Albert Bierstadt | dual personalities

Tag: Albert Bierstadt

Tuesday when I was driving home it happened to be just the right time to experience those few moments known as “the Golden Hour” –when the sun is just at the point on the horizon that the light is redder and softer than usual. At this time of year, it hits the golden and orange leaves of the trees and turns them into molten gold.

Anyway, I was trying to stay on the road while looking east at the trees and not burst into tears. Does this happen to you? Happily I made it safely to the grocery store where I then got a look at an amazing sunset right there in the parking lot. The horizon was a blazing orange under a ceiling of clouds. Amazing!

Then I went in and bought my food. The most incredible stuff goes on around us all the time!

I have quoted this before, but it bears repeating:

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
―Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Happy Thanksgiving!

(The painting is by Albert Bierstadt, 1886)

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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.