Friday, July 18, 2025

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 306 (Santa Rosa)

Here's a collage from last autumn. This is Untitled Collage No. 306 (Santa Rosa). Completed October 7, 2024. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, found paper, collage. Image size: 37.8cm x 28.4cm (14.9 x 11.2 inches). Matted to 24 x 20 inches. Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse. 

This one is a bit unusual for me as it's collaged elements on a substrate. Normally I don't work on a base of any kind. I simply glue together scraps into "rafts" of joined paper. The central pinkish and brick red elements are printed directly on the underlying sheet in this case. All the other elements are collaged bits on top. This one, at almost 15 inches x 11 inches, is also comparatively big for me. Click on the image for a larger view.

For more of my abstract monotype collage work, visit my website at http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/ or you can purchase my recently published book commemorating ten years of working in the collage medium – Colin Talcroft: Abstract Monotype Collage: 2103–2023 (ISBN 979-8-218-37717-5). Available on the website.

In person, my work can be seen at Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa, Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, and at the Ren Brown Collection in Bodega Bay or by appointment.


Wednesday, July 16, 2025

Plants I'm growing: Is it all arugula?

I love the pungent leaves of the plant that I call "arugula." Nothing spices up a salad like arugula, but there appears to be a great deal of confusion surrounding this arugula (Latin name, Eruca sativa). It has many common names (besides arugula, referred to as rocket, rocket salad, roquette, rucola, and garden arugula, among others, with arugula and rucola coming from the Italian and rocket and variants coming from the French roquette) and it's often confused with (or wrongly thought to be the same as) Diplotaxis tenuifolia, which likewise has a number of common names; I've seen it called wild arugula, perennial arugula, perennial wall arugula, and, in plastic bags at the supermarket "baby arugula." While both are in the mustard family (Brassicaceae), they are not in the same genus and therefore not closely related. 

I know the two are distinct simply because the Latin names differentiate them, which is the whole point of Latin names – to distinguish between plants and animals with overlapping common names and different names in different languages around the world, but I also know how different they are because I grow both types in my garden. Eruca sativa, which comes up from seed quicker than just about any other plant I've ever sown, is an annual that grows quickly, producing flat, notched leaves typically about three to six inches long. It is fairly quick to bolt in the summer. Its flowers, on stems up to about 18 inches tall, are typical mustard family flowers with four   petals in a bilaterally symmetrical arrangement, pale cream colored with fine, dark, purplish veining (see photos below). 

Diplotaxis tenuifolia looks altogether different. The leaves are shorter, narrower, and more heavily if not more deeply notched. It forms mounds of dainty foliage, growing up to about 24 inches high or as much as about 36 inches including the long, thin flower stalks. The flowers are again typical mustard family flowers with four petals, but the flowers are a plain, unveined yellow (see photos). Finally, Diplotaxis tenuifolia is a perennial.  

What the two plants have in common is the presence of chemicals in the leaves of glucosinolates that break down into isothiocyanates, which as a group (if I understand correctly) are referred to as "mustard oils." These are the compounds responsible for the sharp and bitter flavors we know from mustard, radishes, watercress, capers, and others – including arugula, or rucola, or rocket, or roquette, or perennial arugula. The two plants smell and taste similar, so they share names, despite their taxonomical distance.

I find it frustrating that there seems to be no agreement about the common names. I've seen almost all of the names listed above for Eruca sativa used for both plants. I've even seen Japanese mizuna (which is another mustard family plant altogether, Brassica rapa var. nipposinica or Brassica rapa var. japonica) erroneously referred to as "arugula." While the Latin names clear things up and I'm perhaps a nerd, I'm not nerdy enough to ask for Diplotaxis at the supermarket. It's bad enough when I pronounce shiitake properly and they have no idea what I'm talking about. 



Sunday, July 13, 2025

Art I'm Looking At: Quilts at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Over the past weekend, I stopped in at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive to see the main show on now – a show of quilts by black Americans called "Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California." The show, which runs through November 30, looks at quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration of black Americans out of the South (1940-1970) in search of work and better treatment than they were accustomed to in the South. It comprises about one hundred quilts either made in the South and transported to California through migration or made in California by migrants to the state from the South. It is the first show that draws on a large collection of quilts donated to the museum in 2019 by a life-long collector. 


The earliest pieces in the show were made by women born into slavery
. The most recent pieces were made by artists still living. The range of styles is diverse. Some exhibit the careful piecing, geometric formality, and intricate stitching that characterize the quilting traditions with which I'm more familiar but others display a much freer approach to materials and composition, notably a willingness (or often a need) to draw on materials at hand; there are quilts that incorporate old denim, old T-shirts, entire pieces of used clothing (one artist in the show appears to have been known for making "britches quilts" using overalls and other articles of clothing intact), neckties, and scrap fabric of all kinds. The inventiveness and beauty of some of the pieces is impressive. Well worth a look. I've attached photos here of some of my favorite pieces in the show.





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