Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Third Phase

The Undiscover’d Country

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Spring                                                                          Bloodroot Moon

At times my past bleeds into the present, creating small emotional events, upsetting my inner equilibrium.  Right now is one of those times.  Many of us are heir to understandings of ourselves as malformed in some way, not quite right.  I certainly am.

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti    Hamlet and Ophelia 1858 pen and ink drawing)

These irruptions come in the OMG I’m not doing enough form or OMG I have not done enough or OMG I’ll never do enough forms.  My anxious self underlines and bolds these self-declarations as my mind races back to find the not enoughs in the past–no graduate school, no published books, never made it to Washington, the not enoughs in the present–Missing not revised, Loki’s Children not started, no time for serious in-depth reading, not helping out enough at home or making enough time for friends and then uses both of these information streams to predict a dire future:  no books published ever, no friends, no concrete results of any kind, then, wink out.

If this line of thought continues, I’m going to have to visit my analyst, John Desteian.  In touch with him (and, now, Kate) I’ve been able to dispel these strong phantoms, learn to live with facts not illusion and get on with what is a good life.  This is, I think, as much due to faulty wiring as anything else, my family coming with a strong genetic pattern for bipolar disorder, though I don’t believe my issues rise to that level of dysfunction.  I know, not enough even there, eh?

Not long ago I re-read Hamlet’s speech in Scene I, a scene I had memorized long ago for a dramatic presentation contest.  It’s baldly existential view surprised me, even shocked me. A line from it came to me as I woke up this morning and it captures my feeling tone right now:   “…the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”  This exactly describes me when I get into these episodes.

In the lines just before this one Shakespeare refers to death as the undiscover’d country from which no traveler returns and identifies the dread of that journey as producing the pale cast of thought, thus rendering a person unable to act.  To be or not to be neatly summarizes all this.

 

Art and Culture, Humanities, Third Phase

Vacated. Returned.

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Spring                                                                        Bloodroot Moon

Vacated, now returned, back in my regular work space.  Feels good. 11th and E street, the Hotel Harrington and the Penn Quarter coalescing into memory.  I doubt I’ll ever travel for a particular art exhibition again, though I’m glad I went this time.

Why?  Crowds.  I like quiet time with art, non jostling, personal time.  Time to dig in and look, really look and not feel like I need to give someone else their turn.  Then, too, I like time in between, away from the art, then going back, looking again.  These big shows actively work against close encounters.  I know this from my work with the Louvre, Rembrandt, Terracotta Warriors.

(Lady of Shallot, William Holman Hunt)

The trip did accomplish its purpose.  Remember my OMG am I doing enough entry a couple of days ago?  My purpose was to get a sense of how my life with art might unfold after I leave the MIA for good.  I see it now, at least a place to start.  It means a study program over several years in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the whole Modern(-ism)(-ity)(post-) bundle with the occasional excursion into the history of science and perhaps fin de siecle Europe, all with the intention of integrating my interest in the pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, Symbolists into the larger movements of cultural forces over the Modern and pre-Modern era.  Ambitious?  Yes, but what’s life for?

The trip accomplished a second, unintended purpose, too.  I gotta go on vacation with no purpose at all.  That’s next.

Right now it’s back to revising Missing and reviewing my Latin for Friday.

 

Aging, Art and Culture, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Travel

And Now, Reverse Field and Head Home

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Spring                                                          Bloodroot Moon

Everything’s rolled up and in the bag, ready to check out, then board the metro for Reagan International.

This was a trip where I had to confront some unpleasant truths about traveling.  For me.  My physical stamina, which I rate as pretty good, is still less than it was.  And that matters for my planning.

Also, not new, but apparent during this trip, too, was the easy slide into OMG, what am I doing?  This is a neurotic pattern that I recognize, having largely learned to slip its bonds, but in a foreign place, separated from my regular routine, wife, friends, dogs it can and does easily return.

On the up side I have learned that my new interaction with art will include embedding art history within the larger history of ideas, letting these two large disciplines bump into each other, suggest questions and directions for each other.  One place I know these streams will converge is in Reimagining Faith.

There is, too, a renewed interest in early American history, especially the Revolutionary war period and its immediate aftermath.  Not sure how strong this is, though it did occur to me that it might be a good journey to take with our Western raised grandkids.

