Notes:
- Thank you Sawsan!
- Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again.
Guess.What.Day.It.Is? (Volume Up)
June 7, 2023 by 23 Comments
Guess.What.Day.It.Is? (Volume Up)
May 24, 2023 by 14 Comments
Notes:
- Thank you bougiecattle, Johan Graham.
- Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again.
Guess.What.Day.It.Is?
May 17, 2023 by 27 Comments
Notes:
- Thank you Horty for sharing a photo from a friend who is visiting Egypt!
- Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again.
The A-Team
May 4, 2023 by 28 Comments
Wally and our grand-dog Sully.
Our Frenchie Brothers.
Top image is a photo from March 5, 2023.
Bottom image is a wonderful painting by Carol Tamplin, commissioned by our great friend Jan. What an amazing gift Jan! Thank you.
Guess.What.Day.It.Is?
May 3, 2023 by 20 Comments
Notes:
- Image Source: redmerhoekstra. Redmer Hoekstra is a Dutch artist based in Elst in the Netherlands. www.redmerhoekstra.nl/shop. Thank you Sawsan for sharing!
- Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again.
October 4 1988
April 7, 2023 by 7 Comments
I would like to be a free artist and nothing else . . . I hate lies and violence in all of their forms . . . I look upon tags and labels as prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom imaginable—freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form [they] . . . take.
— Anton Chekhov, (October 4, 1888; Letters, p. 109) in “Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings” by Michael C. Finke (Reaktion Books, Nov 11, 2021)
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 29th in the year 1860, in the small seaport of Taganrog, Ukraine. He is regarded as one of Russia’s most cherished story tellers. (Portrait & background: Famous Authors)
Lightly Child, Lightly.
March 23, 2023 by 16 Comments
My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything – no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form. You wouldn’t think of form by the ocean. You can go in if you don’t encounter anything. A world without objects, without interruption, making a work without interruption or obstacle. It is to accept the necessity of the simple direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.
— Agnes Martin, Agnes Martin: Writings
Notes:
- Photo: Daybreak. March 18, 2023. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning’s walk here.
- Quote. Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I believe in everything simultaneously. I don’t have a religion and don’t need one.
November 16, 2022 by 15 Comments
…While A Book of Days is dedicated to others, its cover is of Smith in a dashing, black, wide-brimmed hat carrying a Polaroid 250 Land Camera that now looks quaintly retro with her hand irresolutely over her mouth – reverie second nature to her. Its first image is of her hand raised in greeting. “HELLO EVERYBODY”, she exclaims. Hands appear throughout her books, in and out of dreams. Could we focus on her own? Surprised, she considers them: small, shapely, barely lined. Does she ever look at her hands and think: you’ve been with me through everything? She laughs, surprised: “Gosh, yes, I do think that. I look at them and see my whole life. I realise I’ve not changed all that much. I’m just older, older, older…” She feels particularly in touch with her 11-year-old self, “running through fields with my dog and free of social conformities”…
I see her as a literary pilgrim, I tell her, and she looks pleased. But what I most want to know is why she is so dedicated to celebrating other artists? She replies simply: “Because they magnify my life.”..
Does she believe in fate? She replies that, when younger, she saw life as a “huge prayer rug where the threads make a beautiful design but with intentional flaws”. She is still drawn to the “grand design” even if the carpet is a comforting fiction…
She also believes in free will. “I believe in everything simultaneously. I don’t have a religion and don’t need one.” Like most of us, she worries about the world. “Today, I woke at four in the morning out of a sound sleep, thinking of the women of Iran and of my daughter… my mind all over the place. I keep waking through the night. Part of me is always conscious of what is happening in Ukraine, the threat of nuclear weapons, the climate crisis, a part of Florida destroyed.” I look at her face – tired, I see that now: “All these things radiate from my mind and I can’t… we’re powerless to take care of everything but I try to keep these people in my consciousness just as I keep the dead in my consciousness. My father, my mother – I think of them. I can’t help all the women in Yemen watching their babies die of starvation. I can only radiate love toward them. I have to, as an individual, continue to do my work. I have to find a way to balance our troubled world with my own optimism, joy and obligations. So it is always on my mind and it’s complicated.”…
But her emphasis is always on life: “I just keep doing my work, try to take care of myself. I feel blessed to have the imagination I have but don’t think it makes me more important than anyone. I am who I am, with all my flaws – and I’m grateful.”..
— Kate Kellaway, from “Patti Smith: ‘I am who I am with all my flaws’ (The Guardian, November 13, 2022)
What’s that, then?
September 4, 2022 by 23 Comments
The evangelical in Anne had always recoiled at ‘The Arts’, for they had no obvious place in the useful, pious life. But Lia had something. It was not simply an ability to accurately depict the world, to replicate the exact gradient of a crow’s beak or the detailed creases of a hand, held out. There’s real flair there, one of Lia’s teachers had told her, a year or so ago, when Anne had been parked outside the school…She can capture the very essence of a thing, whilst… imbuing it with a… startling newness.
