Topiary Time Lapse

Our Giant Rooster brings us so much joy and wonder.

Photos are from July 24th to December 3rd. #timelapse #seasons #treeseasons #tree

Killing the chatter

Everyday I take a walk. These days it often means layering on articles of clothing to fit three different people. It is a hassle. It is cold. The road is icy. The wind blows. But then I find that the walk clears my head. When I approach the turning back point I feel refreshed, clear and the chatter is silenced. I tried to paint that in several ways.

Overlook 1.5 miles from the house

It is amazing how when I am outside and moving, my mind is cleared and I feel in the present!

It is the present!
Being in the present is the present.

Simple ingredients make a funeral feel happily ever after

 

1.     Location, location, location. Inside or outside, weather permitting.

2.     Find someone with a spiritual bent to ease spirits and address loss. It doesn’t have to be clergy, but often they have the best language for the situation.

3.     Music can build a nest around everybody pulling them close in grief and lifting spirits in memory.

4.     Story. Any and all shared story about the deceased is helpful to mourners looking for a sense of belonging in community at the time of loss. A story can make you laugh and cry and it should honor the soul that is gone. Spoken words combined with social participation grants us a structure to mark the milestone along the arrow of Time.

5.     Food- It is important to nourish our bodies as we grieve and sometimes the preparation of food is devastatingly mundane for those close to the deceased. Donations of food are a treasured balm to ease the suffering and remind us of the need to live.

    6.             Flowers and other additions of nature remind us of ephemeral lifespans and add             beauty to the setting.

-->

Did drawing my aunt on her deathbed rob me of the opportunity to engage with her one last time?

My aunt Marianne died on Saturday just hours after I left her and I am riddled with low sense of self-worth, because I didn’t wake her or hold her hand or play her favorite music. It’s not like I was completely ignorant. She had been sick for months and really, really sick for weeks. There was something that struck me about the feeling of the room and the look of her face. The clear oxygen mask on her mouth let vapors escape and they rose against the incoming light from the window, like motes of spiraling fairy dust, or echoes of the cigarette smoke that often, for years, crowned her head. Her hand clutched onto the remote for the bed controls, and I watched as it relaxed, slackened and hung limp off the side of the bed. Shouldn’t I have known? Instead I propped my sketch pad on my lap and leaned a favorite photo of her in a Santa hat, framed, on the window ledge, thinking that when she woke she would know that I had been there and she would recognize the season. Time in the ward seemed suspended and, though she had been there since March, she had missed out on summer and fall. Down stairs there was a celebration of decorated trees that we had often enjoyed, yet she was too weak and to unwieldy to put into a wheel chair. We would miss the spectacle this year.

On previous visits I had woken her when I found her sleeping and been told I had just interrupted the best dream in her life, or was responsible for the wracking pain that suddenly hit her and had her yelling for a nurse. Just the last visit I had asked her if it was better when she slept and she said, “unfortunately, yes”.

All this is to defend myself for not waking her on her last day on the planet. I did drawings of her instead. I didn’t wake her. Does that make me a bad person?

Picasso Version G is Central to the Harem

Though Picasso was a major abstractionist, he never left the figure or art history. He understood that the classical works were powerful images handed down through generations to teach successive artists secrets. He mined the ancient masterpieces for their primitive and spiritual force.

The linchpin of the Women of Algiers’ composition is the servant at the curtain who defines the depth and is the symbolic guardian of the enclave. Picasso focuses on her form in this single figure piece. The figure is given a monumental perspective and architectural role, figuratively holding up access to the harem and central to the composition, like one holding up the building as an ancient Greek Kore from 500 BC at the Acropolis in Athens. This work belongs to a private collection.

Picasso Women of Algiers Version F goes off script

In this delirious version, Picasso shifts effortlessly from lyrical to dramatic, and back.  He has replaced the center dark depth with a source of light. The servant figure, hoisting aloft an apple shaped teapot, writhes like a snake gathering the curtains and reveals a distant staircase leading to unknown territory and triggering the White Male's imagination of idyllic pleasures. In this work Picasso plays with costume, repetition and pattern.  The harem has become a Garden of Eden, given the symbolism of Eve’s fig leaf. Light falls on her breasts and the bottom of her sleeping companion’s feet. The work is sensuous and the scene is as fragrant as a brothel. Ganz sold this version in 1955 to a private collector. Where it is seems to be anyone’s guess. 
#privatecollectors #picassoseries #arthistory #interpretation #gardenofeden #brothel 

Version F translated by Tilly Strauss

Picasso's Women of Algiers Version E is Sublime

Version E interpreted by Tilly Strauss

After the barbaric splendor of the previous version, Picasso continues his elegy to Matisse in a new painting with a reduced number of figures.  Now we have the seated hookah smoker, the reclining nude, and the servant with tray pulling back the curtain. The reclining figure and the servant both recall works of Matisse’s oeuvre. The Blue Nude- Souvenir of Biskra by Matisse in 1907 was the first odalisque Matisse painted. It was scandalous at it’s first showing at the Salon des Artistes with critics calling out it’s blue shading, and thick, rough, and somewhat angular outline. Legs crossed over, the blue nude of Picasso’s has the only recognizable face in the picture, which is a deftly drawn Greco-Roman profile. The ingeniously reduced silhouette of the exiting servant recalls Matisse’s Jazz cut-outs, such as in The Cirque collage of 1943. There, for a brief moment, Picasso allows the curves, the embellished patterning and spatial lyricism of Matisse to shine through.

There is a dominating voyeuristic element to the painting. We watch a sleeping nude. Someone exits, and the hookah smoker hidden under a veil or in her drug induced haze, is absent. We are alone and awake in the scene.  The lines and shapes fit snugly together- and I delight in the way the hookah fits in the armpit of the blue nude, and the pipe tube defines the pant leg of the hookah smoker. Every shape has it’s place, fitting sweetly together.  It is a scene of sublime simplicity.  So far, of the 15 versions, this is my personal favorite. This 18 x 21 inch canvas is, I believe, in the San Francisco Museum of Art, where someday I hope to see it in real life. I hope someone tells me if it is not there!

-->