Plain Talk: Artistry in Beekeeping (258)

Episode 258 – Plain Talk: Artistry in Beekeeping  

Jim: Podcast listeners, it's Jim here, so it must be time for another presentation. Well, here's my weekly weather report. The weather has changed. It was snowing. Now it's stopped. It's windy and it's cold, and I thought I'd walk back to the bee yard and give you the ambience of the snow cracking and whatever and the wind howling. I decided against that. I'm not doing it. I was sitting inside the shop here on this windy, cold day, and I noticed pictures that have hung on my wall since I built this shop 15, 20 years ago, and before that, they hung in my office.

I'd like to tell you a story, I suspect about an artist you've never heard of, Amy K. Bartlett. Now she's Amy Bartlett Wright from Rhode Island, and she gave me a bee memory that I won't soon forget. I'd like to tell you about that memory. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you here at Honey Bee Obscura once a week, where I try to talk about something to do with just plain talk beekeeping.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started. Get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: I'm in a recliner. My feet are propped up. It's warm inside the shop, and it's not warm outside. It's just good to sit back. Now, I don't want you to think that I'm going to reflect and be all sappy every time we talk every Thursday. This is just a good day. I realize that, as I have talked to you now hundreds of times, that I've never talked about artists in beekeeping or artists using bees as subjects for some of their work.

The reason I haven't done that is simple, is because I am a very minimal artist of any kind. When I was woodworking, I could do industrial sketchings just to build something, but I never had the influence to really know what the vanishing point was and how to set up a picture, so I've never discussed art because I have very minimal artistic abilities. Can I set the story up for you? I'm a PhD student of Dr. Dewey Caron. I was finally awarded my PhD sometime in 1979, 1980, after going to the University of Maryland, College Park, and working with Dr. Caron there.

Just to be clear, I'll always be indebted for Dr. Caron allowing me to be in his program and to pursue the degree and to ultimately earn it, but now I'm off the subject. Dr. Caron took a sabbatical. It would have probably been 1975 or 1976, and he went to Arizona for months and months, and I was honored to fill in teaching his classes while he was gone. At the time, I was a youthful, young PhD, well-read, reasonably convinced that I had learned everything to do with beekeeping and that I was just a matter of time before I would just know everything about beekeeping.

As I have told you now recently, the older you get, the more you know you never knew, so I learn in reverse. Even though I've spent my whole life studying bees, I realize now how much I still don't know. I think I realize. In one of those classes, it was just a beginning beekeeping class, Dr. Caron had always required there to be a class project to be turned in at the end. The class project could be anything in the world so long as it was approved by Dr. Caron, or in my case, approved by me.

Let me tell you straight up that what usually happened was we got a lot of loaves of burned-up bread or bread that had a little bit of honey in it that somebody knocked out the night before just to meet their project. There was some seamstress people who could sew who did reasonably interesting things. There were academicians in training who wanted to write a paper about something that particularly entertained them, and whatever. There was a quiet young woman who said that she would like to turn in some sketches of bees. I didn't know what to expect. I thought she'd sit around under a copy light or something and do the best she could to reproduce a bee outline, so I agreed to it.

I have to tell you that I was absolutely completely shocked to see when she turned in her artwork that it was nothing short of breathtaking. I was just stunned. I was surrounded by this bread I told you about and by papers laying around, and by some people who tried to build their own equipment. Here, before my uneducated eyes, was true artwork that she had turned in. Being a young student and really not having any money, but knowing that I was holding several pieces of interesting artwork here, I promptly said, "Do you have a price for this work that you'd be willing to let it go for?"

I didn't know if I was going to hear $5, if I was going to hear $50,000. What I heard, I was completely unprepared for it. She said, "No, it's not for sale. I could never sell my artwork. It's a part of me. It's who I am." She said, "I will sell you photographs of it." On my wall, there's three photographs of the artwork that she did all those years ago. Now, I've got to tell you that even though I've got those three pictures professionally matted, through the years, those photos have faded badly.

Then it begins to open up an arena. Am I allowed to open those photos up, scan them into Photoshop, and do the best I can to recolor them? Or is it just my lot in life to watch those photos hang on the wall there under bright lights, probably really bad for them, and watch them fade away? I got three photographic renditions of the artwork that she turned in, and there they hang. I asked, "Well, could I contract you to do sketches? Not something that you've really got to hammer down on and spend weeks and weeks on, but just do some simple sketches for me." She said that she would do that.

Underneath those three pictures are my two original artwork pieces that she did do for me. They're both pencil. One's a colored pencil, and the other's graphite. I asked her just to sketch, and I showed her a picture of some yards I had in Alabama where the beehive sat along the edge of a forest. She sketched that out. Within a few, I don't know, a few weeks, I can't remember now, I inherited the pictures. I loved them. I had everything professionally matted, and they're hanging there.

Sometime, when I get a chance, go to amybartlettwright.com and look at her work. She has become, throughout the 35, 40 years since those days that we were at University of Maryland, she has become a prominent internationally known scientist with extensive amounts of work. I can comfortably tell you that she became much more comfortable with putting a price on her work because there's some amazing artwork that she's done. She's a wildlife artist.

Here's the thing that I find valuable. I could not find any instance of where she specifically did any more bee work, honeybees. There must be something somewhere, but she's just seemingly done everything else. I was honored. I was lucky. I was so glad that I had enough of an artistic eye to know that this was a unique situation, and to encourage her.

