by John

At The Museum

Through the eyes of a contemplative photographer

A visit to an art museum can be a contemplative experience if one has time to be still. One is less likely to have this kind of experience in busy museums like the Louvre, the Duomo, the Met and MOMA than in smaller local galleries. A camera can help one focus on the here and now as long as one doesn’t click at everything one sees. It can help one pause and look below the surface of things. Here’s an example:

Person, early 2000s. Suh Se Ok (Korean, 1929–2020).
130.5 x 139 cm (51 3/8 x 54 3/4 in. Ink on mulberry paper

I’m alone in the gallery together with Suh Se Ok’s “Person”. It is mysteriously expressive: A cry for help, perhaps. Or an invitation for unity.
Back at home, I modify the image.

The image has clearly evoked something below the surface even if I’m not entirely sure what it is.

Other images are less obscure as I introduce some movement into them:

Lilian steps out of the space she occupied with seated sculpture into a new space in which she will engage with the somber abstract painting.

And again, below, the relationship between a human subject and an artistic installation stimulates an emotional response. Scale, color, and movement create a sense of foreboding.

Below is another photographic, a diptych. It tells a story combining past, present and future.

On the left, an older person sits between paintings of birth and death. The image of the crucifixion projects a narrative of suffering and redemption. It was the explanation that many of us were given as children. It speaks of suffering in the human condition and, even though we were taught about salvation, there is nothing in the image to suggest it. And so, she sits in silence at the foot of the cross.
The second panel in the diptych portrays a group of school children on a trip to the museum. There is movement. They are bathed in light. They don’t sit and ponder but run and explore. Perhaps they won’t be told the same stories with which we grew up. Perhaps they will write their own stories.

Let’s visit the Altes Museum in Berlin where the Neoclassical façade consists of a portico with Ionic columns and, on the steps in front of the museum is an 1858 bronze statue, The Lion Fighter, by Albert Wolff. I have combined two photographs to integrate the two ancient perspectives.

And in the Pergamon museum, a young woman is absorbed drawing one of the Ionic columns.

She is oblivious of the crowds around her, in the moment, at one with the ancient column whose form and beauty transcend time.
There is a different oblivion in the following photograph I took at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Their absorption in each other involves, perhaps, a mutual sense of transcendence that one sometimes experiences in an art gallery.

A museum experience may not always be profound, but later to dwell on the photographic image quietly for several minutes brings its own reward.

While thinking of color, I’m reminded of my aunt, Betty Woodman, a ceramicist, who nearly twenty years ago exhibited her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

On the left is part of a newspaper clipping from the time, and I created the panel on the right by superimposing two photographs, one I took at the vernissage, and the other taken in her studio.

Returning briefly to the contemplative experience in the museum, the following unedited image of a man reading the art label conveys a sense of respect for the subject.

The Lady of Carthage mosaic (4th-5th century)

Engagement is another museum experience when the viewer is drawn in by the subject.

The doppelganger effect of the reflection in the glass door creates the illusion of a detached person observing the interaction, the unity of sorts, between the sculpture and the viewer. This raises the issue, perhaps, of the tension between detachment and engagement in our own day-to-day lives.

Some experiences are difficult to express through photographic manipulation. Take, for example, the following painting:

Honors Rendered to Raphael on His Deathbed: Pierre- Nolasque Bergeret: 1806

The painting hangs in Oberlin University’s Allen Museum of Art. I was particularly struck by it, not because it is an excellent example of the late eighteenth century tradition of depicting deaths of historical figures, not because it depicts Pope Leo X and an assemblage of notable figures including Michelangelo and the writer Vasari, but because the painting’s nineteenth century owner was Joséphine de Beauharnais.

Napoleon purchased the painting for his empress Josephine at the Paris Salon in 1806, and she hung it at her Château de Malmaison. As I gazed at the painting, I became acutely aware of the fact that this same piece of canvas just three feet in front of me with all its layers of oil paint carefully applied by Begeret was admired by Joséphine more than two hundred years ago. It was as if she was standing alongside me, both of us looking at the same painting, two viewers unable to find any common ground for communication across the centuries but both silently contemplating the striking image together.

