Dallas Arboretum

I feel better when...

This was what I had for lunch today:

If you're wondering if that cheese says Tillamook I will tell you that it does.  I couldn't resist it....I was in heaven this afternoon....life couldn't have been better.  And in that cup you see there is a delicious banana smoothy.  A most blissful concoction inspired by Brasil.  1+1= a very happy me!

  

(i love cheese)

 

 

Bye Bamboo

My bamboo died.  I didn't think it was so sad till I realized I've left it out...dead, black, and dried up.  I can't throw it away....that's when I realized that I am sad my bamboo is dead.  I've had this bamboo for YEARS (at least 8).  Bamboo, in my opinion, is the coolest plant.  I love all things green.  I will always have a plant if not plants in my home, but bamboo combines so elegantly aesthetics with plant-ness.  It's a living art and it's so pretty.  Throw in a cool pot and you've got the greatest thing in your very possession.

This plant traveled with me from CO to ID for school and then back to CO where my parents loving cared for it while I was in Brazil.  Then it came with me to UT and we lived happily for 3 years before it joined me on my long haul to TX.  Now, my bamboo did not like to travel.....and there were probably a couple of times that I was a bit neglectful, but it always pulled through.  (well......except for that one time that I had to do a photo project from all scanned objects up in ID and I thought it would be a good idea to scan my bamboo....I don't know.  I lost one then and the trio became a duo, but these 2 were fighters.)  Every time I noticed my neglect or they underwent a move all I had to do was give them a little therapy (extra love and classical music if you'd like a tip) and they would perk right back up.  Now that's something.

We both were adjusting fine to TX when I left it for a month.  I had to leave rather suddenly and in the rush I forgot to arrange for it to be taken care of.  When I got back I had never seen it look so bad!  It was bad.  I did some major therapy...and was hopeful.  I was expectant more than anything...it had never done anything but perk back up.  But then instead of turning greener it turned black.  No amount of classical music can turn that around....oh, my bamboo.......

Winter

I feel pleased as a plum about what has happened in TX the past 2 days....

 The county was on a "severe weather alert" all day....made me smile.  (To their credit it was a record snowfall.)

gain, get, grasp...master

Bluestocking: a woman with considerable scholarly, literary, or intellectual ability or interest.  

Interest?....check.

I'm working on ability part.

I got excited when these were the books I got to check out for my history paper....such delicious looking books aren't they?  Yes, luckily I think the content is delicious as well....but just look them!  Oh, I love graduate school.

BOO TO YOU!

One of the reasons I love the Fall so much is because of Halloween!  Yesterday was the first day of October and as thus it was the first day I could put up my decorations.  Do you find my pumpkin menacing?

Happy Autumn

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." ~George Eliot

I bought myself a bouquet of pumpkins to remind myself that it's Fall. Who knew you could even buy bouquets of pumpkins! I was thrilled to my core...I love this time of year.

Polaroid Lifts

For those of you not aware what a Polaroid lift is: There are various kinds of Polaroid, not only the kind that were popular back in the 80's that you shake until the image shows up. Though the idea is the same, the image is instantaneous. You can actually go through a process where you boil the picture and then lift the emulsion off and you can put it anywhere. I composed these series out of my lifts. It's like peeling off dried rubber cement and trying to keep it intact....it was a blast. One of my favorite projects. The originals are hanging in my home (I scanned them into the computer so I could share the with you). That is the special thing about Polaroids, they are 100% non-duplicable. Each image is an original. I would love to create tender nostalgic art pieces like these for people of the things that remind them of their loved ones.

Storms Never Last

When I was a child I was frustrated every time a storm ended. Perhaps because in CO there are an estimated 300 days of sun (the most in the US, by the way) meaning that whatever bad weather was happening that day was almost guaranteed to also end that day.

I would revel in the storms, especially rain with lightening and thunder. They were exhilarating to me. The colors they created were inspiring and refreshing. And the excitement that came with knowing something bigger than me was happening would envelope my whole self. I loved it. And it was always annoyingly short-lived.

