Animals

Recently, painter Marc Burckhardt has been in a deep “visual conversation” with literature—specifically, with Petrarch’s Triumphs, a sequence of poems from the Italian Renaissance in which Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity each overcomes the other. Burckhardt first came across Triumphs nearly a year ago, while working on a series based on Dante’s Inferno. As he often does with literary works, he looked into their visual history, and in doing so found “a deep well of imagery—stuff I recognized through a kind of peripheral appreciation.” Since then, working between studios in Austin, Texas, and Bremen, Germany, he’s has been studying, sketching, crumpling sketches, starting over, and taking notes for a series of allegorical paintings that reflect his personal connection to Petrarch’s themes, to be included in an October show at Gallery Shoal Creek, in Austin, Texas.

As we discussed some of his favorite authors—from Heinrich von Kleist and Virginia Woolf to Jack Kerouac and Jayne Anne Phillips—Doctorow asked: “What can you steal from these writers?”

Even with the challenge of below normal rainfall, spring turned out to be a beautiful time of year at Charlane Plantation. While the drought continues, the good news is that we have had rain at critical times, which for the most part has kept the woods green and beautiful—and the wildlife happy and healthy.