Art | dual personalities

June 26, 2017

“Trouble with you is The trouble with me”*

by chuckofish

I spent the weekend cleaning my house so it will be spic and span for all the people who will be arriving this week for the nuptials on Saturday.

The OM and I did make it down to Forest Park on Saturday morning…

to go to the new exhibit at the Art Museum before it opens to the general public.

It was pretty special, and I enjoyed our cultural outing.

We stopped at First Watch on the way home and I enjoyed my avocado toast. Then we headed home and back to gussying up the homestead.

The weather, of course, was absolutely perfect this weekend. God knows (literally) what next weekend will be like. C’est la vie.

I went to church because I was filling in for a friend as the intercessor. They have switched over to Enriching Our Worship, the modern “supplement” to the BCP, for the summer. “The liturgy is intended to expand the language, images and metaphors used in worship in a more contemporary and gender inclusive way.” Just shoot me. I guess I will be taking the rest of the summer off. I’m sure no one will miss me or my rolling eyes.

We watched Long Strange Trip (2017), the Amazon documentary about the Grateful Dead.

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I like the Grateful Dead as much as the next person my age, and Jerry Garcia was a fellow Episcopalian after all, but I was frankly shocked to find out the extent of his drug addiction and the longterm use of psychedelic drugs by the band. As usual, I am not cool enough to understand the Dead. I wasn’t in high school and nothing has changed.

Anyway, I can’t really recommend the documentary. The OM watched the whole four hours (!) but I baled and went back to Absaroka County and reading about Walt Longmire, who, as we know, is more my cup of tea.

And this little guy can now turn over from his back to his tummy. Brilliant.

Enjoy your Monday. Nate and Susie arrive today!

*Casey Jones, Robert C. Hunter, Jerome J. Garcia

6 Comments

June 2, 2017

A landslide in the mind

by chuckofish

“Perhaps there can be too much making of cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot. Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look, ‘Do we need tea? she echoed. ‘But Miss Lathbury…’ She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind. I mumbled something about making a joke and that of course one needed tea always, at every hour of the day or night.”

–Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

Happy birthday to Barbara Pym, the English novelist, born in 1913. I am re-reading A Glass of Blessings and enjoying it very much. Just the thing to calm the mind after a short but stressful week at work. (At least until the next Walt Longmire mystery arrives in the mail.) I recommend her to you.

And this is funny.

Have a good weekend.

What have you got planned? Sunday is The Day of Pentecost:

Almighty God, on this day you opened the way of eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit: Shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

(The first painting is The Red Table (1919) by Leon de Smet (1881-1966); the second is by Mary Cassatt, Lady at the Tea Table (1883-85).)

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May 24, 2017

“It was once in the saddle, I used to go dashing.”*

by chuckofish

I recently bought a little book entitled St. Louis Day By Day by Frances Hurd Stadler at an estate sale.

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It is a treasure trove of interesting information about our fair flyover city. For instance, I did not know that the famous American artist Charles Marion Russell was born on Olive Street in St. Louis on March 19, 1865. Furthermore, he was the great-grandson of Silas Bent, Missouri territorial judge, and of James Russell, a Missouri legislator and judge of the St. Louis County Court. Who knew?

Silas Bent, you will recall, was the father of Charles, the famous fur trader who was appointed as the first territorial governor of New Mexico. His other sons, William, George and Robert, were also in business with Charles and built Bent’s Fort and other outposts of trade in the southwest. One of his daughters, Juliannah, became the first wife of Lilburn Boggs, who later became governor of Missouri. Their son Thomas O. Boggs, an Indian trader and cattle dealer (who married 14-year-old Rumalda Luna Bent, the stepdaughter of Charles Bent, who was an heiress to land grants in Colorado) built an adobe house on the 2,040 acres grant and established Boggsville, Colorado where our ancestor John Wesley Prowers built a two-story 14-room house at that functioned as a house, a school, a stagecoach station and after 1870 as the Bent County seat.

Anyway, back to Charles Russell. He grew up in St. Louis County, and in 1876 a wax figure he sculpted won the blue ribbon at the St. Louis County Fair. In 1880 he moved to Montana, where he wrangled horses and herded cattle and began sketching western life.

Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flathead Indians hangs in the Montana State House

Charles_Marion_Russell_-_The_Tenderfoot_(1900).jpg Russell produced about 4,000 works of art, including oil and watercolor paintings, drawings and sculptures in wax, clay, plaster and other materials, some of which were also cast in bronze.

How did I not know he was from St. Louis?

P.S. The C.M. Russell Museum (including the artist’s log cabin studio and gallery) is located in Great Falls, Montana. Add that to the list.

*Streets of Laredo

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April 26, 2017

“Who thinks the all-encircling sun Rises and sets in his back yard?”

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of the artist John James Audubon (1785 – 1851). Audubon came to America in 1803 to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic Wars. He became an ornithologist, naturalist, and painter, notable for his extensive studies documenting all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations that depicted the birds in their natural habitats

Here are a few examples of his great avian art, courtesy of the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove in Audubon, Pennsylvania, and the Montgomery County Audubon Collection.

