Tag Archives: art
Weekly Photo Challenge: Lunchtime
This week’s challenge is about a universal favorite: FOOD! I grew up in a family that was highly educated about and highly appreciative of food. My family was started in Massachusetts, moved to Chicago and then to California. Regional ethnic influences were explored and absorbed with gusto. Last night, as Steve & I enjoyed dinner at our local sushi bar, we got to talking about our personal culinary histories. Steve adamantly refused to eat anything but hot dogs, potatoes and asparagus until he was 16. Then, on a trip to New England, he actually tried fresh fish and realized that he was missing a world of wonderful taste. You can get lost in a food wasteland, if you’re not adventurous, in the Midwest. But there are plenty of opportunities to branch out.
Last year, on St. Patrick’s Day, we ventured into the city to see what kind of shenanigans we could witness. We had lunch at one of Steve’s favorite places: Beans & Barley. I love it immediately for its California vibe. Here’s a picture of my portabello and gorgonzola and roasted red pepper sandwich with curried potato salad:
And the beer? New Glarus Spotted Cow. The best in Wisconsin micro brews, IMHO. And you can’t buy it in Illinois. Oh, but that’s not all! DESSERT!
The cafe has a deli and market attached, were you can find a variety of locally made sauces, mustards, natural soaps, and ART!
Yes, indeed, ladies & gentlemen! Step right up to the Art-o-Matic vending machine, insert your token, make your selection, pull the knob, and PRESTO! A cigarette-pack-sized piece of genuine, handmade ART will plop into the tray! Decoupage, graphic, random, actual ART. Really, isn’t this a cool idea? Get your local cafe to install one TODAY! All your neighborhood artists will want to supply stock for it. I think it’s brilliant.
This year, on St. Patty’s Day, we’re invited to the Finnegan’s house (Steve’s sister’s) for garam masala corned beef & aloo gobi, naan, chutney and Chai spiced rice pudding. See, living in Wisconsin need not be bland!
Wordless Wednesday: Growth
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Canon Practice
Last night I went to my first ever photography class to learn the basics of using my new Rebel T3i. I find myself wanting to figure out how to approximate the feeling I had when I took pictures with my AE-1 film camera, so I’ve been experimenting with disabling automatic, computer-generated options. It doesn’t always yield the best results, but I’m still learning. I don’t want everything lighted evenly, nor do I want everything in sharp focus. So, I’m learning how to tweak the white balance thingie and the depth of field. It’s interesting that the viewfinder will not show you what the picture will look like, and the instructors knew that there was some way to view it, but they discouraged that, saying that the Canon representative hadn’t showed them how. Well, I think I found something in Manual setting with Live View that approximates the final result. But, hey, no film wasted, right? Click and review. So I’ve been fiddling around with it, using some of my favorite subjects. Allow me to introduce them:
From my elephant collection
This guy was helpful with the monochrome, but he kept falling over on the bedspread. He was an experiment in Manual Focus.
So I replaced him with a littler guy and worked on depth of field.
Then I pushed the ISO way up to see what kind of noise they’d make.
But this little guy just looks so special in his own portrait, all decked out like a museum jewel.
Anyway, I’m having a great time with my new toy. The class was OK, but I didn’t appreciate the first 20 minutes where they tried to sell us on another truckload of accessories. There is still so much I have to learn about the gizmos on the main piece of equipment! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend following your own bliss! And honestly, don’t think you have to spend a nickel to do that. At the end of a photo session, I put down my camera and marvel at the eyes I got for free.
Playground Photos
Earthbound, solid structures surround me. My eyes shoot upward toward the moon. Life is so much more than my immediate environment. Hard and colorful outlines are surely blurry and insignificant when viewed from that other orb. I must remember this. I freeze the thought in a frame…and wish I could expand the edges to infinity.
Dodging Art
What an amazing day! Training at Old World Wisconsin included visits to the Animal Barn, the Garden curator, and the Collections curator. I met two oxen, each weighing a ton, and stroked their noses and chins. I was introduced to three horses who are each in their 90s in “people years”. I saw a sow who had given birth for the first time just this week and her seven pink little piglets. Oh, how their little faces captivated me (and made me wish I’d brought my camera)! I visited a greenhouse full of tiny sprouting seeds which will become food and decor to an entire community, a future rooted in the present and informed by the past. I browsed through shelves of antique artifacts that illustrate the lives and time of people whose stories encompass miles of external and internal territory. So much to take in, visually, mentally, physically and spiritually! I came home to my usual tasks of dinner and chores and a phone call from my darling youngest…and now I’m sitting at my computer and entering this century of technology for the first time today. It feels kinda weird! I can only imagine how this feeling will intensify as I spend more time in the Old World.
