a multidisciplinary dialog
Pursuing my two favorite motifs, water and the anatomy of movement, I started making composites, extracting from one image and pasting onto another.
Showing the first version of this composite to a mentor, he questioned me about shadows.
June’s post led to a discussion of vertical lines. Three pictures are shown here that show not only vertical lines but also put them either at the center of a picture or where they frame a path in the center of the picture:
(1) In the 19th century, Pierre Etienne Theodore Rousseau put a road lined by trees pretty much into the center of his painting ‘Village of Becquigny”.
Last week, Dave Caldwell published a picture of the Appalachian Trail in the NYT with a similar composition.
A photo by Seth Kugel, also last week in the NYT, makes the same point, vertical lines pretty much at the center of the scene!
Has Rousseau’s point of view - centered vertical lines - caught on 2 centuries later? What has happened to the convention of putting objects of interest discreetly at some ‘third’ aspect of the picture?
A Francis Bacon, according to an ad from Artprice in ft.com on March 31, 2008, fetches more money than a Rothko.
Here is a Bacon entitled Study from the human body
Contemporary artists also paint human anatomy. David Palmer paints human subjects engaged in movement. Jacob Collins paints human subjects more traditionally as stationary form.
A New York City dance group, the Ailey II dancers, enjoy popularity.
Body culture is rampant in the U.S. No longer just aimed at fitness, it advocates mindful movement. Amazon.com offers books such as
Is there a renewed interest in the HUMAN FORM? Will such painted human form express functional anatomy, mindful or any other kind of movement?
Please help characterizing the genius of Henri Matisse’s painting from 1910.
Le Géranium made news because of its high price at a Sotheby’s auction on May 7, 2008.
Saving my screenshot as ‘for Web and Devices’ made the colors more brilliant. Has anyone seen the original? How bright are the colors?
Low tide uncovers mud flats with their extant waterways, the so-called ‘Priele’ at the Nationalpark Wattenmeer, Wilhelmshaven, Germany. ‘Priel’ may be related to ‘Prill’
a word in English brought over from the Watternmeer .. together with other words reminiscent of some landscape of ooze and sandbanks with marshy regions behind (Some Etymologies).
Courtship in mudflats involves:
Mud Swimming
This horse is the earliest painting by Karl that I treasure. The cheap acid paper has darkened with time. The purple/maroon colors have faded. Time to archive the horse as a digital print. Taking the frame apart for the removal of the glass, I noticed that the paints were absorbed on the foam board backing so that I now the original painting plus a print of it.
Was the hand of the small child directed by something bigger than himself to paint the lines of the horse’s head given his tender age? The lines makes me think of Zen. Continue reading a child’s horse
‘The right aspect of a web page has a stronger impact on our mind than the left aspect’ is a notion adopted by the advertising world, as I recently learned from one of Steve’s comments.This made me look at the real estate on the web.
For safety, I recently switched to gmail because I lost all my archived email from my apple mail box after innocently agreeing to update the mail box.
Let us look at one of my gmail threads:
Who are some of the role models in NYC? Continue reading Where to go?
as we are told in yesterday’s headline of the Columbia Daily Spectator reporting on the opening of an HBO documentary reminding us of the long gestation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Saffron Gates in Central Park, New York City?
Or does Saffron spell enthusiasm? Here is my snapshot of Saffron cloth billowing in the wind on a snow-free day, February 2005.
After musing for decade or so on how to capture this solitary stand of cottonwoods growing on a ridge in the dunes, the challenge was met through dérive or drifting.
Continue reading dérive = drifting
Personal psychogeography (see previous post) has provided food for thoughts for many days to come. Listening to Will Self’s lecture on this subject, I enjoyed the image of a busy novelist who, intellectually, made the decision to allow ‘drift’ into his own life. He explained that he used to live in ‘microenvironments’ consisting of the city of London and, on his book tours, the hotels that he was transported into by airplanes and taxis. To appreciate more of his surroundings, he now walks from airports to hotels or takes buses.
I, too, find it more enjoyable to take a bus from La Guardia airport through the streets of Queens to Manhattan. Part of my enjoyment is watching the ethnicity of people boarding or leaving the bus in the different neighborhoods. Psychogeography accompanied by anthropology, an interest in the lives of people?
First of all, a common thread in my personal psychogeography has been Water. Having grown up in a small town at the North Sea, I often jogged with my dog along a bay in the ocean.
