I Go to the Museum

My mother was a dedicated advocate for all manner of art and culture for her children. Devoted to music, she faithfully took us to the Chattanooga Symphony Children’s Concerts, where we fidgeted through various classical works. Sometimes these concerts were enlivened by visual aids, as when a cartoonist improvised sketches for works such as Peter and the Wolf, one of the more child-friendly performances.

My mother took me at around eleven years old to the recently opened Hunter Museum, on the bluff overlooking the Tennessee River. I might not have enjoyed wandering through room after room of mostly 19th century American art, but my mother was crafty.  She chose a week when a traveling exhibit of the inventions of

A Leonardo drawing

Leonardo da Vinci was on display. This was my first introduction to the breadth of Leonardo’s interests, which encompassed not only painting – I had encountered the Mona Lisa in school art class – but sculpture, drawing and inventing a bewildering variety of devices from war machines to mechanical wonders such as a helicopter, and a flying machine with man-powered wings. Most of these inventions were never completed and tested, but the exhibit featured a number of models made to assist the visualization of their complexity.

A model of a helicopter

I loved the displays, and especially the drawings, with Leonardo’s unique mirror writing, which made his left-handedness less of a problem for him.

I have spent adult time in the Hunter as well, once I grew older, but that day will always be special for me, and another reason to value my mother and the time she invested in my education. She sincerely believed that education should not be confined to school and my teachers. I am blessed with her memory.

I must also mention, however, that one memory of that visit to the Hunter is not quite as elevated in tone. At some point, Mother allowed me to explore by myself as she investigated exhibits not to my taste. I had seen one sculpture attracting my eleven-year-old, ah, baser interests. A life-size sculpture of a nude young woman, no doubt with great artistic value, but I was attracted by…other attributes. Heh. I don’t think my mother knew of my little private viewing. I certainly never mentioned it.

Exhibit at the Hunter

Exhibition at the Hunter

Five Objects with light right

Here in Chattanooga, a new traveling exhibit opened a week ago. Titled Object Project, works by 15 artists are exhibited, all with an assigned five objects to be included in one or two works (depending on the size) by each artist. My favorite is this one, by Daniel Sprick, called simply, “object project.” Mr. Sprick already has one work in the Hunter’s permanent collection, titled “Summer Solstice” which I very much like, also.

All of the works are interesting and sometimes very good. I have been back twice, once with my beloved Babs, and she also likes the works very much.

One she especially likes is by Scott Fraser, entitled, Three-Way Vanitas, seen at right. I also like this one very much, with its many angles of mirrored images. I like repeated images and mirrors.

After January 12, 2009, when it leaves the Hunter, the Object Project exhibit travels to Englewood, Colorado, to the Museum of Outdoor Art. It is worthwhile to visit, should you be there after February 20, 2009.

Urban Explorer Meets Iraq Blogger

In the summer of 2004, a blog began appearing online maintained by a soldier in Iraq. There were plenty of these “Milblogs” as they were called, but Colby Buzzell’s blog, My War (originally Fear and Loathing in Iraq), was exceptionally vivid and gave a sense of what a grunt’s life in Iraq was like. Buzzell’s writing was noticed and eventually he turned his blog into a book once he was out of the military and back home. Now he writes pieces for Esquire and occasionally other magazines.

In December of this past year, he did a piece for Esquire on an “Urban Explorer,” Miru Kim, who takes photographs of nudes (mostly herself) in the back spaces of New York City and other places. Kim favors abandoned buildings, tunnels, odd examples of outworn architecture. Rather like going on an urban safari, complete with spooky dark places, and encounters with strange people dwelling in the low and abandoned spaces of urban landscapes. The soft lines and textures of the nudes contrast with the sharp, pocked and shadowy cityscapes used as backdrops.

I had encountered the term “urban explorer” several years ago on a Live Journal page maintained by Cherie Priest, an author of horror and supernatural fiction, former Chattanoogan now living in Seattle. Priest went around the aging industrial areas of Chattanooga snapping photographs and posting them on her Flickr account. She does not do nudes for her photographs, however. Priest now displays her work on her blog page. Interesting stuff. I like her books, as well.

I also like the intersection of so many interests new and old I find whilst surfing the internet. From a former blogger to a magazine writer, to an artist in urban photographs, to an author of books in a genre I rarely read. Makes for late nights and poor posture, but a shot or two of Bushmill’s helps with those minor problems.

Winter Light

Sitting in a bar tonight, as the daylight savings sunset lingered, compared to last week, I practiced my favorite occupation when bar visits yield no conversation. I watched people. One apparent family of three, middle-aged father and mother with their twenty-something daughter, especially caught my eye.

I was looking out the wide front window of the bar as the family got out of their SUV across the street, father on one side of the vehicle, wife and daughter on the other side. They preserved their separation as they crossed the street, the father with inward, serious self-absorption, the two women both with downcast eyes, arms tightly crossed beneath their breasts. The shadows were lengthening as they approached the sidewalk in front of the bar. Still separated by the gap between driver and passengers, as they neared the bar the father was cropped out of the frame of the bar window. The two women turned towards the door, then the man followed into the frame, and reached to hold the door for his family.

They entered the bar, and sat at a window table on high stools, the father and mother on one side, the daughter on the other. They were handsome people, all of them, lean, well-groomed and dressed in LL Bean casual clothes. The father had mildly long hair, mostly silver, swept back across his ears. The two women had highlighted medium blond hair, pulled back and gathered at the napes of their necks.

