"Dynamism of a Soccer Player"
Umberto Boccioni, 1913




"The Reservoir at Villa Falconieri"
Maxfield Parrish, 1903

"Water Lillies", Art Institute of Chicago
Claude Monet, 1906

"Water Lillies", St. Louis Art Museum
Claude Monet, c. 1916



"Gray Line with Black, Blue, and Yellow"
Georgia O'Keefe, c. 1923

"Schloss Kammer at Lake Atter III"
Gustav Klimt, 1910

"Still Life on a Green Sideboard"
Henri Matisse, 1928

"The Sleeping Gypsy"
Henri Rousseau, 1897

"Map"
Jasper Johns, 1961

"Afternoon of the Faun", sketch for the ballet
Leon Bakst, 1912

"Interior with Blue Deck Chair"
Pablo Picasso, 1958

"Le Moulin de la Gallete"
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876

EXTRA CREDIT!

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, union organizer and early feminist. Funny story with this one: I bought it at the same time as all the above, at the Mandala closing sale, thinking it would be excellent to supplement my art cards with some historical educational material. Three weeks later, I was cleaning my room and found an old postcard book in a dresser drawer that my grandmother gave to me when I was probably 12 or so: Women Who Dared. Oops. Thanks, Grandma!


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! 25%!

With the uploading of these postcards, I am officially one-quarter of the way done with goal 78! A few weekends ago, I went to visit Katelyn in Tampa and we trekked down to the Dali Museum in St Pete. There was some sort of special event going on that night and they were closing early to set up for it, so we only had about two hours to wander around. Luckily(?), the building is way too small for the museum's collection, and we were able to see just about everything without feel terribly rushed. And, of course, they weren't about to kick us out of the giftshop! I bought two postcards, one real card, and a poster - because it was two dollars cheaper than an 8x10 print of the same painting. So! Clicky clicky for the pretty!

Tres Picos - 1955

I think my favorite part of this sketch is something it might take a few seconds to notice... so take it all in for a second. I don't want to spoil anything. Go ahead, I'll wait.

...Yeah, that orchid is definitely blooming out of his crotch. It's a delightfully feminine representation of the phallus. Coming in a distant second is the leaf-hat-morphing-into-caterpillar. I just love Dali's playfulness, how he blends realities and unrealities and creates a game out of masking the lines.

The Lion Sketch - 1956

ZOMG LIONFACE. This one was not on display this time around, but when I saw it on the wall amidst all the other postcards, I knew I had to have it. He's probably the most adorable ferocious lion of all time, and I love him. These simple pencil drawings, that must have taken a quarter teaspoon of Dali's creative talents, make me intensely jealous of people who have both imaginative vision and the ability to execute that vision in a seemingly effortless manner. Intensely jealous. On Monday I'm going to draw another snail.

Girl with Curl - 1926

According to legend, Dali grew up fantasizing about a Russian peasant girl... three years after completing this painting, he met Gala, a Russian bourgeois girl (close enough) who left her husband to become Dali's muse, wife, object of candaulistic pleasure (fitting for a visual artist). Some say that makes this painting "prophetic" and read a lot into the odd perspective that cuts out the middle ground between the girl and the background landscape. I just like the sensuous curves, the sliver of a crescent moon mimicking the drapery over her backside, and the hints of myfavoritecolorblue in the upper reaches of the sky.

Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at 20 Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln - 1976

Painted for the bicentennial of America, a nation he only lived in for eight years decades before, this 448-pixel-wide version doesn't really capture the true power of this painting. Proportionally, I think you have to be about seven inches from the screen the first time you see it for the Gala part to be more powerful than the Lincoln part - the actual painting is one of those jumbo, wall-sized things, fifteen feet tall at least. I love how it's sorta pixely (before pixels were really a thing), and the little squares on the bottom that separate Gala and Lincoln into separate pieces. I especially love the bloodorange in the sky, textured like water, and how it reminds me of flying down the east coast at sunset.

In sum: Dali = awesome, and far more than the Persistence of Memory (iconic and awesome work though it is), and after they open the new space next January, I want to go back and see the whole collection.

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Artful things

Last night, I was cleaning out my dropbox and realized I never posted the two Jesus postcards I bought two years ago at St Paul's in London, two of the founding members of my collection. For shame!