American Robin

Burrowing Owl

Osprey

Wood ducks

What an amazing life full of travel, science and art!

By the way, Audubon is buried in the graveyard at the Episcopal Church of the Intercession in the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum at 155th Street and Broadway near his home, Minnie’s Land. He spent the last nine years of his life on this thirty-five acre property, which is now upper Manhattan, facing the Hudson River.

Trinity Cemetery

Detail of Trinity monument

There are statues of Audubon all over the country!

Covington, Kentucky

Henderson, Kentucky

Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, Louisiana

Audubon, Iowa

Museum of Natural History, NYC

You could make quite an interesting road trip following the path leading to all of the John James Audubon statues!

“All praise and honor! I confess
That bread and ale, home-baked, home-brewed
Are wholesome and nutritious food,
But not enough for all our needs;
Poets-the best of them-are birds
Of passage; where their instinct leads
They range abroad for thoughts and words
And from all climes bring home the seeds
That germinate in flowers or weeds.
They are not fowls in barnyards born
To cackle o’er a grain of corn;
And, if you shut the horizon down
To the small limits of their town,
What do you but degrade your bard
Till he at last becomes as one
Who thinks the all-encircling sun
Rises and sets in his back yard?”

–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

5 Comments

April 14, 2017

Make My Heart a House of Prayer*

by chuckofish

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Henry Thomas Bosdet, Jesus Before his Crucifixion

Good Friday. It should be a day of reflection, but I have to work, as usual.

Here are a few poems and images to help us stay focused.

Good Friday
Christina Rossetti

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

John Singer Sargent, 1903, Boston Public Library

Good Friday
George Herbert

Oh my chief good,
How shall I measure out thy blood?
How shall I count what thee befell,
And each grief tell?

Shall I thy woes
Number according to thy foes?
Or, since one star show’d thy first breath,
Shall all thy death?

Or shall each leaf,
Which falls in Autumn, score a grief?
Or cannot leaves, but fruit, be sign,
Of the true vine?

Then let each hour
Of my whole life one grief devour;
That thy distress through all may run,
And be my sun.

Or rather let
My several sins their sorrows get;
That, as each beast his cure doth know,
Each sin may so.

Since blood is fittest, Lord, to write
Thy sorrows in, and bloody fight;
My heart hath store; write there, where in
One box doth lie both ink and sin:

That when Sin spies so many foes,
Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes,
All come to lodge there, Sin may say,
No room for me, and fly away.

Sin being gone, O fill the place,
And keep possession with thy grace;
Lest sin take courage and return,
And all the writings blot or burn.

The Crucifixion, from the Life of Our Lord, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1880

So whatever you do today, keep in mind that it is Good Friday.

The Robe (1953)

But far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (Galatians 6:14)

*Charles Wesley

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April 13, 2017

“And when the hour came”*

by chuckofish

Most depictions in art of the Last Supper are pretty terrible in my opinion, but I kind of like this one.

The Last Supper by Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (1952-1929)

Here’s a Protestant version by Lucas Cranach the Younger, 1565, with leading Reformers portrayed as the Apostles, and the Elector of Saxony kneeling.

I wonder whose face he used for Judas? The pope?

Here’s Albrecht Durer’s woodcut of the Last Supper.

Tonight I will skip the Maundy Thursday service at church with its foot washing etc, but I will do my hour, staying awake in quiet prayer with Jesus at our overnight vigil in the chapel.

It’s the least I can do.

*Luke 22:14

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March 6, 2017

“Visit us with thy salvation, enter every trembling heart”*

by chuckofish

While my DP was shivering in 12-degree weather in the north country, we were enjoying spring temps in flyover-land. I went to a couple of estate sales and found a watercolor of Bruton Parish church, which, as you know, is one of my favorite Episcopal churches.

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We visited the wee babes at the hospital, but didn’t get to see the boy who was filming a lacrosse game at the time. We had quality time with daughter #3 who brought us up to date on the twins.

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Aren’t they looking good?

On Sunday I skipped church and went to see Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade, a “groundbreaking exploration of Edgar Degas’ fascination with high-fashion hats and the young women who made them,” at the St. Louis Art Museum which featured “an array of period hats and 60 paintings and pastels, including key works by Degas that have never been exhibited in the United States.”

58b05edae6f4b.image.jpg I am not a huge fan of French Impressionism, so an exhibit focusing on French woman and their hats (especially hats with dead birds on them) turned out to be not that exciting to me.

Since the OM had declined to accompany me (He had “too many things to do”–whatever), I decided to check out the rest of the museum. I was pleasantly surprised to see the re-furbished second floor of the main building.

There was actually a lot to see! The European, Asian and Ancient art displayed was impressive and I recognized a lot of “old friends” which must have been in storage for years.

Likewise, I enjoyed the “re-imagined” American Art galleries on the third floor.

The space for American Art has been greatly expanded and, again, includes a lot of good things. I was pleasantly surprised.