She was already pursuing an undergraduate degree in scientific illustration. She went downtown while she was working at the University of Maryland and worked at either the Smithsonian or one of the institutions downtown as a scientific illustrator. I think that I'm really honored to have this hanging on the wall. I don't mean to push this point too long, but years later, thanks to the web now, the web knows everything if you've just got the right question. I asked the web what happened to, as I knew her, Amy K. Bartlett. It came up with Amy Bartlett Wright, technical illustrator in Rhode Island. There it was, and there her phone number was.

One day, on a whim, I called that number, and she answered. I told her who I was, and I asked if she had any memory of that bee class at the University of Maryland. She said she did. She had a memory of me and our relationship during that time. I asked what happened to those bee pictures that she drew at the University of Maryland. She says, "As I speak, they're hanging on one of the walls in my house. I've still got them there very prominently."

I'm not an artist. I'm not a musician. I'm not a lot of things. I always feel a void when I watch somebody else play the piano, and when I watch someone else just sketch, or even do detailed artistic work. I simply am not wired to do that. I do have those pictures. They do mean a lot to me. It is a valuable memory to me that I just gave to you. For those of you who have this gift, I really envy you. I encourage you anytime that there's a chance for you to work your way through it. Let's take a break. I've got a few more things along this line to talk about, but this was the primary memory that I had. Let's take a break.

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Jim: I don't know what the issues are legally about original artwork and its use. That's her work. It's her name, Ms. Wright. I would never use it for anything other than just something to hang on my wall and to offer placid memories. Dr. Rothenbuer had a few pieces of pen and ink artwork that I have no idea where it came from. It's got the artist's artistic signature in the lower right-hand corner, and it's a complex picture of a farmyard scene with trees and fences and whatever. Then right in the middle of all that is a prominent bee selection of different beehives and whatever. I've never used it. I don't even have it framed.

I don't know what I've got that I inherited from Dr. Rothenbuer when he had to leave. I don't know what to do with that kind of work. I don't know how to post it or frame it. I'm reluctant to photograph it. For all I know, the person is alive and well, and then I would ensure it being some kind of artistic copyright violation. I really have no idea what to do with all that. I've got some in the same genre but different. I've got some waxwork artistic stuff that people have done where they either carved in beeswax or they molded beeswax, and then they went through extraordinary efforts to real-life paint it.

Obviously, it's a queen bee on a slab of beeswax that was molded, but what the person was able to do was to give it life and flair by so beautifully painting it. It's far more than just a cake of beeswax now. Somebody put their soul into it, and then, for whatever reasons, they gave it to me. I've had it for years and years. The person who did it has now crossed over to the other side, so it's no longer an issue. I would never assume to do anything with it.

If any of you have experiences, have abilities, have talents, that's a unique gift, and it's one that I envy. If you want to tell me about them, I'll relate it to the other listeners here that are hanging on right now, but I am completely unable to do it. My only claim to fame has been my modest woodworking ability. For a while, I spent vast amounts of time and energy reproducing old beehives, specifically one of the H.A. King hives. I'm looking at it here across the room. Sometime maybe I'll talk about that, but if I had to just justify my own existence, if I had a talent, I'd work in wood. I don't work in pen and ink and paint and wax work and whatever.

There is another thing that I don't know what to do with, maybe nothing. Maybe I should find out, first of all, how these things work. Make a sentence, Jim. What are you talking about? Years ago, at the AI Root Company, when they were manufacturing bee supplies, and the magazine was then called Gleanings in Bee Culture, they did their own in-house printing, their own in-house magazine printing, label printing for honey jars and whatever. I have some of those old reversed printing plates. Do any of you know how to use those things? Would you just ink them?

I don't know how they got the color. They were in vivid primary colors. I can see how you would ink it and then just use it like an old-fashioned ink stamp, but how did they get the color out of that? I've often considered using those things to do things that would be some kind of stamped ink work. I briefly bought books on linoleum stamping, where you'd buy pieces of the old-fashioned linoleum and then carve it in reverse and then use it as a stamp to make Christmas cards or whatever.

As I talk to you about that and my place in life now, where I am, maybe I'll review that again to see if I could make some kind of thank you note with a Jim Tew crudely done bee scene that I stamped out. I guess I'm asking if anybody knows how to use these old stamping print plates, what could be done with them? I just don't see how they got all the color out of those things that they did. Even though they were using it for commercial labels, my intent would be to do something now that would be considered more elementary artistic, using those old labels. They've got to be stamped some way because everything is reversed.

It took a unique person, as far as I'm concerned, to sit there with tools, reverse carving the word honey, pure or whatever, and doing it all in reverse, and carving it out with, I guess, it was zinc that they were cutting those designs into. As I've chatted with you here today is something that I'm not qualified to chat about, and I admitted that upfront. There are those of you out there who have these artistic talents, and it's in multiple veins, multiple mediums. Those people who work in wax are frequently not beekeepers at all. They just need beeswax for their medium.

Then what they turn out would be very enviable, coveted artwork or useful products made from beeswax. They never kept bees. They just bought the beeswax that beekeepers sold. It's an interesting thing. It's a side and a part of beekeeping that I'm not qualified to discuss, but I always enjoy seeing it in craft stores or in artistic events or whatever. That's it for today. If you've got those talents, just know that I envy you. Sometimes I'd like to talk to you about them and hear what it is that you're able to do. Until we talk again about this time a week from now, I'm Jim, telling you, bye-bye.

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