I’ll end this stream of consciousness posting with a few more photographs:

In the left panel, a ray of sunlight streams through the open door of my Montreal office many years ago. The right panel contains a corner of the waiting area.

Da Vinci’s Horse, Grand Rapids, Michigan

In the late fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci embarked on a project to create the largest equestrian statue of his time. But the bronze earmarked for this sculpture was repurposed for warfare. Centuries later, sculptor Nina Akamu revived the project, and in 1999 two casts were poured, one finding its way to Milan, and the other making its home in the United States.

Finally, the photographer wrestles an angel in the church of Xavier del Bac, the Spanish mission founded in 1692 by Padre Eusebio Kino, an Italian Jesuit who traveled from Europe to the “new world” in the late 17th century.

c

by John

A Brief Encounter

Joyce as a young woman

She shuffled slowly up the path
clinging to her walker
as a winter-ravaged Alberta pine
clutches a rocky outcrop by the lake.
Her name was Joyce.

Only scoliosis twists a person
into a gnarled old conifer 
bent by countless winter storms. 
She seemed old, silent, expressionless, 
as if there was nothing left to say,

Her sideways glance seemed almost sly,
her head bobbing to an inner beat 
that only she could hear. 
She drooled a little, the way one might 
when dementia loosens self-control.

Our paths crossed that sunny day
and I politely commented on the weather.
Then she told me she had been a teacher,
a musical composer, nurse,
published poet, and a belly dancer.

I listened patiently to her delusional story,
punctuated by tremors and twitches,
until she apologetically told me
that she couldn’t linger, or she’d be late 
for her Parkinson’s support group.

As she shuffled off,
I listened to the swish of her skirt, 
noticed the tilt of her hips, 
and, from some distant place,
heard the mesmerizing music
of the danse du ventre.







by John

Remembering Javelinas

Photographs at our Southwest Arizona home

Javelinas were frequent visitors to our home in Southwest Arizona. Some people think them as wild pigs, but they are actually members of the peccary family, a group of hoofed mammals originating from South America. Javelina form herds of up to 20 animals and rely on each other to defend territory. They use dry riverbeds and areas with dense vegetation as travel corridors.

This large male is agitated, perhaps by the presence of the photographer.

Javelina form herds of up to 20 animals and rely on each other to defend territory. They have a scent gland on their back, and animals from the same herd stand side-by-side and rub each other’s with their heads. Their scent identifies animals from their own and different herds

Newborns up to three months old are red-brown or tan and are called “reds”, live an average of 7.5 years. All Javelinas have very poor eyesight and may appear to be charging when actually trying to escape. They have a keen sense of smell that identifies people and pets. It’s best to keep a safe distance.

They need a water source for drinking and sometimes can be seen scratching for water in a dry river (desert wash). When available, they will roll in water and mud to cool off. During the summer months at our home, temperatures would often exceed 40 C.

Mountain Lion, Sonoran-Arizona Desert Museum

The only predator a large Javelina would fear in our neighborhood was the Mountain Lion.

This nighttime photograph shows a young mountain lion in a neighbor’s property with its prey. In this case it is a Roadrunner.

The following images may be gruesome for some. So, be forewarned!

Here is the ribcage and skull of a Javelina that a mountain lion brought onto our property one night. Knowling that the lion may return the next night and fearing for our pet dog, I threw the carcass into a ravine close to our property,

The next morning, I discovered that the remains of the Javelina had been moved from the ravine to a grassy patch near our house, suggesting that some coyotes had found and finished off the creature.

To end on a more palatable note, here is part of a multi-generational herd of Javelinas on a neighbor’s property

by John

Picasso and Paper

A photographic expression of the experience

Here he is, in front of his 1938 creation, “Women at their toilette”, a Surrealist work using collage and gouache mediums. This month marked the end of an exhibition on “Picasso and Paper” at the Cleveland Museum of art. The exhibit was a chronological overview of Picasso’s career and experimentation with paper over about eighty years.

Cleveland Museum of Art, Picasso and Paper Exhibition

There were nearly 300 works. One could view all of them, but there were too many to examine closely. So, we chose a few to spend time with. I took photographs, not to duplicate what we saw, but to try to capture the stimulation we experienced at the exhibition. So, here is “Women at their toilette”

I created a shimmering ivory tone for the above image to convey the “electricity” of this image that is now over eighty-five years old.

