Table Tops

Henri Burkhard

Like so many American artists at the turn of the century, Henri Burkhrad had to leave his native land for Paris in order to find his painterly voice. Paris was the centre of the avant-garde, a melting pot of radical ideas, experimentation, and wild characters who encouraged each other to push the envelope further in a single minded journey towards subjective truth. Burkhard had a by-the-numbers artistic education, attending three of the great Académies in the city and honing the traditional skills he had learnt as a young man in New York to novel effect. He returned home shortly before this work was painted, bringing with him the new way of thinking he had learnt overseas, and was quickly celebrated as a leading figure in the American modernist movement, exhibiting extensively at major galleries and museums across the country. Burkhard fell into relative obscurity later in life, and his contribution to a uniquely American painterly style is rarely discussed, but his cubist inspired still lives still retain a sense of potency today.

Saturday 6th June

The Moon deepens further into the constellation of Capricorn, one of the twelve zodiac constellations that form a band of fixed stars around the Earth. Capricorn, along with Virgo and Taurus, carries the element of earth. In the garden, this relates to the roots of plants. Root vegetables such as onions, carrots, parsnips, and beetroot are grown for their roots, and any tending to them today, through weeding, sowing, or perhaps thinning, can help us work with the earthly forces of Capricorn and support their development. By the evening, we see the Moon cross the threshold into the light constellation of Aquarius, bringing a different quality towards the end of the day.