Also below the cut - an ad for an exhibition on now at the Met. It's about time I kick off goal number 84, and I absolutely adore simple sketch drawings like this. Something about them seems more... personal, more individual... closer to the artist, and therefore more remarkable that they have survived through the centuries. I suppose they're the visual arts equivalent of acoustic songs. Anyway, I'm going to be in New York in less than a month for Spring Break (Daily Show should be completed then, too!) and I am really excited about loading up my ipod with quiet music and going to go absorb the pretty :)



These are apparently part of a larger series called "The Way: The Truth: The Life," by Sergei Chepik, and were completed in 2005. They are the second and third pieces, "The Public Ministry" and "The Crucifixion," respectively. I love how forlorn they are, especially when compared with the rest of the St Paul's decor, which is much brighter and more traditionally "wondrous." (For reference, see #6 and #8 on this post.) It's good to be reminded by these darker works that St Paul's is one of the largest public mausoleums in the world, in addition to a place of worship.

And! Here's the exhibition's ad:

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Toward a Red

Two weeks ago, I went back to Mandala with my friend Michelle so she could sell some books, and while I was there, I, as I do, found another postcard to add to my collection. The reason for its extreme delay is that I have found, amazingly, something that is not on the internet. Anywhere. For real. I have searched high and low, working with the artist's name and the title of the painting given on the back of the postcard, to figure out if this abstract piece is meant to be viewed vertically or horizontally. I have googled his name, its name, both of their names; combed wikipedia for any reference to it, and even gone to the website of the museum that printed the postcard to see if they had a picture - nothing. So, I present, with a 1/3 chance of correct orientation, Sam Gilliam's Toward a Red.

If you know think you have a good eye for aesthetic sensibilities, let me know which way you think is up. You should be able to click the picture and be taken to a much larger version, if you'd like to study it more in-depth.

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Postcards - the beginning.

(Sort of) as promised, here are 15 of my original 17 postcards.

1. Edgar Degas, "Two Dancers on a Stage," The Courtauld Gallery, London.

2. James A. M. Whistler, "Girl with Almond Blossom," The Courtauld Gallery, London.

3. Henri Reignault, "Salome," The Met, New York.

4. John Singer Sargent, "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," Tate Britain, London.

5. Paul Delaroche, Detail from "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey," National Gallery, London.

6. Detail of Mosaic, St Paul's Cathedral, London.

7. Camille Pissarro, "The Boulevard Montmarte on a Winter Morning," The Met, New York.

8. Detail of Mosaic, St Paul's Cathedral, London.

9. Pierre-August Renoir, "Madame Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier and Her Children," The Met, New York.

10. Pablo Picasso, "Girl with Mandolin," Museum of Modern Art, New York.

11. Georges Seurat, Study for "Le Chahut," Courtauld Gallery, London.

12. Pierre-August Renoir, "At the Theatre (La Première Sortie)," National Gallery, London.

13. Edgar Degas, "After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself," National Gallery, London.

14. Georges Seurat, "Young Woman Powdering Herself," Courtauld Gallery, London.

15. Francisco de Goya, "Doña Isabel de Porcel," National Gallery, London.

The other two are not on the wall (for symmetry reasons) and I don't have any pictures of them yet. They're really awesome, post-apocalyptic paintings commissioned for St. Paul's Cathedral in London earlier this decade. They were first hung, I think, right after the mosaics were given their first thorough cleaning in at least a century, and although I don't normally enjoy paintings that depict Christ, I find this pair to be fascinating, especially their very-intentional juxtaposition with the brightly gilded mosaics. I plan on scanning them at work tomorrow so I can show them off, too :)
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On a Streetcar Named Getting-My-Ass-In-Gear

For the first time, I feel really good looking back at the progress I've made in the last week. It might be because I got paid and so everything just looks a little cheerier, but it just seems like I've gotten over some kind of hump (or maybe just my plague) and am better equipped to listen when I tell myself to turn off the TV and do something else. In fact, on Thursday night I was too good at that and missed half of the Bill Clinton interview on The Daily Show - even though I had set up a reminder and the cable box had switched itself over to the channel. But the reason I missed it was that I was so engrossed in my Adaptation project, and the interview is online, so I don't feel horrible about it. I think this week I am actually going to write a scene, instead of just taking endless notes. Three or four possible ideas for an opening scene have been fighting to claw their way out onto the pixel-page, so I might just do all of them and see where it goes.