The following image, “La Vie” was painted more than 120 years ago and is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art permanent collection. It is flanked by Picasso’s study drawing for this work. He considered different groups of people and different poses before paining La Vie

Here is Picasso’s “The Painter and his Model”. But again, I have modified the image, superimposing two views of the work to underscore the point that the image is anything but static.

In the following composite, I overlaid a self-portrait that Picasso sketched of himself sketching a model onto a larger drawing of “The Painter and His Model”

And, one more variation on a theme: The superimposition of nine framed drawing by Picasso onto his larger “The Painter and his Model”.

Finally, here is an image that isn’t very different from how it appeared in the exhibition. Yes, the photograph has been cropped to create a sense of standing close to the image and entering into the beauty of it.

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the exhibition contained nearly 300 works. In this post, we have viewed only four of them through several different lenses.

by John

Some Thoughts in February

It has been so cold over the past few weeks that the birds haven’t been coming to our feeders. Like most Februarys, I find myself staring out of the window at the cold landscape feeling mildly depressed that winter seems never ending.

At this time of year, I seem to spend too much time standing at the window and looking out at the monochromatic bleakness. And my mind goes back fifty years …

…. to our first year in Canada when I took the above photograph in the frozen Ontario countryside. But then, there’s the realization that we felt differently about winter in those days.

Ice hockey on Lake Ontario

It didn’t take long for the children to learn to skate.  Here’s our son, Adrian, on the frozen lake in front of Kingston’s city hall.

We embraced winters back in the seventies, and even wrote some poetry:

But, now in one’s mid-eighties, standing by the window, looking out at the falling snow, one’s mind goes back to warmer winter’s past.

On the cloudless days of February in Southern Arizona, we hiked the foothills of the Santa Catalina mountains not far from home where the shimmering golden Cottonwood trees were the only sign of winter.

And, before that, during our time in Jamaica, February was when the tourists came to escape winter.

Port Antonio, North Coast, Jamaica

And we would find a secluded place to escape the tourists and swim in the warm waters of the Caribbean.

Alligator Pond, South Coast, Jamaica

And we would talk about when we swam in the Indian ocean and of our native South Africa when February meant long summer days on the most beautiful beaches anywhere.

Robberg Peninsula, Garden Route, South Africa

And, because it was still summer in February when we returned for a vacation twenty years ago, we hiked at 3000 meters in the Drakensberg Mountains.

Sani Pass, Drakensberg, South Africa

But these are just memories that, if anything, make today’s North American winters seem even colder. And, looking out the window, the snow is still falling, and I am reminded of my Irish grandfather and of the final paragraph of James Joyce’s short story, The Dead.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

And suddenly I notice a bird, a junco, perched on the feeder pole. Life goes on.

by John

Housebound

This morning it was -3 F (-20 C), unusually cold for Northen Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie and a good day for staying at home and enjoying some of the art and artifacts that we’ve collected over the years. One of the benefits of blogging about these things is that it makes one look more carefully at them and appreciate them anew.

The Dancers, Gene Pearson, Harmony Hall, Jamaica, 1985

We bought this 60 cm high ceramic sculpture 40 years ago in Jamaica when we lived there. Gene Pearson was one of the earliest students at the Jamaica School of Art, returning in 1970 to teach ceramics for ten years. Based in Kingston, his work has been exhibited widely including at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and UC Berkeley in Berkeley California. We were drawn to his signature Nubian masks and heads for which he became known internationally. We had mixed feelings about the strange superimposition of two heads one body. Yet, the individual heads were so expressive, we couldn’t resist acquiring the sculpture.

Nearly forty years later and 2.500 miles distant, we were attracted to another ceramic piece of art.

Born in 1963 in Keams Canyon in the Navajo Reservation, Arizona, David John is best known for abstract Indian symbolism painting, sculpture, and ceramics. Soft-spoken and humble, John admired his Grandfather, a medicine man who instilled profound, spiritual beliefs in the young Dine. John spent much of his childhood attending healing events-from seasonal rituals to sand painting ceremonies where he often participated and was instructed by the most revered members of his culture.

