Wayne Thiebaud: An Artist to Enjoy and Study

A retrospective in London:


"He [Thiebaud] remains prolific, if self-critical, and recalls an anecdote about the great Japanese artist Hokusai, who proclaimed at the age of 90 that he might really learn to draw if given another 10 years. Does Thiebaud likewise feel that as an artist he continues to learn with age? “I often feel that I’m always starting over, in a way,” he says, on reflection." - NYT, 8-27-17

Office Still Life, 1975

And still, Mark Rothko:

 "Rothko...  told a group of art students that he included in his paintings a measure of hope: ‘‘10 percent to make the tragic concept more endurable.’ ...  he chafed at the label ‘‘abstractionist.’’ The subjects of his paintings, he said, were ‘‘basic human emotions’ " -

The Rothko Chapel, Houston, TX

New Cats for me - Neku Atsume

I got this cat today - I had no picture of her, and I'm never satisfied with play unless I get one - I consider I haven't really seen the cat, though it may have visited.


I also got Sassy Fran - finally!
I've been waiting so long. She came to the cafe.

Time for Museums to play a role

LET THERE BE MUSEUMS and compassionate memorialization

History is vital to human decision-making, though we all know we cannot walk in the same river twice.  

Let’s fund new museums and venues of the Civil War that preserve the reality with compelling, honest displays, artifacts, and interactive video. A group of  museums that hold these pain-provoking statues will help neutralize the immediate civic issue by permitting viewing choice, removing the obligation to see an object that is thought offensive and intrudes upon citizens' freedom of movement. The narrative of America’s struggle with human liberty would be safer from appropriations and re-definitions of history. 

Museums have authenticity, possessing  “the real things” -  its holdings have an originality which defy commodification.  Museums have the power to prevent anonymity.  They preserve, heal and teach.  Museums grow imagination and connection.  They are seedbeds for wisdom.  Museums are a unique synergy of journalism, biography and history.  They possess a kind of neutrality, set apart as they are.

The Reagan Library is a fine example, as is the Holocaust Museum.  The sacrifices, tragedies, and achievements of the past are summoned for us in museums - just step aboard the U.S.S. Iowa in San Pedro Harbor and smell the gritty innards, gaze at the massive power of its long guns, and see for yourself.  

Free speech is an American right, but violent protest defiles and destroys the history of our ancestors who died on slave ships or fought in the Civil War - south and north. Their lives need not, and should not be degraded.We do not have the right to remake our heritage.  We have the obligation to understand it, as humans and citizens. 

Protestors who deny or distort the past are corrupting and destroying their own rights and freedoms.  We need to save them from themselves as well as ourselves.  For terrorists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members, I pray that economic and educational opportunities come to them, and offer them an exit from the hellish place in which they live and breathe.

Let the rest of us gather around  informed memorialization.

Hawk Sighting - Which one is it, Cooper's or Sharp-Shinned?

Up on the wires over our pool, not as rufous colored as the illustrations in my bird books. Breast was streaked with gray on a white ground.
  I’m leaning to the sharp-shinned because of the small head and bill, thinner legs, but it wasn't the size of a jay, it was slightly larger.

        








Range Maps from Cornell show the likelihood of it being a sharp-shinned is not great - they are supposedly only winter migrants (check my books TBD).

Cooper's hawk

Sharp-shinned hawk

  

 

I guess I will have to wait for my next sighting to be sure - sometimes the second time I find a bird, I get it right - having learned some new detail to spot.