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Izumrud: The Garden and The Forest 

This June 2022 and early July we are embracing summer at the gallery with very open arms and celebrating Mother Nature's glory and power of rebirth in particular of returning greenish and leafy forms; when our world becomes lush and full again, when the sun tickles aspen leaves and the wind rushes through the big trees... there can't be a better sound than this. And especially, now as the days become longer until they become shorter; a pregnant moment defining an ebbing and flowing...honeyjones is marking this time with the celebration of greenery,  but also with a showing of gratitude for the artists that have been with the gallery in the last year or so, including with a reception in honor of our longest days of the year, our summer solstice.  

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Included in our Izumrud theme are works by Shahen Zarookian,
Maura Glandorf,  Sirarpi Heghinian Walzer,  Joanne Simon and
Myra Wilson.
Photos above clockwise from top left show two of Myra Wilson's unframed acrylic portraits on paper,  Sirarpi Heghinian- Walzer's Waiting, four paintings by Shahen Zarookian (which are shown in a slide gallery along with Shahen's bio below) and Joanne Simon's monotype Little Green and Maura Glandorf's oil painting Dappled Light.   
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Scroll down to the end of the page to see images from our very beautiful summer soirée on June 17th and to read about the inspiration for this showing. 

Shahen Zarookian

Several artists had works at the gallery that are fitting for a green theme, but a few in particular brought in new works, including Shahen Zarookian, who is new to the gallery, and whose works are being highlighted. 

a statement from abstract realist artist Shahen Zarookian;

For forty years, Shahen Zarookian has led an illustrious career in graphic design, brand identity, and architectural graphics. In 2008, soon after he left Bose corporation, where he spearheaded the company's packaging design creatives, he launched into the fine art space and took his own concept of abstract realism into the art world. The result has been a thrilling ride of pop culture juxtaposition inspired by his love of domestic and world travels. HIs work has been displayed in galleries throughout the Boston area as well as in La Jolla, California. 

Shahen lives and works in Belmont, Massachusetts.     

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Maura Glandorf

Also featured with new artwork is Maura Glandorf who has been in the gallery for more than a year. Maura has three works up, including Dappled Light, shown here. 

 read/see more about Maura... 

It was a wonderful summer soirée gathering !! Thanks to all who joined in !!
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Izumrud

 

The inspiration for this theme is a personal experience within a community garden several years ago. As a community gardener at this time, the plot I was thrilled to be able to choose was a beast of a garden: overgrown, untended for seasons, and scary. I loved it. I had big plans to make my own beautiful organic mess of it, including incorporating the rocks that were as plentiful as the snakes. I wanted to set an entire peripheral wall of stones and would have been able to do this eventually if I had not been kicked out of my plot and the gardening community by the Garden Board for failing to create said or any border fence and for not tending to the garden as they preferred me to do. 

 

I was surrounded by better gardeners from the get-go, infinitely better in all ways. It might be noted, though, and history does have it, that the previous gardener, interestingly, wasn’t really much of a gardener either. Apparently, he just kind of walked about and let things BE where they were. Right on. I never met him. I was only told about him: that he didn’t tend the garden so much as he wandered about…and dug. 

 

He dug in the rocky ground in search of treasure… and sifted around in the prickly primal thicket in what I would later imagine to be a mix of rapture and reverie. 

 

One adjacent gardener, a man from Ukraine, who tried valiantly to get me started on a serious- serious-meaning-steel -posted -fence, told me about the treasure. I thought he was joking, really. I thought maybe he was teasing me. When he said izumrud, I thought, hey, that kind of sounds like emerald. 

Do you mean emerald ? I would say…

I don’t know,  he would say, leaning on his shovel over his fence…but he was digging and never planting…and yes, he would dig up these stones, very beautiful ..izumrud… I don’t know how you call in English.

 

This was spring work day in May. There were a lot of gardeners keeping busy, including another adjacent gardening couple, an older couple from Russia, from Siberia. It seemed they walked by many, many times as I was getting to know my own garden. Their faces looking on to me were very friendly, rosy even, and open. They would glance until our gazes met, having something to tell… Their English was slightly worse than my Ukrainian neighbor, but what I got from them, unsolicited, was a feverish excitement about something magnificent in the ground… and hand signals to the wrists and neck. 

Jewelry. 

Izumrud. 

 

I caught the fever pretty quick about this serendipitous lark, this treasure or bounty of mystical provenance. It was so wildly unsettling. And inside, I thought, could they be teaming up to joke on the American lady? But no, it wasn’t like that at all. It was just one of those meant-to-happen days. 

 

I called my youngest, my son, to come to the garden. I told him the story. He got the fever for about 30 minutes of digging before I segued him into the other real work which was planting Nana’s potato spud babies (which turned out to be quite a golden bounty of the garden).


To make a winding twist of a story shorter and to the point... I never did find an emerald.

 

I did find a black amalgamation with emerald-y lodgings within it one day, though. I brought it home, placed it on a windowsill as I do with many precious items. Then I proceeded to misplace it. It was the size of an almond. If I had spoken it to be emerald, those community gardener board members would surely have been on me. 

I casually and secretly convinced myself that it wasn’t an emerald; that I didn’t bring that unusual bit of geology home with me…and that if it was, anyway, izumrud, that it was actually lost as it was meant to be…lost again as I imagine my predecessor; a lost wanderer in his garden, wandering in search of something left behind, something hidden, something special. 

 

You know what they say about a story, and the revealing… it’s the same when you find it.  

 

It’s green, it’s deep green and it’s nearly blue. Did you get it? I got it, and I found it. 

 

I couldn’t help noticing the analogy of the garden and its fences and treasures and land rights among Ukrainian and Russian neighbors to be timely.  For another time!

 

Julie 

honeyjones  

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