John is specific about his use of color. Like most native American tribes, the Dine (Navajo) associate particular colors with the four directions: yellow-the west, white- the east, turquoise-the south, and black- the north.

John’s characteristic messenger is the Yei Be Chei, an ethereal messenger to the Navajo. Since exact replication of the sacred icon is taboo, he modifies the image to the satisfaction of his tribe’s spiritual leaders. According to collectors, the alteration does not affect the impact of the painting’s message.

Looking around the house, we find more ceramic works but in very different genres.

Tea Pot, a gift from Aunt Betty in 1969.

In the 1970’s, Betty’s work took a new turn as she deconstructed the traditional ceramic household vessels. “I make things that could be functional, but I really want them to be considered works of art.” And, increasingly it seemed, she moved from three-dimensional objects to flatter two-dimensional ceramic pieces.

Betty Woodman, Vermisage, MaxProtech Gallery, NY., 2006

Betty Woodman’s evolution from artisan to fine artist as illustrated in the two preceding images, culminated in a retrospective in 2006 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its first for a living female artist.

Elsewhere in the house, we find a vase, the work of a Canadian acquaintance from thirty-five years ago.

Margaret Hughes, Kingston, Ontario, 1990

Here is a good example of what Betty Woodman was talking about: The deconstruction of a household item that, while still possibly serving a functional purpose, is an expressive work of art.

And, while on the subject of ceramics, I should include another object that we have sitting on a mantlepiece.

‘Cawl” or soup bowl, Llanelli Pottery, Wales, 1839 – 1922

The bowl, a gift from a grandmother, was likely made in the early 1900’s. ‘Cawl’ was the staple diet for families in the country. It consisted of a clear soup made of boiled meat, vegetables and chopped parsley. The bowl has a pleasing form, decorated with attractive sponge imprints. The pottery made in the factory at this time was of poor quality, tending to ‘craze’ into fine cracks.

I hear the furnace turn on, reminding me of the cold outside, and looking out the window, I see starlings at the feeder, undeterred by temperatures below zero.

by John

Art and Artifacts at Home

I noticed this little wood carving in my grandfather’s home in South Africa in the late 1940’s. He told me that it had been carved by a prisoner in a concentration camp. I didn’t know what he meant, but I thought the carving was beautiful. The figure was originally holding a long-stemmed pipe, possibly a meerschaum that, together with the apron, suggested a European artisan.

I wondered if the little figure had been carved by an Afrikaner prisoner during the Anglo-Boer War when the British interned 40,000 Boers in 45 tented camps for Afrikaners and 64 camps for Black Africans. About 25,000 detainees, mainly women and children, died of disease and malnutrition. I wondered if something as beautiful as the small carving could come from such harsh conditions.

Then I remembered that during World War I, South African troops invaded neighboring German South-West Africa where German settlers were rounded up and sent to concentration camps in Pretoria. Perhaps the carving had been done by a German settler thinking of home in Europe.

And then I remembered reading how, during World War II, the battles of North Africa resulted in about 93,000 Italian Prisoners of War being brought to South Africa. Arriving in 1942, they were employed in the local farming communities as laborers, builders, gardeners, and mechanics. Although they weren’t imprisoned and they worked collaboratively with South Africans, they were far from home and, perhaps, one of these Italians carved the little figure.

One will probably never know the truth behind the carving, but it doesn’t really matter. It is a continuing memento of a beating heart in a foreign land far from home. A memory carved in wood.

There are other carvings in our home and, only now do I see some common themes: Here are two pieces of Navajo folk art created by Dorothy V. Wilson in the style of Antonio Johnson in that part of New Mexico that was the home of the ancestral pueblo people in the seventh century. The figures are carved from cottonwood, using an axe to form a rough shape, and a pocketknife to create the detail. The surface is painted with house paint, watercolors, and a fragile white clay used by the Navajos to paint their bodies.