(Hotel fire stairs.  1910 vintage)

There is, as well, a definite sense of my own regional identity, an Upper Midwesterner, and the way that identity differs from and could inform the culture of national policy.  This is an odd phenomena since I feel very much a man of the North, of the continent more than the country; yet I feel more and more like a citizen of the planet, also more than the country.  Whether this is a personal experience or a more broadly shared one interests me.

Specifically I wonder if the internet intensifies globalization of perspective while reinforcing local identity.  I wonder if think global, act local and the whole locavore movement might feed this pattern, too, making the local the touchstone not for national identity, but for Terran identity.

 

Art and Culture, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

the wall

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Spring                                                          Bloodroot Moon

Hit the museum wall today.  No, not neuromuscular, psychic.  Standing, moving from painting to painting, trying to follow the multiple threads in my own inner discourse.  Plus.  Muscle fatigue from yesterday’s long walk, much of it on concrete.

Together, they moved me out of the galleries and onto Constitution Avenue.  Which, I learned yesterday, is a covered canal from an original scheme to move goods throughout the capitol by barge.  The railroad did it in, the canals lost money, a lot of money, and so, they filled them back up.  What Schumpeter would call creative destruction.  Me, just destruction.

(Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810)

A Durer show opened today, too.  Lots of people.  His work demands such close looking that the crowds made it unfruitful.  I imagine they will calm down in the coming weeks.

In looking back over the questions I wrote down here a few days ago my main interests have popped into clear relief.  I’m interested in the history of ideas from the Renaissance on through today, in particular the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Modernism, Post-Modernity.  Painting styles interact with these broader philosophical and cultural trends, but in complex ways.

As I move forward in my work with art, I plan to make my history of ideas interests a more central part of my art historical research.  Without going into it at any length I find direct correlations between, say, Romanticism, and my project on Reimagining Faith.  That realization can trigger art historical research.  There are, too, issues of economics and politics at play.

(The-Bard-1774-by-Welsh-artist-Thomas-Jones)

This may be why the museum work had begun to move too slowly for me.  It wasn’t addressing a broad enough range of my interests.  It wasn’t the museum; it was me.

 

 

 

Art and Culture

Looking at art pre-Raphael

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Spring                                                                       Bloodroot Moon

After I had lunch in the Cafe Britannia, a theme cafeteria featuring British food, I decided rather than go back through the pre-Raphaelite show today, I would go to the early Italian painting, pre-Renaissance, and follow through to Raphael, see as much as I could that was, in fact, pre-Raphael.

It was worthwhile but first let me tell you a problem with this approach. In the National Gallery there are many fine pre-Raphael paintings, including works by Fra Lippi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli and DaVinci.  The PRB, at least in their formative years, did not travel to Italy, nor were there many good examples of pre-Raphael paintings in England.]

There were a few, but not the profusion you find even here in Washington.  Instead much of their influence came through prints and drawings, the effect being especially strong in the PRB line and, I think, in their closely observed plant life.

Having said that, I was struck by the correlation between many of the fine pre-Raphael paintings, especially of the High Renaissance, that did suggest the direction taken by the PRB.  Bright colors, realism, religious and mythic subject matter.  All there.

Did the later centuries give way to sfumato (a smoky, shadowy look) as the PRB contended?  Yes, in many ways they did, but not in all.

Here’s a Grunewald, for example: 

 

And he’s not the only one working in intense, even tortured realism or fantasy created through realism like the Arcimboldo I posted earlier for Kate.  Bosch is another.

On the whole though I did agree with the critique of the PRB, that painting had gotten murkier.  Now there’s a whole raft of perfectly good Baroque and Mannerists works by no less artists than Rembrandt and El Greco.  But when you’re trolling for missed opportunities you don’t find the excellence in the past you seek its defects.

I’m glad the PRB did.  We now have the wonderful works between Raphael and their revolution and the works of these radicals, bright and interesting, real, present.  Not long after the PRB had run its course, maybe the turn of the century or just after, the  Nabi, the Fauves, the expressionists and the post-impressionists came onto gallery walls followed not long after by modernism in all its mutations starting with abstraction and abstract expressionism.  It’s been a wild, wild ride since then and one that’s not over, not even now in the next millennium.

Art and Culture, Sport, Travel, US History

The Contenda

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Spring                                                       Bloodroot Moon

First day, tired.  Ate.  Walked.  Got too chilly.  25 mph winds and 37 degree temps.  Came back to the Harrington after getting a sight of the US Capitol, white and domed at the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

When I began to scout D.C. on the web, I got on a Washington Post website that featured restaurant critiques.  It wasn’t the restaurants that caught my eye though, it was a helpful graphic the Post staff had created to help you find “the homicides in your neighborhood.”