The teacher was new there. New and young and pretentious, for what nonsense this was, Anne had thought, but smiled as politely as she could nevertheless, and started the car, so as to let the intrusive woman know she had heard quite enough. Lia came out, holding a painting of a single egg in the middle of a large blue bowl. There was no essence; no startling newness. Just an egg in a bowl. And no one, thought Anne, with any sense, kept their eggs in bowls in the first place. Except for the French, perhaps.
See you tomorrow, Amelia. The teacher had smiled and walked away, smart and smug in her shoulder-padded jacket.
What’s that, then? Anne had asked, glancing in the rear mirror as they neared home.
Quiet, Lia had said.
What?
The title. I’ve called it – Quiet.
And Anne had straightened her spine in the driver’s seat, unnerved by the odd little child in the back of the car, pretending that she couldn’t see how the solitary egg in the bowl was, indeed, a very quiet-looking thing after all, as the tyres ground loudly against the gravel of their driveway.
— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
A well-cultivated mind comes to recognize the good, the true and the beautiful
August 4, 2022 by 45 Comments
I learned calligraphy in the seventh grade when my classmate’s mother taught the basics during an afternoon art class. In my case, it was pearls before swine. I was hardly an apt pupil. Art was where I parked myself between recess and after-school soccer. But even in my grubby pre-adolescence, her elegant pen strokes struck me as beautiful…
I’ve never employed my chirographic skill apart from that homework assignment. I do, however, remember the lesson vividly for three reasons.
First, it taught me there is beauty in this world. Some things are pleasing when seen; calligraphy is such a thing. It is beautiful to behold and drew me out of my pubescent self.
Second, beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but many see beauty in the same things. Some objects are man-made and others are natural, but attraction to beautiful things is nearly universal. This speaks to an ineffable longing written on our hearts.
Third, we each have the capacity to create beauty through the choices we make and things we do. Not all we do will be beautiful, but it all has the potential to be. The gift of freedom behind all these choices, made and to be made, is itself beautiful.
I’m glad I was dialed into middle-school art class that day so long ago. An impromptu calligraphy lesson taught me a lot about beauty in this world and the one to come.
— Mike Kerrigan, from My First Lesson in Beauty (wsj, July 30, 2022). Kerrigan is an attorney in Charlotte, NC
Notes:
- Post and Post Title inspiration: From a response to this article by Jim Reardon: I enjoyed Mike Kerrigan’s “My First Lesson in Beauty” (op-ed, July 30). Mine came when I encountered Shakespeare in ninth grade. Never had I imagined language could be so powerful and, yes, beautiful. I share Mr. Kerrigan’s skepticism that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A well-cultivated mind comes to recognize the good, the true and the beautiful, whether in art, nature, science or noble acts.
- Photo by Diana Schroder-Bode via unsplash
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
July 18, 2022 by 9 Comments
I close my eyes. (They) both laugh when I do this. They think you gotta see to paint, but sight is just a distraction from what it really takes to translate image to art. I let it float out my fingers, escape out my breath, and I don’t need to see when my body is an entire vision.
Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling: A Novel (Knopf, June 7, 2022)
Notes:
- DK Rating: Highly Recommended
- Amazon Top Books of 2022.
- Selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick.
- NY Times Editor’s Choice Top 10 Books of the Week. NY Times Book Review here.
this delicate painting will endure
May 14, 2022 by 8 Comments
On the shelf in my studio in Bloomsbury are four postcards of paintings that I love: The Blue Rigi, Sunrise by J.M.W. Turner; Stonehenge, a watercolour by John Constable; Self-Portrait by Rembrandt, dated 1658; and The Convalescent by Gwen John.
Just one look at this reproduction of Gwen John’s painting and my breathing becomes easier. The whole composition is a symphony in grey. She must have mixed the colours on her palette first—Payne’s Grey, Prussian Blue, Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Brown Ochre, Rose Madder, Flake White—then all the other colours would be dipped in this combination so that every form is united in grey: the dark blue of the girl’s dress, the thrush-egg blue of the cushion behind her back and the tablecloth, the rose pink of the cup and saucer echoing the delicate pink of her fingernails and lips, the teapot like a shiny chestnut. The wall behind her is flecked with mustard-coloured dots placed randomly and precisely, as marks in nature always are, like the speckles on an egg. The painting is as fragile and robust as an egg—the structure of the composition holds everything in place; this delicate painting will endure.
Gwen John instructs the model to loosen her hair and part it in the middle. She wants the model to resemble her. Before Gwen starts the painting, she positions herself in the wicker chair and tells her model that she must sit in exactly the same pose. Gwen lowers her eyes and holds a small piece of paper in her hands. She is completely still, and her stillness pervades the space around her. The room becomes silent. The model now copies Gwen; she looks down at her hands, and she doesn’t look up until she has heard that Gwen approves.