I read almost all the articles I meant to, which can be read about in the post below this one, and I finished Sourcery, the first next Discworld novel on the list. I also began Streetcar on Saturday morning and got about halfway through it. If you've never read the introduction that Tennessee Williams wrote himself for it, you can download it from me here. I would pull out one of my favorite quotes, but 1) I don't have just one, and 2) I can't bear to rip any of them out of context. They're all better together. Suffice it to say that reading it, and then lovingly transcribing it because it seems not to exist ANYWHERE ELSE on the internet, I was reinvigorated about both this project and the general direction I want to take my life.

Speaking of which, the Foreign Service test is just a little over two weeks away. It's intimidating. There's this huge, seemingly-singular event in my too-near future and it. It seems like applying to Vassar all over again. I have my sights set on this one thing, to the point of totally blocking out any other potentiality, and I'm not sure how many more times this is going to work for me. To that end, I've begun to think about how else I might leave Daytona in next spring or summer. It's actually not as hard as I thought it would be to do this... I imagined that planning alternatives might feel like a concession of defeat before I'd even given myself a chance to see what I could do. Instead, although I'm still dealing with those feelings, I also feel more confident in myself, and sort of feel resourceful for the first time in my life.

Besides wanting to be a career diplomat, one of my other long-standing career dreams has been to be an editor at a publishing company. I don't just love grammar, I have a sort of unnatural eagle-eye for spotting errors and typos (think an extra space between words) at a glance. Unfortunately for this particular dream - though greatly to my credit for the State Department, obviously - I majored in Political Science, not English, so I'm not immediately qualified, on paper, to get a job in publishing. I do, however, have a bit of practical experience editing manuscripts, papers, and, recently, business reports.

Enough experience, I think, to post a craiglist ad in the major cities advertising my availability for freelance editing services. This idea is still in its infancy, but hopefully, if I can get this venture up and running by the beginning of November, and people are into it, I'll be able to have at least six months of experience to put on my resume and a list of references to vouch for my abilities. If it doesn't work out with the State Department, I can still move back up north (or west, or somewhere completely off my radar right now) and apply for real editing gigs and do something (else) that I love with my life.

So there's that. Another thing I love is books. (Yeah, completely and unartfully changing gears here). On Friday afternoon, my brother and his girlfriend flew into town and I left work early to hang out with them, and discovered that Kristen really likes books, too, and that, furthermore, my brother had never heard of Mandala, my very favorite used bookstore... possibly ever. So we turned right back around after we got home and headed down once more to "Daytona proper" and spent a good two hours rummaging through the overcrowded shelves and floor-stacks and old National Geographics and Playboys. I ended up with three new Philip Roth books; The Satanic Verses; a book called Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, one of the fathers of the modern Arabic novel; Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man; and a National Geographic from 1975 revealing the amazing future of wind power (including a really excellent artist's rendering of a futuristic, multiturbine, exceptionally top-heavy oceanic device, which, thanks to the power of the interweben, I need not scan because some kindly person has already done it for me. The picture will be below the cut, along with my final purchases, four new postcards! I'm really excited about them and I can't really remember this second if I made any more good goal progress this week - rode the bike to work on two days last week? Stretching regularly every night? - so I'm just going to skip right to the pictures :)



First, the windpower of the future!, as envisioned by National Geographic in, once again, 1975.

I know, right? Craaaazy hippies. What were they thinking?

Now, postcards. Tomorrow I plan on sharing the 17 postcards I already have, but first up tonight is Gustav Klimt's "Cartoon for the Stoclet Palace: Expectation." Secret: I really love the Klimt aesthetic but my inner indie snob has always prevented me from buying a poster of "The Kiss," because everyone else has it. What I enjoy most about "Expectation" is the way the woman's body is facing left, but her head is turned back. What is she looking at? A man? A mirror? A squirrel? The world may never know.

Next, the Monets.

This "Japanese Bridge" lives in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, according to the back of the postcard, and is the much warmer, more vibrant brother of the painting I've seen a few times at the National Gallery in London, and I like it more, I think. I'm a huge sucker for the interplay of the full spectrum of colors.

The second Monet is "Venice, Palazzo Dario," which feels cool and refreshing to look at, with all that bright-blue water. I don't really remember seeing any Venice paintings by Monet before, but the fuzzy detailing in the water really drew me into it. If I have to pick only one city in Europe to go to to satisfy my travel goal for the list, I think it has to be Venice. What with the whole sinking thing (even though that may not be true anymore), it seems rather urgent that I get there as soon as possible. Maybe I'm just in the mood for delicately ornate architecture right now. Who knows.

