Terraced Light: Of Sacred Groves and an Açaí Garden
by Till Till Bögelsack
Summer grove
A summer grove garden where we can share the inner Sertão bounty, in Oneness with late summer fruits of açaí like sapphire grapes – they warm us like lagoons. Diving into northeastern baths under lush summer trees and their inner bark-sparks like the embrace of another fresh red pomegranate, inner earth.
Therein, we feel innately drawn to riveting paintings. We find a lyrical emotiveness, directness, fig stirring resonance like our being unfolded in a grove’s garden. A surface vessel dipped into mild gesso, and natural colors like a Firenze recipe grow out of the well of the wise, us always finding another way in the desert of heavenly pines.
North Carolina
Onto the Appalachian-plenary of pines, North Carolinian Sea! – vast like the Americas, an oak table with seats as if a raft on Lake Kummerow, laid out in summer bronze. Paintings in self-made colors on water – they shine like wooden planks ripe with artisan spirit, calm and devoted, a surface to build the Syracusia heavenly throne, lines and gradients, natural patterns on wood’s surface can appear like a lush maze of branches of knowledge, ocean-caring fig-sweet patterns edged into humble wood.
An innermost conversation and deep stirring, according to Sabina Puppo: “This summer I started a series called Nocturnes. The night sky in New England is so different than in Virginia, Norway, Italy or Uruguay. Crickets are a constant rhythm, as the air and darkness reveal one’s geographic position. In “Up with a foal” the night horizon of the north seems to reveal a shimmer of the northern lights.”
In ancient Europe, sacred groves carried similar wise pages of an inner antenna and outer garden, inner book and outer books of a wise craft, of conversations we shared like the patterns of a shared story of adamant language warm and crisp like the Rocha Coast and speech culture as vast and rich as the South American continent.
Fruit trees
Sabina Puppo reveals the healing life of nature: “In “Symphony in green” a walk on a trail becomes music, with the leaves of trees in the background, and bunnies and wildflowers playfully adorning the path. This was my mother’s favorite painting of the summer of 2025.”
Pine-ward natural media of vast perception and philological contemplations are found therein, and in the Medieval Warm Period ink and feather were the bedrock of vast medical knowledge of fruit trees, early medieval rococo figs.
Much of this medical knowledge is now effusive like a scribbling desert of the Atacama Desert, soaking water to be revealed again like a cultural flourishing that remains tied to the jade of the earth, not just in the art of initials of books like in a sea of graphene, or in the endless spelt of coal, harsh grain within industrial landscapes, hiding missing calories but that are needed to make rains and forests flourish again.
Freshwater pine
Words of refined medieval nature were frequently taken out like herring from the sea, fish not finding their turn, fish taken from their inner nature of breathing salt and turned into full industriousness, turned away from the inner life of the freshwater pine. In this mellow drama of an inner Dante, visuals felt absorbed in an industrious dabble that was previously unknown.
But now there are so many kindred, naturalistic grove spirits re-establishing this medieval lyre-rye lyrical presence in natural visuals, paintings turning away from the artificial industry that covers lands, forests, marches. A return to full Andalusian Arabesque.
Letters of earth
Like a grove’s garden, fluye a lo largo de estos muros cálidos bañados por el sol. There is a sense of olive warm closure within the previous, circumscribed nature by the warm walls of sacred groves and stones – feminine nature often found within in these – wide-open layers of bricks where initial letters of earth are to be recovered again from the mortar, their natural form, reopened to light to reveal feminine essence.
Honey grapes like wobbling propolis follow this warm mortar in the medieval garden, like a trail of ocher bricks, warm, which allow for growth in the icy north and perhaps in the Latin American depth, somewhere where only snow apples grow, but in the south: açaí and naranja.
Deep library
A medical lexicon well-kept in the deep library, one of Pomeranian geology establishes continuity of this monastic feminine wisdom on the surface of the flowing Iguazu. It is the flowing nature of vast inventiveness, soon-ness in Latin American art like flowing river, connecting similarly the marches east of the Elbe to the streaming waters of the Iguazu.
This is where the tree of medical life and feminine knowing is not merely juxtaposed by modern design, cedrene wooden industriousness. It embraces the medieval, the natural, what came first, and only partially partakes in relished style of the historicity as there is an immediate memory. One tied to the core within, tied to grasses. Knowledge leans onto these walls of the grove’s enclosure.
But quite algebraically, mustering wise silence like the Río de la Plata in its thick indiscernibility, a tight forest of the wheat of the Darß fully circumscribed in natural ink, the same lexicon of fruits can also break down one’s inner knowing walls, go from industriousness to olive nature, where we find deepest roots in an oaken dye of sturdy knowledge, paradise grass like in the flowing light of the coastal sand-forlorn headdress. Core of living fig-leafed earth.