— Celia Paul, Letters to Gwen John (New York Review of Books, April 26, 2022)
Then and Now
September 11, 2021 by 16 Comments
Pascal Campion’s “9/11: Then and Now.” In his cover for the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Pascal Campion depicts two people, likely too young to have experienced the day firsthand, sharing a moment of comfort and consolation on the rebuilt site of the World Trade Center. “Emotions can often be difficult to express in words,” Campion said. “But I’m a visual artist and, in my chosen medium, emotions can transcend words.” Behind the couple, the memorial reflecting pools, the footprints of the old Twin Towers; the wing-like silhouette of the Oculus, Santiago Calatrava’s gleaming shopping-mall-cum-transportation hub; and the illuminated office towers that make up the present-day skyline. Life has gone on. And yet, almost two decades later, the surroundings remain imbued with the memory of the events that took place on that day and by the absence of what was. (The New Yorker, September 13, 2021)
T.G.I.F.
June 25, 2021 by 24 Comments
Notes:
- Photo 1: The Robin Red Breast via Discovery.
- Image 2: Artist Constructs Cube Animals. Aditya aryanto, an artist from indonesia, has imagined a surreal series of animals that take on a quirky, cubic form.
Cézanne could not draw…
June 22, 2021 by 26 Comments
Visitors to “Cézanne Drawing” at the Museum of Modern Art may be astonished to learn that critics once complained that the late 19th-century French artist could not draw. With about 280 graphite, ink and gouache drawings and watercolors—over a third of them from private collectors—and a handful of related oil paintings, the staggeringly beautiful show proves otherwise. Organized by Jodi Hauptman, senior curator at MoMA, and associate curator Samantha Friedman, it also argues convincingly that Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), a foundational painter of modern art, produced his most radical work on paper.
The exhibition, arranged in broad, thematic terms, opens with loose study sheets and pages from the artist’s sketchbooks. Cézanne drew almost daily over the course of his career, using standard studio materials, and produced more than 2,000 extant works on paper. Though they rarely served as straightforward preparations for his oil paintings, his drawings pull us directly into his potent creative orbit…
After a dark year of building walls between ourselves and the world, “Cézanne Drawing” invites us to discover at an exhilaratingly intimate range the luminous genius of an artist whose work remains as rewarding as it is demanding.
— Mary Tompkins Lewis, from “‘Cézanne Drawing’ Review: Radical With a Pencil” (wsj.com, June 21, 2021)
Notes: 1) Paul Cezanne ‘Still Life with Cut Watermelon’ (c. 1900), 2) Cézanne’s ‘Coat on a Chair’ (1890-92).
World Re-opening…
June 4, 2021 by 16 Comments
Art by Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğl, (from Istanbul, Turkey). Françoise Mouly: “When coronavirus quarantines were announced, more than a year ago, artists began sending in sketches about our new, locked-in reality. One of those sketches, from Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu, who is based in Istanbul, looked far ahead, imagining the thrill and poignancy of a world reopening. Today, the pandemic is far from over, but many countries are finally exhaling, and it seemed apt to publish Ekşioğlu’s image.”
Guess.What.Day.It.Is?
June 2, 2021 by 20 Comments
Notes:
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Art: Kenneth Zeng (via Aberrantbeauty)Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again.
Lightly Child, Lightly.
April 22, 2021 by 26 Comments
I have also, I think, learnt what it is to love: being capable, not of ‘exaggerated’ initiatives, of always going one better, but of being thoughtful in relation to others, respecting their desires, their rhythms, never demanding things but learning to receive and to accept every gift as a surprise, and being capable, in a wholly unassuming way, of giving and of surprising the other person without the least coercion. To sum up, it is a question simply of freedom. Why did Cézanne paint the Montagne Saint-Victoire at every available moment? Because the light of each moment is a gift.
So, despite its dramas, life can still be beautiful. I am sixty-seven, and though it will soon be over, I feel younger now than I have ever done, never having had any youth since no one loved me for myself.
Yes, the future lasts a long time.
— Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir
Notes:
- Painting: “Paul Cézanne: La Montagne Sainte-Victoire” via Culturium
- Quote via “Alive on All Channels”
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
Lightly Child, Lightly.
April 15, 2021 by 21 Comments
“There are two different ways of looking at the world. You can walk on the path, or you can walk through the hedge. And I think that’s the beauty of art, that it just makes you step aside, off the normal way of walking or looking…”
“There’s this wonderful sort of tension in the wind — that moment when you’re held there suspended is a very beautiful moment … a moment of clarity in a very chaotic situation. … It’s like a shaft of light that penetrates.”
— Andy Goldsworthy, from “Leaning Into the Wind” (1987)
Notes:
- Andy Goldsworthy (born 26 July 1956) is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.
- Quotes via The Hammock Papers.
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
Live & Learn 