I went home where I puttered around and later that evening I went to Lenten Evensong at church which was a good way to wind up the weekend.

O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.

Now it is Monday again. Have a good week! Seize the day!

*Charles Wesley

3 Comments

February 24, 2017

Shelter from the storm

by chuckofish

Friday again. The week raced by as it does when you’re busy.

How wonderful to be able to stay home this weekend and unwind!

A cup of coffee, a book, a movie, and some puttering. Maybe I will tackle a project or two and maybe I won’t.

One thing about growing older is that you allow yourself to take a break sometimes. And when you do, you appreciate it.

Of course, we’ll go see the darling wee babes…

Have yourself a good weekend. Here’s a little Bob Dylan to get you started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rKEXFSw54M

(The paintings are by Walter Gay, Susan Watkins, Carl Holsoe, and John Singer Sargent)

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January 25, 2017

The moon is mine

by chuckofish

George Sotter (1879-1953)

I have a compact to commune
A monthly midnight with the Moon;
Into its face I stare and stare,
And find sweet understanding there.

As quiet as a toad I sit
And tell my tale of days to it;
The tessellated yarn I’ve spun
In thirty spells of star and sun.

And the Moon listens pensively,
As placid as a lamb to me;
Until I think there’s just us two
In silver world of mist and dew.

In all of spangled space, but I
To stare moon-struck into the sky;
Of billion beings I alone
To praise the Moon as still as stone.

And seal a bond between us two,
Closer than mortal ever knew;
For as mute masses I intone
The Moon is mine and mine alone.

–Robert Service, from “Moon-Lover”

In case you have forgotten, a tessellation of a flat surface is the tiling of a plane using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellations can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of geometries. A periodic tiling has a repeating pattern.

(I’ll admit, I had to look it up.)

The painting above (“Silent Night” c. 1923) is by George Sotter (1979-1952). The paintings that follow are by Maxfield Parrish, Bertha Lum and Albert Bierstadt.

All photos from Pinterest.

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December 16, 2016

“I am excessively diverted.”*

by chuckofish

Today on the Episcopal calendar of saints we commemorate two Episcopal architects and an Episcopal artist: Ralph Adams Cram, Richard Upjohn and John La Farge.

Upjohn (22 January 1802 – 16 August 1878) was an English-born architect who emigrated to the United States and became most famous for his Gothic Revival churches.

His family initially settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts and then moved on to Boston in 1833, where he worked in architectural design. He had relocated to New York by 1839 where he worked on alterations to Trinity Church. The alterations were later abandoned and he was commissioned to design a new church, completed in 1846.

Trinity then and now…

He published his extremely influential book, Upjohn’s rural architecture: Designs, working drawings and specifications for a wooden church, and other rural structures, in 1852.

Upjohn designed many buildings in a variety of styles–such as St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Baltimore which combines 12th-century Italian elements on the exterior and Romanesque elements on the interior–

but he is most identified with Gothic Revival Episcopal churches.

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Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter in Poughkeepsie, NY

However, he also designed the much more humble and very charming Gothic Revival St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in North Charlestown, New Hampshire where our ancestors the Rands were members. I’d love to know the backstory on this!

A small country church with a cruciform plan sheathed in board and batten siding with zigzag bottom edges. Its nave runs in an east/west direction, bisected by transepts and ending in a polygonal apse at the east end. A shed addition abuts the north end of the apse. The placement of a square tower at the southeast corner dominates the otherwise symmetrical plan. The first-floor tower window is a small peaked rectangular window with entry through a pointed arch doorway on the south side. Second-story windows are rectangular. Apse windows have a low pointed shape with label molds. Above the two-story base, the tower is capped by a steeply pitched truncated hip roof sheathed in hexagonal and regular slate shingles, capped by a smaller square stage with a louvered. almond shaped opening on each side and surmounted by a pyramidal roof topped by a cross. Remaining roof surfaces are sheathed in alternating bands of green and purple slate. Each of the transept ends features a tripart trefoil arch window. Rafters support the projecting eaves with a collar tie adorned by four cutout quatrefoil designs. The nave is four bays wide with small peaked rectangular windows. A small steeply pitched gable vestibule extends from the rear of the south side. Located in the rear of the nave is a six-part circular stained glass window capped by a collar tie similar to those in the transepts.

The church was designed in 1863 by Richard Upjohn, a prominent New York ecclesiastical architect and is New Hampshire’s only wooden church by Upjohn. Ground broken July 4, 1863; completed December 10, 1863; consecrated December 11, 1863. The church was enlarged in 1869 by the architect’s son, Richard M. Upjohn, by moving the nave back 22 feet and building transepts, a tower and steeple. (National Register Nomination Information)

So hats off and a toast to Ralph, John and especially Richard, saints of the Church, and a prayer too:

Gracious God, we thank you for the vision of Ralph Adams Cram, John LaFarge and Richard Upjohn, whose harmonious revival of the Gothic enriched our churches with a sacramental understanding of reality in the face of secular materialism; and we pray that we may honor your gifts of the beauty of holiness given through them, for the glory of Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

*Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

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