The Navajo people had been forcibly removed from their homes in Arizona and New Mexico in 1864 and sent on the “Long Walk”, an effort to “civilize” them and assimilate the Navajo into white American culture. The “Walk” was a series of forced marches that included the capture of thousands of Navajos and involved the destruction of crops and the killing of animals. It resulted in hundreds of deaths from exposure and starvation.

And here we have direct descendants of those persecuted people producing something beautiful claiming a long-denied respect.

Another example of recent indigenous art, but with brighter colors and certainly more whimsical designs are carvings by the Zapotec people concentrated in Oaxaca in Southern Mexico.

Known as “ Alebrije”, the carvings they are made from locally sourced copal wood. They are carved using hand tools – machetes, chisels, and knives. The works above are those of Juan Carlos Santiago of Arrazola, a small village in Oaxaca, Mexico. Most Zapotec Indians still speak their own dialect, and many don’t speak Spanish. Their life is agriculture based with some hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild foods.

In a future posting I’ll share a few ceramic, pottery and woven works of art that we’ve collected on our journey over the years.

by John

Art and Artifacts at Home

Aphrodite in our home – Venus in the Getty Museum

Aphrodite is the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty whose Roman doppelganger is Venus.

In Naples en route from South Africa to Canada in 1974

In the background of this picture is Vesuvius, and it was in Pompeii where we went without lunch to buy our little statue at the start of our married life together.

The word aphros means “foam” which, according to the Greek poet Hesiod in 700 BC, was produced by the severed genitals of Uranus after his son Cronus threw them into the ocean, and from which Aphrodite was born.

The castration of Uranus, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy

The birth of Venus, Boticelli, 1496

Ten years later, when Lil and I gazed at the well-known Birth of Venus at the Uffizi in 1984, we were oblivious of her gruesome origin and countless affairs with both gods and mortals. For us, Aphrodite (Venus) was simply the goddess of love.

These three very similar statuettes portray Aphrodite. The original was probably the small terracotta sculpture in the center that is now in the British Museum and dates back more than 2200 years. The bronze on the left, also in the British Museum, is an equally old copy. Our little statue is a fine art reproduction and, although there must have been hundreds produced around the time we bought it, the beauty of the original is faithfully conveyed.

Aphrodite was the only beautiful presence in the scrubby little furnished apartment above a convenience store that was our first rented home upon arriving in Canada.
She was wrapped, packed, transported and unpackaged fourteen or fifteen times as we moved from apartment to house, from city to city in Canada and later to Jamaica where she watched our armed robbery but was herself left unscathed. Then to the United States to watch the children grow. Then back to Ontario followed by Quebec, only to return to Ohio followed by Arizona, then back to Ohio where Aphrodite, now fifty years old, is quite at home in our retirement community.

Is love ever out of place?

by John

Art & Artifacts At Home

A few random photographs taken on a cold winter day within the space of about two minutes

An eighteenth century toleware tea tin from New Hampshire

A crudely carved African woman, of no great value. But we enjoy her presence in the house

A chair back. Sometimes there is beauty in simple things.

Lord Kitchener, Boer War general among other things

A Chokwe mask

A corner of the house

Into the bedroom

Turning towards the living room windows, I snapped a few bird photographs. The subfreezing temperatures brought many of them to our feeders.

Nuthatch

Red Shouldered Hawk

Junco in the snow

Cardinal among the oak branches

Territorial imperative

by John

The Apartment

My girlfriend’s mother wore a yellow housecoat.
It took the place of sunlight that never found its way
into the block of concrete, they called home:
One bedroom and a porch for five, six with me,
crammed around the table in the entranceway
to talk and drink coffee.

An opening to the living room was blocked
by a velvet rope looped between brass poles
suggesting you should wait to be seated,
but the wait, you knew, would never end.
Beyond the barrier, white pile carpeting
still bore the imprint of vacuum tracks curving
under a polished coffee table decorated with doilies,
starched white to match the lampshades,
pristine in their protective cellophane.
And the sofa, its virginity intact, sat proudly
under plastic covers in which it had been delivered
six years before. Above hung two photographs,
Kennedy and Roncalli, President and Pope.

“They’ll probably never visit”,
my girlfriend’s mother said, her housecoat glowing
like a priestly garment in her holy of holies.
“But if they ever did, I’d be ready.”