August 17, 1989 - Rituals of Summer's End0
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Elaine de Kooning in her studio.
— Edvard Lieber Photo
Tribute to Elaine de Kooning
A memorial tribute to the well known
East Hampton artist Elaine de Kooning,
who died in February at the age of 70, will
be held on Sunday, August 20, beginning at
noon in the John Drew Theater of Guild
Hall. The event will coincide with the.op-
ening of "Elaine de Kooning: Portrait
Drawings," an exhibition that will be on
view from August 20 through October 1 in
Guild Hall's Leidy Gallery.
The memorial tribute, which is free and
open to the public, will include reminiscen-
ces by family members and friends,
among them Herman Cherry, Rose Slivka,
Ibram Lassaw and Edvard Lieber, who
will present slides of the artist's work.
Members of the audience will be offered an
opportunity to share their thoughts about
her.
The exhibition focuses on portraiture,
which engaged Ms. de Kooning through-
out her long career. The 18 works range
from two later 1930s pencil studies of Wil-
lem de Kooning (whom she married in
1943) to a 1976 drawing of her friend and
fellow artist Aristodimos Kaldis. Among
the other subjects in the show are George
Bernard Shaw (1944), the artist Fairfield
Porter (1954), critics Tom Hess (1956) and
Harold Rosenberg (around 1959), and Pres-
ident John F. Kennedy (1963), whose por-
trait commission she was unable to
complete because of his assassination.
Born in New York City in 1918, Elaine de
Kooning began drawing at the age of five.
While attending the Leonardo da Vinci Art
School in New York in 1937 she met Willem
de Kooning and began her association with
the New York School. In addition to hold-
ing a prominent place among post -World
War II American artists, she emerged dur-
ing the 1950s as one of the important writ-
ers on American art, publishing reviews
and monographs on Hans Hofmann, Josef
Albers, Atshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Franz
Kline and others. Her final series of water-
colors, prints, acrylics, sumi ink paintings
on paper, and oils was inspired by a 1983
trip to the paleolithic cave drawings of
southern France and northern Spain.
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Focus on Nature
Rituals of Summer's End
By Paul Sloutenburgh
Summer always has its hot, sultry days
and we had just that kind of introduction to
this year's August weather. Each morning
I'd look out and see the haze of summer hang-
ing over the back pasture and almost clog-
ging out the woods a half mile away. In this
kind of weather, if you are on a boat it's cov-
ered with dew each morning. So much so it
almost seems as if it has rained. On such
mornings the water is glassy still and peo-
ple talk in whispers.
On these hot days my bees hang outside
their hives like a coating of some thick
growth. It's cooler outside yet some must
continue to work and these are kept cool by
worker bees fanning their wings at the en-
trance to air condition the hive.
In the morning my windmill stands motion-
less awaiting our usual southwest wind when
it will be turned by this great force and pump
its endless stream of water. In these dry days
of August we keep moving the black plastic
hose from our newly - established grape ar-
bor to each individual tree in our dwarf or-
chard. How the limbs of the pear and peach
trees hang with the weight of the growing
fruit! After the orchard is watered it's into
the raspberry patch that towers alongside the
path. Why they grow so profusely I don't
know. I never fertilize them but only put the
sweepings from our lawn each spring on
them. That seems to do the trick for they are
loaded with berries. Barbara has already
made blackberry jam and it will soon be time
again for her peach and raspberry combi-
nation. How those jars of jellies and jams add
to our good living out here on the East End.
It's a shame so many people have given up
this culinary skill that most homemakers
once practiced.
Birds' Year Ending
Most of the nesting chores of our birds are
over. Ospreys are learning to fish for them-
selves. The terns that made it through their
precarious nesting season are now flying and
begging for food as the parent birds try to en-
courage the young screaming fledglings to
get into the act and learn the rites of survi-
val themselves.
Speckled robins fly awkwardly about now
on their own. Young starlings have joined
with the flock and are combing the back pas-
ture. Soon they'll be making pests of them-
selves at the farmers' orchards and, of
course, as soon as the grapes in the nearby
vineyard start to ripen, they'll attack them.
Already the farmer finds them competing for
his sweet corn. When a thousand hungry star-
lings or other birds land in your valuable crop
it is time to do something. Usually noisy air
guns start booming but they only move the
birds to another field. It's a real problem for
the farmer and grape - grower and one both
he and his neighbors are deeply concerned
about.
I don't know if any of you remember my
mentioning a few weeks ago that the water
where we anchored our boat in Shelter Island
was alive with some kind of tiny swimming
young. We collected some in a jar and
brought them home so our daughter who
teaches an outdoor education course could
use them. We thought nothing more about it
until yesterday when she showed us the re-
sults of their further development. Baby
crabs could be seen climbing on the sides of
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the jar. Just what kind of crab we haven't yet
determined, but here again were nature's re-
newable resources coming into play. It would
be nice to think they might be blue-claw
crabs but the odds are that they probably will
turn out to be spider crabs, lady crabs, rock
crabs or some other species of crab other
than the tasty blue -claw crab. But then we
can always hope.
Shore Birds in Farm Fields
In some fields even at this late date of sum-
mer there is still evidence of water from the
heavy rains of this spring. One pond in par-
ticular near our place is right alongside the
road and I continually am amazed at how it
attracts birds of all sorts. Doves, finches, ro-
bins and other common land birds drink
there along with gulls, crows and yesterday
a flock of geese. These I glance over quickly
but stop the car and check closely when I see
the shore birds being lured in. The first was
a yellowlegs. This tall- legged shore bird, like
most we see from July on, is returning from
its nesting ground in the extreme far north.
This watering hole is just one of many on
their annual migration. It's here and along
our south shore that they rest and feed so
they can continue their journey south where
they'll spend the winter only to repeat the
trek next year.
Then I saw my old favorite, the kildeer,
feeding along the muddy edges. This bird
could have nested here on Long Island but
each year I see fewer and fewer of them as
the open farm land disappears. They nest on
the ground like most shore birds. Another
ground nester found there was the spotted
sandpiper whose tail bobs up and down and
helps identify it. This bird nests on our sandy
marsh edges and beaches where it lives a sol-
itary life. I remember photographing him
years ago at Shinnecock.
Other birds that are always around these
rain ponds swooping and drinking are the
swallows. From here on they'll be building
up in great flocks. It's quite a sight to see the
telephone lines and TV antennas loaded with
birds, and trees drooping under their weight.
When you see this, you'll know they've had
a good feed and are resting. We should be
happy, for mosquitoes and flies and bugs of
all sorts are their only food. They, too, have
finished nesting and are now fattening up for
their flight south.
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THE SOUTHAMPTON PRESS I AUGUST 17, 1989