I have one more week of the poetry challenge from NaPoWriMo to complete, and already I can tell that it’s not going to be easy to be in the mood to concentrate on composing verse each day after training! Still, I hope to have a little time to dabble in the word pond. Today’s prompt is to write an “ekphrastic” poem, a graphic description of a work of art. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a famous one. I went through some art photos that I had collected for a game I invented, and this one caught my eye. It’s a self-portrait by Van Gogh. Here’s the picture and the poem, and then I think I’ll call it a day here in the 21st century and get ready to go back 150 years again tomorrow!
Freckled, wistful world
Speckled, swirling molecules
Boundaries camouflaged
Fits and bits punctuating disappearance
Addled, dappled, sparks in the dark
Furtive sideways glance to the canvas
Back to dabbing, daubing, repetition
Poking at the flat reality
Testing the surface, then
Bouncing off again
Art, Time, and Love
In the expansive mist of morning, when my soul takes time and room to breathe and stretch, I gaze around my room and wonder what I might do with myself. My eyes light on the top shelf of a bookcase, where stands a handmade paper album. Pages of rough texture wait to absorb something well-constructed, like a bed of rice made to nestle a complicated curry. What poem or drawing or photograph would be worthy to lie in those lush furrows? Surely nothing as lowly as what I would create. Yet I long to put my time, my love, my hands to work, to make something. I want to slowly blend my life into some material. The satisfaction is exquisite. I felt it once, birthing and raising children. The medium responds, reacts, engages, resists. It is not a work of power; it is a work of love.
I have begun to notice an impatient annoyance building up in me when I look at photography sites. I am enamored of the images, but so often the captions leave me irritated. I do want to know what I’m looking at and where it was found. I don’t like the flavor of language that suggests violence. “I captured”, “I shot”, “I took”, “I caught”. Why not just say that you were there? It was there. You made a photograph of it at that place and in time. Doesn’t that sound more respectful somehow? It does to me.
I like art that shows that respect. An artist is generous with time, patient, slow, allowing something to unfold, gently. There is a generosity of presence in art. An artist gives herself – body, consciousness, energy, and love – into a relationship with her work and medium. That’s what feels so rich, pleasing and compelling in a well-made piece. Whatever it is. I am often so task-oriented that I don’t think of that. I was taught to be efficient, neat and accurate. In preparing a meal, for instance. When I began cooking for Steve, he’d ask me about supper, and I’d tell him the steps I planned to take and ask for his input on decisions. He’d respond with something like, “Just make it with love.” I wasn’t sure what that meant. I think I have a better idea now.
I have a whole day and a whole chicken ahead of me. I want to make something satisfying, not just in the end product, but in the relationship along the way. I’ll let you know how that turns out. Meanwhile, I’ll share these pictures from Horicon Marsh. I didn’t take them. I like to think I invited them, and they came willingly.
It’s All How You Look At It
Stan Freeburg’s comedy musical “The United States of America” contains a line where a Native American remarks to Christopher Columbus that they discovered the white man. “Whaddya mean you discovered us?” “We discover you on beach here…is all how you look at it.” “Y’I suppose…I never thought of it that way,” Chris replies.
Dualistic thinking, good/bad, right/wrong, is all about thinking, as my sister pointed out in a comment. It’s not about the actual thing in front of us. So it seems that often all we learn about the world is about how we are thinking about or perceiving it. Art and artists play around with this quite a bit, of course. And then philosophers ask, “What is real?”
Who knows.
Do we choose to look at things in a way that gives us pleasure of some kind, even perverse pleasure? Sure. I think we photographers get to do this now more than ever with all the tweaking technology allows. We get to illustrate the story going on inside our skulls. Here’s an example.
Sample inner monologue: “Rural life is a thing of the past. Flat, washed out, joyless and crumbling. There is no life left in the earth by now. Life is in the cities. It’s time we bulldozed these ruins and built something we can inhabit.”
Of course, you could be having a completely different monologue in your brain with this image. Go ahead, share it with us! Here’s another:
Sample thought: “Ah, the good old days! Blue skies, wood, stone, a farm. Life was simpler; it meant something back then to work hard on the land. All you need is within reach – your livelihood, your family, your pleasure. Who could ask for anything more?” Another:
Sample thoughts: “The world is an interesting juxtaposition of contrasting elements – texture, color, shape, pattern, organic and inorganic. There’s no making sense of it. The dynamic of life is about the tension and release we experience through our senses every day. Nothing more. I need a cigarette!”
There’s no right and wrong in this little exercise. “Is all how you look at it!” Please, have a go! Amuse me!
