadily along the left hand fence.

I begin to make my way out as an invite to return again wades through the bee smoke, like a curtain closing out the evening.

Tuesday.
On Tuesdays we trip…

High Noon gallery on Tuesday is met with bright blue skies as the door leads to a more temperate, cooler gallery beyond the door.

In alternate realities of relation with nature communicating in echoes and bubbles of effervescent geometrical forms, Fatemeh Burnes opens a window to a new nature. The environments painted on canvas feel at first classical to the senses of sight regarding what consciousness recognizes about nature: color tones of spring and fall, and movements associated with leaping animals, sunsets, or aquatic scenes.

Cool pastels drive an eye to revert recognition to the palettes of impressionist art. Yet, the strokes that fill in the forms of geometric shapes seem to almost bend off of the canvas to welcome the contemporary viewer—an invitation to a new world. The geometric forms are as if shapes broke out of a chemistry book to begin a life of their own upon canvas. A new “natural” world is depicted on a timetable not yet known but codified in color to be understood. Still, the canvas provides a remembrance in an unfolding scene unattached to any cultural identity.