• Tag Archives art history

  • Still Learning

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                                    Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

    The moon light, bright in the southern sky, casts shadows, thin skeletons of trees and shrubs splayed out upon the snow.

    This Latin stuff is fun.  Going back and forth among dictionaries, grammars, websites, puzzling out the verbs and the nouns, trying to fit it all together into English, peeking inside Ovid, at least reading Ovid in his native language.  I know it’s weird, but I really enjoy it.

    I feel about it like I feel about art history; I wish I hadn’t waited so long.  On the other hand the two together give this final third of my life mental vitality.  I’m only getting started.

    Oh.  Picked up the novel I’d set aside, about a third done.  It has promise.  Need to find time for it.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Art and Culture Humanities Myth and Story Retirement 📎and tagged

  • En-Theos

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                      Awakening Moon

    If you know me, you know I have enthusiasms.  Two or three years in astronomy.  Two years of close study of Jungian thought.    9 years of touring and two and a half years of education in art history.  A full years home study course in horticulture.  We’re now in our third year of converting our property to a permaculture environment for vegetables, fruits and nuts.  The most recent instance, though one of long standing in my thoughts, is Latin.

    As I finished my first four lines of the Metamorphoses the other day, it struck me that art history and Latin suit me pretty well, better than politics and the church.  I said this out loud to Kate and she said, “Well, philosophy and anthropology were more masculine.”  I guess that’s true and I guess the same certainly goes for politics although that’s changed a lot since the 60’s.  The ministry is a more mushy profession gender wise, especially for liberal protestants, but since I always did politics and consulting, probably not so for me.

    The thing is, I don’t think art history and Latin were options that were even visible to me.  It wasn’t, in other words, that I rejected them in favor of philosophy and anthropology.  Nothing much more to say about this than that I have them in my life now and I’m not about to let go.

    I have wondered about political action, long my baseline activity, the self-authenticating act.  Has its time passed for me?  I’m not sure about that. Will take more thought.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality Humanities 📎and tagged

  • It Is a Privilege and an Honor

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    32  bar steady 30.37 0mph WNW dewpoint 28  Spring

                         Full Moon of Winds

    I got all didactic on the study of ancient bronzes post and it wasn’t where I wanted to go.  Let me try again.

    In one gallery at the Minneapolis Art Institute we have several high quality representatives of an art form that dominated Chinese material culture for 1,500 years.   Imagine if, say marble sculpture or fresco painting or mosaic had been the primary, to the exclusion of most other art forms, art of the West since 500 ACE.  That’s the length of time we’re discussing.  Or the period of time between the birth of Jesus and the colonization of the New World.  That’s a long time in people years.

    To see these objects is not only to see the aesthetic and technical prowess of  Shang and Zhou dynasty artisans; it is to see the actual object that they produced.  These very ku, kuei, jueh, ting, lei, tsun and fang i came into the existence through a complex network of Chinese people who lived over 3,500 years.   There were miners, transporters, smelters, mold makers, mold designers, foundry workers who cast the objects and broke them from their ceramic molds.  Other people sold and transported them after they were made and for years, centuries, even millennia in some cases these objects were either used in public ritual or stood by in a tomb ready to provide service in the afterlife.  Think of that. 

    Think of the journey that graceful jueh had to take both as a created work of art, then, after that, as an artifact of a long dead culture now thousands of miles from its point of origin.  That it survived all that is amazing, even if it is bronze.

    The conceptual world that brought this work into existence, a system of public cults around unseen gods and dead ancestors, a conceptual world had such a profound grip on the Chinese mentality that it stayed pretty much intact for the entire Shang dynasty, then only gradually lost its force in the later Western Zhou.  Those are powerful ideas.  Ideas can be more fragile than any ceramic; yet, these objects testify to the energizing and creative force these ideas carried, not just for a while but for hundreds of years.

    To put myself back in those times, to feel the ebb and flow of both the material culture and the beliefs that animated it, is to come alive to the human experience in a way I can’t in any other way.  It is a privilege and an honor to represent these objects and their world to the public. 


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture World History 📎and tagged