Goethe Girl and Rick took Loretta and Dick to Chelsea for their last evening in the Big Apple. Not many galleries were open on Thursday evening, but what could be seen was actually pretty good. The paintings by Melinda Hackett (at Charles Cowles Gallery), like the one above, reminded me of the radiolarians on which I posted recently. 
The myriad forms in Hackett's paintings don't have the symmetry of the intricate mineral skeletons found in the ocean depths, as in the beautiful illustration at the left of "Stephoidea" from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1904). Still, in their dreamy profusion they are so undersea-like that they also brought to mind a beautiful sonnet by Elizabeth Bishop entitled, simply, "Sonnet." Here is the second stanza:
There is a magic made by melody,
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading waters deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea
And floats forever in a moon-green pool
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.
After our gallery viewing, we marched off to the Village for dinner. All in all it was a good week for the visitors from Louisville.
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