And the parting shot is Renoir's "La Déjeuner des canotiers," or, "The Luncheon of the Boating Party," for the more English-inclined. Not going to lie, I am a bigger fan of Renoir's ballerinas (second only to those by Degas), but I bought this postcard because of Amélie, one of my favorite movies of all-time-ever. If you've seen it, you know it features semi-prominently in the film, with Amélie playing a semi-metaphorical Girl-with-Drinking-Glass. It's one of those beautifully complex paintings of people that I love, where every person is their own character, and you can tell just by the way Renoir has painted their faces that they all have a unique backstory and set of motivations that make them more enduring than just the luncheon scene itself.

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Sundries - Part 2

52. See a staged version of Angels in America.
61. Join the Foreign Service OR be taking significant educational steps (ie be in grad school) to do so.
64. Visit Atlantis.
72. Learn the dance from Dirty Dancing.
73. Write 101 letters to Washington.
74. Be a member of the live! studio audience of The Daily Show.
78. Accumulate 101 postcards.
80. Bake my own bread for a month.

Details

52. See a staged version of Angels in America.

It just seemed like the kinda thing a mentally-deranged sex-starved pill-popping housewife would do.

61. Join the Foreign Service OR be taking significant educational steps (ie be in grad school) to do so.

When I was little, I read Goodnight, Moon, and the Berenstein Bears, and, of course, every young girl's favorite, The Hunt for Red October. I wanted to be just like Jack Ryan when I grew up, and married to him, and have like ten thousand of his CIA-trained ass-kicking babies - while still making time for ass-kicking adventures for myself.

The next best thing? The State Department, which will, at the very least, send me abroad for slightly more legal adventures in foreign lands. I'm looking forward to my first hardship post in some tropical developing country, learning a new language and living in a completely new and different culture. I'm looking forward to moving on every three years.

I'll tell the truth. I'm really looking forward to the day when, after a long and faithful career of diplomatic work, I am appointed the Ambassador to the Federated States of Micronesia, where I will work in the embassy on the island of Pohnpei and not, as many people believe, on the isle of Yap.

And also Cuba. I'm hoping that when we reopen proper diplomatic channels with Cuba, I'll be able to go down and be a part of it. It seems rather... well, not glamorous, per se; it's not 1950s Havana or anything that I'm envisioning. I don't know what I'm envisioning, except that I think I really, really need to be there or somewhere similar or anywhere that is not here. More on this theme very shortly.

64. Visit Atlantis.

No, I don't actually think I can find Atlantis, and no, you don't get to know what this goal actually is.

72. Learn the dance from Dirty Dancing.

Um, yes. Just. Yes.

73. Write 101 letters to Washington.

Decisions are made by those who show up.

Complaints lodged: 3

74. Be a member of the live! studio audience of The Daily Show.

Another one of those we-always-talked-about-doing-this-and-never-did-it goals. I love The Daily Show and I will gladly sit outside its studio in New York for six or ten or however many hours, in rain, sleet, or shine, to get tickets. No specific date is set for this attempt, but I'm sure that I will be in New York on some weekday between now and the middle of 2012, so... yeah. Daily Show, woot!

78. Accumulate 101 postcards.

Being a college student, particularly one who moved around as far and as often as I did, it helps to separate one's possessions into those than can be easily and cheaply transported and those that cannot. After you've got your necessary, need-this-to-survive-on-a-daily-basis stuff packed, it feels good to add in some personal effects. My favorite ones are books, but that's not always a practical choice. Posters, too, are good to look at and are generally mobile, but sometimes you really just don't have the space for that tube in your suitcase.

Combine this conundrum with that of how to preserve your memories of your favorite works of art when your camera takes truly terrible pictures with the flash off, and you come out with my postcard collection. Right now, I have about 20 postcards of some of my favorite paintings that I can take with me wherever I go and transform my living space into my home. My goal is to visit enough museums and galleries that I expand this collection to include at least 101 such postcards. Whenever I obtain new ones (they will usually be in batches of between two and five postcards), I'll make a post here with scans of them under the secondary label "Postcards."

Postcards collected: 25

80. Bake my own bread for a month.

First, I should explain why this goal is not listed under creativity with the other "Adventures in Cookery" goals: simply, I already know how to do this. Instead of testing my culinary wits or making me learn a completely new set of recipes, this particular goal is a test of stamina and commitment. I know how to bake bread, rolls, and pastries of most every kind. I know my favorite recipe, a naan recipe that can, with no modification, double as a dinner roll recipe completely by heart. I'm by no means a locavore or invested in any way in the organic foods movement, but I do think it is fun and responsible to do simple things for yourself, especially if you already know how.

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