Art, Music & Myth: The Deeper Story of Being Human
Are human beings the only animals that weep?
Charles Darwin noted that Indian elephants weep. There have been many books written on the subject of animals’ emotions, and I haven’t read any of them, so I’m not going to venture an answer. What I do know is that I weep. And Steve weeps. When we weep — not cry, but weep — it seems to come from a sacred place in our soul, a place that has been stirred by something far greater than our selves. Of course, we can make efforts to wall off that place, if we want to. Bombarding ourselves with distractions often works to activate those shields. We can also choose to be curious and try to understand that feeling better.
“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.” – Mark Rothko
Tears can be a sign of “religious experience”, then. Fair enough. Something spiritual is going on there. What?
“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.” – Mark Rothko
That loneliness, that “pocket of silence where we can root and grow” resonates deeply with my partner, Steve. He calls it being moody or refers to his “Slavic melancholy”. It’s not a sorrowful thing only; it is just as brightly tinted with joy, like some of Rothko’s paintings. The combination, the totality is what hits home with him. He says, “The deeper story is to face all of life. Jesus and the Buddha are heroes of that story.” They are not conquering wartime heroes interested solely in winning. They do not struggle and strive. They embrace all dimensions of life equally: the suffering, the love, the sacrifice, the elation.
Rothko - Untitled Red and Black
In the book The Power of Myth based on Billy Moyers’ interviews with Joseph Campbell, I read:
Campbell: “The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our own lives.”
Moyers: “Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans?”
Campbell: “It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today.….”
Steve weeps when listening to Mahler. And “Puff the Magic Dragon”. Slipping into his cave, searching for that place to root and grow, he feels the poignant essence of life, the crescendo and decrescendo, and resists exerting his will against the flow. I think that I have a different sensibility. Maybe not so expansive, maybe more interior and visceral. I identify with a lonely pocket of silence for rooting and growing…the womb. I feel womb-love, the ache, the swoon, the exchange of life blood. I see colors inside my eyelids, sunshine through membrane, the tragedy and ecstasy and doom of flesh. Okay, I am in the grip of my biology this week, so this makes a lot of sense. I have given birth four times and dream of my grown up children regularly. The story that trips my tear ducts is “Homeward Bound”, anything with a reunion. The deeper story for me has something to do with connection. Maybe that’s the Gaia story. I think she’s like Jesus and Buddha in that she also embraces all of life without struggling or striving, but in her own way. Perhaps I feel more in my Sacral Chakra, Steve in his Heart Chakra.
The deeper story of being human is told from inside this skin. It is not the only story in the universe, however. There is the elephant’s story, the asteroid’s story, more stories than we can imagine. I would hope to know many more, and to weep at all of them.
Zeal for Thy House
We watched another installment of Simon Schama’s “Power of Art”; this one was on Van Gogh. I didn’t know that he attempted a career as a missionary and was released for his “over-zealousness”. That zeal, that fervor exploded in color and paint a few years later. Perhaps the misfiring of his neurological circuits added to the visions he experienced, but that doesn’t make them any less real, does it? For the film, an actor portrays him eating an entire tube of chrome yellow. It is an intensely sensuous clip. It makes me want to feel the passion myself, love and zeal and lust in an explosion of warm color and bright hope. I wish I had art sliding around like finger paint beneath my skin.
Making chocolate truffles with my daughter; good gooey creativity
I feel the need to make something. It’s going to end up being a pot of chili and some yeasty corn bread from scratch. I wish I had some clay or acrylics lying around to play with, but I suppose it’s just as well I don’t. I’d feel bad about wasting expensive materials just for the tactile exploration. Still, I feel a tension within me longing for creative release. Perhaps that’s because I haven’t been singing regularly for a while, or playing the piano. I miss getting caught up in the joy of expression. Do you suppose that our society suffers from creative repression on a massive scale? With all the technology we have to take creativity out of our hands, are we fueling a psychotic collapse? What if we staged a revolutionary return to physical creativity, set up mud pie and garden therapy stations, bread dough and needlework, improvisational dance and percussion…would we see a decline in depression, suicide and domestic violence?
My fingertips get a mild work out typing every day, but it doesn’t feel like enough. I used to do 8 hours of typing, telephoning, and staring at a screen in a cubicle every day. It got very old. I’m lucky to be done with that. I hope that we don’t press people into that kind of thing more exclusively as our society “progresses”. It seems pretty soul-killing. I’d like to set them all free in a wheat field with a box of squishy colors and a canvas and let them stay out all day until the sun sets. Then invite them to share a bottle of wine with me, some good crusty bread, and listen to them describe their experiences while they show me their work. I want to hear their zeal and watch it float free into the world…with mine.
scillagrace 