Now, at the risk of being too personal without getting too personal I recently went through my own personal storm. This storm did not have the same affect on me as the thunderstorms of childhood. It actually created a lot of fear in my life and was not until much turmoil, extensive pondering, and needed action that it brought about its own kind of exhilaration and awe inspiring affect. I'll share what I learned from it in a minute, but the storm did pass. Though it was annoyingly long-lived.

I recently moved to TX and quickly learned that thunderstorms here are not like ones I'm used to. I have never seen such lightening. I have never heard such cracking. It leaves one longing for the echoed gift of thunder that is only offered to those miles from where the strike itself is fiercely whipped. Honestly, it's a little scary. Luckily the sky-wrenching crack occurs between bouts of thunder and the storms themselves are short-lived. Minutes sometimes even. The rain tonight came down in pelts and the interspersed flashes could be seen incessantly from inside blinded windows. But as soon as I thought I had finally reached a point of comfort with the storm so much as to not notice it anymore I realized the comfort was because it ended. I had a friend want get up and leave where we were to go and play in the storm. I laughed, I thought that was charmingly frivolous. And I remembered how I felt during my childhood storms. Of course, adult responsibility trumped or perhaps fear of social norms and this friend of mine did not leave to go play in the storm. It passed before we even had to leave the building only to resume a few hours later.

I was home alone when I suddenly heard the water dripping so loud I thought we had a pipe burst in our house. It was the rain come back full force. I think the combination of earlier being reminded of my childhood love for storms as well as the romanticized laissez-faire attitude portrayed in the movie I was watching is what caused me to want to explore this storm. I realized that part of my fear was my lack of experience, my fear of the unknown. I wanted to face it. (At first I wanted to photograph it. Then I remembered the pelting rain and so gingerly returned my unprotected electronic piece of equipment to the apartment.) I wanted to step outside and watch the lightening. Then I saw that my porch was no cover for the sweeping shower. I stepped out into it to see if I could see any of the lightening. I loved the heavy drops falling all around me. Two drops would have been enough to make me feel wet due to their expansive splats. It took seconds for me to get duly sopped. I was having fun. There were a few flashes that illuminated the whole sky defining what seemed to be one mammoth cloud as voluminous layers. Though, before I could become soused I saw that strike of lightening with the immediate crack from its whip and it sent me bounding back indoors. Yet, keeping in Texan tradition the storm shortly passed.

Storms never last.

One of my favorite quotes happens to be a scripture in the Bible, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. . ." (2Tim4:6)

It is for that reason I will face the unknown, embrace change, and continue moving whether the storm is enchanting or terrifying, short-lived or long-lived. After all, storms never last.





The following is a photograph I took that is completely unrelated to this post. It is of my favorite trees.....aspens.

Rothkoesque

Squaw Peak

We had a lovely hike up to Squaw Peak. We left at 6am and it was stormy moody weather...such a dream.

















The Crew

Some thoughts about some Art

I often feel like art is misunderstood and it makes me a little sad. My art history classes were some of my favorites. It was so enlightening to learn what happened behind the scenes of great artists and art pieces. Knowing the history and the evolution of ideas considerably helped me to appreciate even the commonly (or perhaps especially) misunderstood pieces of art; for example, the ones that look like your 6 year old brother could've done that (admit it, you've thought it). I'm just going to highlight some of my favorite little tid bits that have encouraged and aided my understanding/appreciation/love of art all the more.

1. Realism: obviously a movement all about depicting what was real. Artists were done being dictated by the high and mighty and started to show all the itty gritty details of real life for the majority of people. They were the demonstrators of the labor-intensive, sorrow-ridden, religiously-devoted lives of the average person. Below is an example by Gustave Courbet titled Burial at Ornans (1850).

2. Impressionism was a movement in contrast with Realism. Claude Monet is perhaps one of the most commonly known impressionists. You might know him best for his paintings of gardens such as :

His Cathedral Series is also worth note:

Here's why it's worth note.

