• Tag Archives Ensor

  • Burn your bag, boy?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                          Awakening Moon

    Two stories from the world around us.

    Michele Yates, a docent colleague, toured a group of second graders last week.  At the James Ensor expressionist piece, “Intrigue”, a little boy raised his hand, “Look, you can see the paint.  It’s still wet.”  Turns out this young art connoisseur believed we had a basement filled with producers of art, crankin’em out every so often for the delight of the viewing public.  A time when it would have been delightful to be inside his mind and see the imagined works underneath the museum.  I see trolls and gnomes and dwarfs hard at work.  How about you?

    (Frejya and the dwarfs)

    An l.e.d. sign for onion sets drew me off  Highway 35E and put to Beisswinger’s Hardware Store.  Beisswinger’s is a great old style hardware store with lots and lots of stuff cared for by employees who actually know how to use it all.  When I took my brown sacks of red, yellow and white onion sets inside, it occurred to me that I still need a fence tester for our electric fence; the high voltage pulse knocks out ordinary voltmeters.  I know.  I did it.

    Anyhow, he’d never heard of one, but agreed to look it up.  Both of us were surprised when he found not one, but two.  On the way to the electric fence tester aisle, he started this story exactly like this:

    “So, Charlie Brown and I were in New Hampshire on my uncle’s farm.  He’s an old guy, over 70, but wiry.  We’re going out hunting [I’m thinking this is a joke, so I’m preparing to laugh whether it’s funny or not.  He seems like a nice guy.] and the old man scrambles over an electric fence.  Charlie Brown steps over it, but gets a jolt.”  In his red Beisswinger store shirt, this guy seems believable.  He goes on,  “The old man hollers back over his shoulder, ‘Burn your bag, boy?”

    I had students from Eau Claire and New York Mills today.  Both groups were fun, interested and engaged.


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  • Practical Paranoia

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    20  bar falls 30.52  1mph ESE  windchill 19  Samhain

    Last Quarter of the Dark Moon

    Second graders from a dual-language immersion school trailed after me through the museum.  We went up on the elevator, always a hit and proceeded once on the third floor to Tanguy.   Sophia, or was it Sarah, said, “It looks like the artist created a bunch of shapes so we could figure out what was there.”  Reasonable working definition of surrealism.

    At Ensor’s Intrigue we found a face on the painting that I’d never noticed, a face in the lower right hand corner.  Here the kids expressed concern about the baby slipping, “She’s not holding the baby very well, and the other people are yelling at her.”  Since this was a Spanish immersion school and since it was mid-November, the somewhat festive atmosphere and skeletons lead to a consensus:  Day of the Dead.

    At Dr. Arrieta, Jared, a small Mexican boy who spoke no English proudly read out the Spanish language inscription.  In this case the group decided Goya was a woman who looked old because she had gray hair and wrinkles.  At they didn’t say, really old.

    We were done after three pieces, but Kyle noticed Theseus and the Centaur, so we looked at it.  Camryn, who requires hearing augmentation (I wore a receiver/transmitter so she could hear me.), made this observation, “He’s trying to kill him because humans are not supposed to have horses legs.”

    As I left, Virylena, a sweet faced Mayan girl, said, “Wait. We don’t know the way out.”

    The teacher, however, assured her that she knew the way out.

    paranoia400.gifAfter the tour I waited in the coffee shop for Mike Elko.   He had an exhibit in the Minnesota Artists Exhibition space a month or so ago.  I bought a digital print of one of his pieces.

    We talked art for a while. He believes prints, and art in general, should be simple to read and grasp.  His work all has humor in it.  He showed Careen Heegard and me some pieces from an upcoming show at the HighPoint Print co-op.  He has taken pictures from old school dictionaries, like a bantam rooster and put a saddle on the rooster, complete with a child in riding gear ready to mount.

    I’m tempted to hang a sign under this piece once I get it framed that will read:  Never Again.  This period in our political history and in particular this aspect of it, the demagogic fear mongering, has weakened our democracy and attenuated our freedoms.


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