They gave their orders to their server, and exchanged desultory conversation, still a bit apart from one another. The late daylight savings sun streamed across their finely boned faces, weathered in the case of the older couple, still softly contoured for the young woman.

Something about the crisp, cold light from a low winter angle reminded me of the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Regardless of the season, Wyeth’s paintings always make me think of winter. Something about the light, and the subdued colors combined with sharp contrasts in light and shadow.

I wondered about their lives, about their reason for going together to a bar which largely attracts young people, singles and couples. I wondered about their reticence with each other. I came up with no answers, any more than I do looking at a Wyeth painting; there are only questions.

Father’s Day

There are a number of good poems, and other literary evocations of matters concerning fathers, but few works of painted or sculpted or drawn art on that same subject.

All I could think of offhand regarding works specifically on fathers were Goya’s work “Cronus Devouring his Children” and the classical statuary, “Laocoön and his Sons,” in which Laocoön and his sons are strangled with sea snakes. Not quite the thing, either of them, for Father’s Day.

I liked the image below, courtesy of Google, “Father Sky and Mother Earth,” a Navajo sand painting.

Now that I look at the painting, and think of the title, a little word riff forms, and I think “My father is full of stars.” Good line for a poem. Thank you, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. I shall have to work up something using that line.

Stay tuned.

Bloomsday

Today is the 103rd anniversary of the day James Joyce took his future wife, Nora, walking out in Dublin, Ireland. June 16 is also the day the actions and thoughts and images of Joyce’s novel Ulysses take place.

This poster, by Barrie Maguire, superimposes on an image of James Joyce a hand-written few lines from the beginning of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The lines are below:

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moo-cow coming down along the road and this moo-cow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo … “

I like the way the coloring of the letters changes as the background changes. The portrait of the artist including some of the words he spent his life creating is also pleasing. Seems fitting on Bloomsday, although the words are from a different work than Ulysses.

Shared Space by Toby Penney

Shared Space by Toby Penney

Toby Penney is a former Chattanoogan who juggled school, her art and part-time work at a bar we frequented for several years. Toby had a couple of shows while still in town, and my beloved bought a painting from her. We both liked her work then, and through many evolutions of her style and techniques we continue to find much to like. Toby changes selections on her web page frequently. The painting below is on her opening index page right now.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Here is a painting I encountered because of a poem, W. H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, which uses the painting as a launching point for a considerable work about the indifference of humanity to individual suffering – or not; poetry is ambiguous if it is good.

Rendering the classical legend of Icarus flying too close to the sun into a sixteenth century landscape, Brueghel places the fallen Icarus in the lower right-hand corner of the painting, only his legs visible above the water into which he is sinking. Around this individual tragedy, daily life goes on for the people of the harbor town and surrounding fields.

Because of the crowded detail of this painting, I have linked the thumbnail on the left to a larger image, accessible by clicking on the smaller one. The closing lines of Auden’s poem stay with me as I look at this painting:

…the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Epitaph for the urge to overreach.

On Seeing Art

Note: I posted this the other day on my home page, but I would like to preserve it here. What little knowledge and appreciation I have of art started with the experience described below:

Long ago, when I was 23 and in Washington, D.C. on a business training session, I wandered throught the museums on the Mall, lost in the profusion of objects, inventions, nature exhibits and above all, the paintings in the National Gallery.

I was not schooled in art at all beyond pasting into paper albums small prints of Famous Paintings during brief sessions in elementary school. I was overwhelmed by the number of paintings and sculptures, so many by artists whose names were famous even to me. Sensory overload set in, and I blundered from painting to painting, the colors and figures blurring. Then, as I walked down a long hallway I passed a doorway and glanced through it. I stopped. Framed in the doorway was a full-length painting on the opposite wall. A dark-haired young woman stood looking out from the painting, her long white dress set against a white hanging behind her. Few other colors were in the painting. It was Whistler’s “Girl in white,” titled by the artist as “Symphony in White No. 1.” I walked into the room and stood there looking at the painting. I remained there for quite a while. I walked closer to the painting and noticed that the dress and the backdrop were actually a multitude of colors applied in such a way that they were the separate notes and themes of Whistler’s symphony in white. I was hooked for life. I have seen other paintings, many that I enjoyed, but the Girl in White remains my favorite. I don’t know why, other than the work supplied a point of focus and understanding that day. The Girl saved me from a meaningless stumble through overwhelming numbers of paintings. I have returned to Washington on different errands over the years, and hope to again. Regardless of what reason brings me, the National Gallery will see me at least once, and I will seek out my art touchstone.

I have read much commentary on the Girl since then, but nothing touches my feelings and understanding as did that fortuitous glance through a doorway I almost passed. Thank you, James McNeil Whistler.

The Tyger’s Furnace

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp:

Blake’s mighty lines questioning the creation of the Tyger’s brain have
been rattling around lately in my own somewhat less cosmic
cerebellum. Specifically, what makes a creative person, not just a
person with talent in one or two fields of creativity, but one consumed
with their expression in words, music or the physical arts? An artist, in
short, springs from what influence or cluster of physical and
psychological factors; what hammer, what chain, what anvil provides
the workshop for creative sensibility to the point of that sensibility
controlling the artist’s life completely?