(I don't know how many of these he did but I don't think I'd be wrong to assume that there are more than these) I find these images fascinating not only because to me they are beautiful but also because for Monet it was a scientific study. Interesting. Never before when I had looked at and appreciated Impressionism did I ever think it was scientific or concerned in the slightest with reality. It seemed to be about, well, impressions - feelings and thoughts - more so than reality. However, it is my understanding that Monet when he looked at the Rouen Cathedral he didn't see the Cathedral but rather saw light, shadow, and colors all of which were constantly changing. Impressionism was just as concerned about reality as Realism, only its primary emphasis or concern was with visual reality - the fact that shadows are not black but rather purple and blue and green. Impressionism was not concerned with the object but with what was happening to the object such as the way it receives/responds to light. This is what Monet did. He studied the Rouen Cathedral until it wasn't about the Cathedral anymore....the object disappeared and light and color were revealed.

3. Cubism ensued Impressionism and adopted with it a similar take to this idea of breaking down an object until it is not about the object. Cubism is also actually very scientific. Georges Braque's The Portuguese (1911) is a wonderful example of this. (You thought I was going to mention Picasso here didn't you...)

This is an image of a Portuguese guitar player. Cubism is all about flatness. However, this flatness is combined with perspective. As you move around a 3-d object your perspective of it changes. Cubists merely put all these perspectives together on one flat plane. This piece of Braque's is an interpretation of his theory of reality....Isn't this how we perceive experiences, ideas, objects, and others...all of our perspectives superimposed to comprise our reality? Just a thought.

4. Have you seen Duchamp's Fountain (1917)?

Yup. Marcel Duchamp was actually scoffing at the god-like perspective artists were having about art.....mostly that anything an artist says is art is therefore art. He entered this piece into a show under the name of R. Mutt (basically a nobody) to surface the much needed discussion that is unresolved today of who gets to say what is art. I just think it's great that he knew it was ridiculous and was essentially calling them all yahoos. Regardless, it has become a huge art icon and I think with reason.















5. Artists started to use the new ways in cubism of portraying reality to convey their ideas and agendas. For example, Ernst Barlach's sculpture titled War Monument (1927).

With this - a lingering deadman somewhere between life and death - he is making a statement about the unresolved state of things that existed after the war.

6. Then Surrealism. A creation of the subconscious, a disconnection from reality. Salvador Dali is a good example. The Persistence of Memory (1931). Honestly not my favorite movement and I don't know if it merits to be among my tid bits but it did play a role in modernism and post-modernism which are movements I find endlessly interesting....hence why it's among my tid bits.

On to Modernism. It shouldn't be hard from here to see where we get works like Warhol and Pollock. Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (1914) shows how all the previous ideas have been built upon each other: the flat perspective combined with the conveying of a message combined with the subconscious...

I can't remember what it was about Marxism and Communism that he is trying to say here but you are looking at an airplane from 6 different views. All are the same rectangle. This was a religious piece for him, again I can't remember why, but it was very utopian because it deals with pure color and pure shape. It is easy from here to see how the following developed.

This was done by Piet Mondrian (1930) and is called Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow. For him true beauty was in perfect form and primary colors. This was a piece of purity.

The main values were simply shape, composition, and color. This became narrow and dictated among the artists to the point of exclusivity. Greenberg even declared that they had achieved their goal of Modernism.....flatness. This he probably shouldn't have said. This unintentionally declared that art had no where else to go and the purpose was closed.

7. Post-Modernism rebelled! Other artists revolted against the hegemony and declared that meaning, wholeness, ideas themselves are more important! One of my favorite pieces is by Joseph Kosuth titled One and Three Chairs (1965).

You see he asks the question of which is real? Is it the actual construction of the chair? Is it the photograph of the chair? Is it the dictionary definition of the chair that makes the the construction mean it is a chair? What is a chair? Mind you, this is a discussion that has gone on since the ancient greeks....I could see how something like this could be seen as elitist as in to suggest that one must be deep and say meaningful things and wear black to be real and truly alive. Or it could also be a way to remind large quantities of people of some good or interesting or thought provoking ideas.

Another reason I like Post-Modernism is because the process started to become significant. The how an artist arrived at the end was just as important as the end product. I agree with this. Even with paintings, pictures, sculptures, whatever the piece...I think the process is important and therefore the artist is....who they are what they believe and what they think all matter because it all contributes to the art piece...or can.

If you have any thoughts, ideas, contributions, corrections I'd love to discuss whether via blog or face...