That night I didn’t click through since I didn’t have a neighborhood, so imagine my surprise as I sat in Harriet’s, the Harrington’s restaurant and saw, on the now cliched plasma screen, “Murder by the Whitehouse.”  Sure enough, within two blocks of the restaurant and hotel somebody had shot a football player and killed him.

The Whitehouse is only a hop, skip and a drive-by from here.

Whitehouse, in fact, is the Harrington’s passcode for its wi-fi.  A  natural.

Too weary to do sight-seeing with a wind-chill I went back to my quiet room, wondering what was happening on floors 2 thru 9, and flicked through the channels, reconfirming our decision to cancel our Comcast TV.

But.  I did find a middle weight boxing match, a world championship in the WBA between Macklin, the contenda, and Felix Sturm, the champ. I haven’t watched boxing since they were sponsored by Gillette Razors and that was in the fifties, but I watched this one.

No knock-out punches, but a lot of gamy attacking by the contenda and a lot of backing up by the champ.  There was blood, some.  Shots of faces crushed by left and right hand jabs.  Uppercuts.  The occasional clinch, but mostly strategic holding up of gloves followed by flurries of punches.  Boxing seems almost quaint with mixed martial arts, Ultimate Fighting, now enjoying popularity.

The bout had a Hemingwayesque aura, perhaps a bit of the 1940’s.    The referees were all Latino one from the U.S., one from Puerto Rico and one from Spain.  They went with the German though the Irishman, Macklin, could have won it, too.  At least that’s what the announcer said.

It was Hemingway and contestants bloodying each other up and the Spanish referee that led me to bull fighting.  There is, in both boxing and bull-fighting, a suspicion that you shouldn’t really be watching.  Two adults pounding each other with their fists?  A whole raft of folks against one bull whose only way to leave the contest is dead? (Yes, there are the rare exceptions where the crowd saves the bull, but most of the time the bull dies.)

This wasn’t the I planned my first evening of this pre-Raphaelite immersion, but there you are anyhow.

Art and Culture, Dreams, Family, Travel

Oh, man.

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Imbolc                                                                      Bloodroot Moon

Oh, man.  Staying up late no longer has the romance it used to have, or else the way I feel after, like this morning, has simply become intolerable.  Whatever I don’t like the feeling, jangly, edgy, a bit morose.

Had a dream last night where someone tried to steal my laptop.  While I had it in my hands.  I cried out, “Stop that!” and flung my arms up, waking myself up.  Pre-travel jitters I imagine.

Now when I travel, or at least prior to travel, I have a period, sometimes intense, of not wanting to go.  Not wanting to leave the predictable comforts of home for the uncertainty of the road, the hassles, the physical demands.  Once I leave the house this all wanes and then again I delight in travel.  The strangeness of it.  The oddities.  Even the hassles, so long as they don’t involve running for airplanes.

My family was born to travel.  Mom went to Europe as a WAC during WWII.  Dad traveled happily and often within the US with the occasional trip to Canada.  Once, even, to Singapore.  Mark has traveled the world since college or close thereafter.  Mary moved to Malaysia many years ago and both still wander.  Mary just returned to Singapore from Valencia and England.  Mark toured Saudi Arabia over his break.

Wanderlust, I suppose.  A sense that the present moment, the home, needs the occasional view from afar.  A desire to see what’s over the next hill.  In the next valley.  Around the next bend.  There is, too, at least for me, gaining a clear sense of my Self as stranger in this world, one alone while living with others.  This existential isolation hides often at home, the quotidian a salve for it.

So, Washington, D.C.  I was last there during a layover for a train home from Savannah, Georgia.  I went to the National Gallery that day; I’ll go again this week.

Art and Culture, Family

Marriage is jazz.

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Imbolc                                                             New (Bloodroot) Moon

Jazz at Tryg’s.  Wenso Ashby.   His trio was perfect for a celebration of our anniversary.  Marriage is jazz.  So much improvisation on old standards with the occasional solo performance that comes back, blends in, continues the melody.

This was a benefit for KBEM, the local jazz station that has hit the big time since its inception as an internet radio station.  Kevin Barnes, a KBEM DJ, made the interesting point that being a jazz station was incidental to the stations primary purpose, training young people in the various skills necessary for careers in radio and media.

In fact, this event was a fund raiser for the intern program.  Lucky for us that this educational organization happens to sponsor a damned good jazz station.