• Tag Archives images
  • Collecting

    Imbolc                                                                       Valentine Moon

    Tumblr.  Addictive in a sense I don’t fully understand yet.  I’ve selected bloggers on Tumblr, largely where folks post images of one sort or another, who present art.  Over 100 of them at last count.  At any one time only a handful might be posting, so keeping up, or at least staying roughly abreast is doable.  The range of images that folks select is wide, one of  the charms of Tumblr for me, a chance to both get inside people’s heads as they choose images to post and an opportunity to see art that I wouldn’t have found on my own.  In that sense it’s a very eclectic museum.

    (folder: architecture)

    The addictive part for me is that I’m saving images, image after image, in those files I talked about reorganizing a while back.  Many, many art folders:  art contemporary, art Russia, art Symbolist, artist Blake, artist Matisse.  Cinema and television.  Natural world.  Cities.  War.  Travel.  So on.

    Like a squirrel delighted with finding an abundance of acorns, I pluck these images up in my digital cheeks and carry them over to the small holes I’ve dug in my hard drives memory to cache them.  The folders have begun to grow fat with image after image.  Perhaps a hundred images or more in some instances.

    (folder, art photography.  the pope’s apartment the night before his announcement about his retirement.)

    My question is, why am I doing this?  Part of it is a desire to see again striking images or historically significant images or funny images or moving images.  That’s true, but mostly, like the squirrel, I dig the hole, then go on to dig another hole, often forgetting the one I dug before.  This is what oak trees count on.  How oak forests grow.  Of course, I know where all my folders are and I can open them whenever I want, but my point is that I’m more engaged in stuffing them full than utilizing them.

    Utilizing them for what?  My first approach to answering this question will come on Thursday when I start reading the catalog for the Pre-Raphaelite show at the National Gallery.  I have a folder filled with Pre-Raphaelite art and will find images, I imagine, of most of the pieces in the show.  Perhaps I’ll curate them myself, re-organize them in different ways, trying to emphasize different aspects of this 19c phenomenon.  Perhaps I’ll use the images for comparison, for tracing the history of certain themes and techniques.  Or, I might just open the folder and look at them, one after the other, taking in their color, their subject matter.

    (folder History England.  a 1920 poster for the tube.)

    This is an activity only possible with the internet and large hard drives.  And a lot of time.  It feels important; that’s why I’m writing about it.  But why?  No idea.


  • Images, Images Everywhere

    Imbolc                                                                      Cold Moon

    Did I mention I transferred all my images, thousands literally, to this newer computer?  Did I mention that for some reason the pictures library here rearranged them in a seemingly random manner?  Requiring my image by image attention to slot them back into accessible folders.  Did I mention that?

    Well, if I didn’t, I should have.  It’s taking me a very long time.  A great time suck and for some reason an almost obsessive need for order has taken over.  I need to have them all sorted and back in their places.  I’m not normally like this, at least I don’t think I am, but until this is done, everything else is on the back-burner.

    Geez.

    On the one hand sorting the images is a sort of psychometric. I and only I chose to save these specific images.  Why?  What do they mean?  Why does the same image appeal to me over and over?  What categories have I chosen as important?  Images of our gardens and our home seem right now to be the largest single collection, though the art collection is very big as are the various travel collections.  Then there’s all those shots of the grandkids.  Animals.  Climate and weather.  Cinema and television.  And on and on.

    Some strange satisfaction in seeing the image, deciding on its classification, moving it and going on to the next image has me in its grip.  Some sort of librarian impulse.  Or taxonomist.

    Odd.


  • Scattered Images

    Imbolc                                                                                 Cold Moon

    Reorganizing my fragmented collection of images.  I have a method, it works, but there are a whole lot of images.  This may take a very long time.  Worth it in the end though because I will have a well organized image resource, collected by me and easily usable.

    Watched Wim Wender’s “The End of Violence” last night.  Kate likes her narrative served straight up with no sides.  This  film had oblique angels and sudden turns.  She wasn’t crazy about it, but I liked it.  It was an early post-modern film.  A film about a film about violence in which the resolution of the film destroys the protagonist’s career and liberates him at the same time.  Clever, beautiful.  Well acted.  Bill Pullman.  Andie MacDowell.  Gabriel Byrne.

    Looks like the critics on Rotten Tomatoes agreed with Kate for the most part.  I write these critiques before I look up the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  Sort of like translating Latin before checking with an English version.

    I’m in full inside mode at the moment, not moving outside for much though I do plan to visit the grocery store this afternoon.  Cold.  And our furnace is out.  Fortunately I have my own gas stove in the study.  Centerpoint is coming today.  Could be the end for the furnace; it’s 18 years old and their life-span is 15-20 years.  Sigh.