Living earth
We lay our head onto the warm rouge Venus, calm Veleti grass in the medieval garden, listening to grass telling stories of wise medieval women, and a priestess of the 13th century reads flowing lines from the lexicon of fruit trees. Another kindred spirit cares for these summer waters, the still citrus and the grapes. The sun-hall of walls descends and bows to her nature.
And kindred water flows Pomeranian-like into the crevices of the wholesome chernozem of North and South, sand of living earth – to grow fruits and northern figs, naranja and açaí. Soil for fruit brings the scent of iron-ironic taste.
Beavery plains
Out of the geological soil emerge the philological descriptives, non-ironic olives of the fruit lexicon. We sense the innermost philology, linguistic dexterity of Alexander von Humboldt and his endless, caring revue of plants. His firmament-discernments of natural beginnings are not mere experiences, but perhaps the first moments of innocuous serendipity in Cumaná.
They capture us at the immediacy of the moment, as if we were a broken – yet craving, riveting moon in desert meditation. They are restored agate temples, wandering resorts of tenderness of hilly Pomerania, surface Peene Valley. Natural connectedness-embeddedness, like sweet water that re-surfaces giving rise to the upper Orinoco, deepening fish swarm-like, fresh water into the Iguazu, Moconá and the beavery plains of the olivine-simmering Potomac River.
Hills rising from Western Pomeranian-riveting grasses, wavy-weary Eurasian flat lands like Alexander von Humboldt’s travel itineraries of peace – imagine they would reach the bounty of the upward plains, straining into the knowing leaves of the Adirondacks, flowing along the South-North width on a vast compass all the way to the Appalachians crossing vast worlds, in a seeming breath uniting South America and North America poetically. Armonía y cariño.
Hudson river
In the American geology, basalt layers become airy, closed riverbeds, opened, intertwined like a mount of olives. They form the bedrock of the light of a dairy moon and beaming light of day. It is a continent of basalt strength and forte like the Palisades near the Hudson River. Reopen another chapter, another and another, paint layer upon layer. Home experiences, local experiences tied to the Americas, are deep local experiences.
They are never closed but remain powerful reflective surfaces – and we are visitors on continuous visits in the Americas, taking first steps, creating connections with a vast array of deep and rich leaves, like the tapestry of light and they remain the fundament, aspect, bedrock and the stem of the vast Latin American tree.
Adirondack
The core of natural life awakens in the art of Sabina Puppo: “Of all the things I have done and tried, painting frees me from my inner critic and from judgement. If people say: your trees are too big! You can’t see roots and rocks in the underground! The roads are too winding! The oceans are too wavy! or You mix aerial and frontal views! I share with them that this is how I see the world, how it feels in me.”
The Virginia bluebell calls home rivers – and maps a narrow path horizontally, along straits of fern, seeding books in Adirondack grasses, beaver lakes. Emotive visits of Colibrí wings sway wide – like flower buds in the warmer south, plains, steppes, cedar rains.
Sapphire-jade and calm. ¡Hemos llegado! Like a flood of quick wings in fortuitous air. Colibrí blessing is on these surface waters. And a reed flute plays to America – another tempest-sway from south to north along the spine of the Appalachians, across geologic layers, through groundwater, marshland clouds, underground fields of anthracite, coal deserts and mountains buffering chlorophyll meadows, forest floors. And in the south, bronze Mantiqueira Mountains.
Artist Statement by Sabina Puppo (in her own words)
“Sabina Puppo hails from Montevideo, Uruguay, which Jorge Luis Borges described as “backwatery and clear in the afternoon as the memories of a smooth friendship.” The small provincial capital remains the hub of an otherwise rural nation. Sabina has spent some of her life in many urban settings, but she is a country girl at heart. Indeed, she and her husband spent seven years living near a village named Pueblo Edén, several miles inland from the Rio de la Plata. They designed and built a modest house, grew their own food, planted thousands of native trees, and raised barnyard animals. Since then the rolling landscape with its grazing sheep, vineyards, olive groves and eucalyptus trees breaking the wind off the river has left an indelible mark on her work, even though she currently lives in Leesburg, Virginia. Fortuitously, her home overlooks a farmstead dating from the 1740’s, and it comes with a cow and abundant wildlife, thus her work continues to evoke the innocence, simplicity, and rural rhythm of a bygone era. Her paintings are whimsical and spontaneous. Were you to ask her what she’s going to paint today, she’d smile and say she doesn’t yet know where her hand and brush might take her. She’s a narrative painter and her stories unfold on the canvas.”
For the exhibit at Museum Mile Contemporary showcasing the art portfolio of Sabina Puppo
To send a message to the administration click the link:
https://www.museummilecontemporary.org
To contact the Author of this review: tlbgls@proton.me
The artist’s website is: https://sabinapuppo.com
Social media: https://www.instagram.com/sabinapuppoart
Friday, November 28, 2025
On the cover: a portrait of the artist; in the article: all images, courtesy by the artist ©Sabina Puppo (all rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited)
