Horsing Around

I always told my students with creative inclinations to not compare their efforts with the GOATs [Greatest of All Times.] Maybe some time, but not with their initial efforts. However, I did suggest that they look at GOAT history, to see what choices the GOATs made along the way. 

I do follow that particular piece of advice in my own work, which I offer as a partial explanation of the evolution of Horsing Around.

When you look at the history of all the bigs in painting - Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet, Picasso, Cassett, O'Keefe, LeBrun, Basquiat - etc., etc., etc. there is one common theme, they experiment, they change, they evolve. Those shifts are often the openings forgers seek to exploit, e.g. Han Van Meegeren's fakes purported to be "early Vermeers." However, those shifts, I also assert, give us amateurs permission to do a little shifting on our own.

My Cranes images grew out of a desire to play with something uplifting and positive to combat the Perfect Storm I wrote about the other day. Horsing Around is a continuation of that general theme - and obvious composition. I believe I wrote about a time on our Italy trip when we were watching a Carousel getting removed from a plaza where we were taking a break. I found the horses particularly winsome and so snapped a picture:

The front horse stuck with me and became the theme piece in Horsing Around, which owes its structure to Cranes:

Each horse will be treated as a separate mini-composition. Following my normal process of creating a black and white cartoon:

And then adding color:

When all six are completed I will find myself, once again, face-to-face with the recurring background issue.

I'll let you know how that turns out!

All the King's Horses

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty together again.

-  Mother Goose

 

There are times when I need to remind myself that a "perfect storm" is a bad thing. Meteorological conditions come together to bring nature's might down upon we wee mortals who build our homes and dreams where, perhaps, we should not. And newsreels are filled with images of shocked people staring at destroyed homes and lives wondering how, or if, they will ever be able to rebuild.

A perfect storm has settled over America. If I need reminding I simply need to look at some news source - any news source - to learn of the most recently ravaged countryside. Our current perfect storm is not meteorological, it is political. We all see the world through our own unique set of lenses. Mine focus on education, art, the environment, and - as the husband of one, father of two, and grandfather of four - women, women's issues and related social concerns - including the associated impacts upon the economy. Sadly, without exception, those lenses see destruction, victims of the perfect storm.

The perfect storm is most clearly seen in the actions of two powerful figures current entrenched in Washington; one elected, one not. The elected entity is Donald Trump, a president who has proven time and time again that loyalty to him outweighs any concern for the impact of his policies on the nation. The unelected sidekick is Elon Musk, richest man in the world and poster child for all the rich, entitled, insecure bullies you may have encountered.

Together they are laying waste to much of what I hold dear individually and as a member of a cherished democracy. Whether purging entire departments, like education, or medical concepts like mRNA vaccines, or important societal realities like gender and diversity, or attempting to ethnically cleanse the various Smithsonian entities to foreground more purely American concepts, or similar inclinations for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Trump and his boy wonder, Musk are seemingly following a script unseen in a Western democracy since Germany in the late 1930s - an historic movement of whose salute Boy Wonder seems overly fond.

While professing to eschew the power of various "woke" movements Trump and Musk and their various sycophants are actually seeking to empower their own special interest group - the WWs - those who are White and Wealthy. Those of us who fall into half of that group simply by virtue of being born, gain no such natural membership into the second W. While much of the American middle class can be seen as "wealthy" compared to large portions of the world's population, compared to the Boy Wonder - richest man in the world - and Trump - chief billionaire wannabee - we are mostly paupers, concerned with the price of eggs and the possible impact of various "on again - off again" tariffs on our jobs, pensions or savings.

My concern is the fragility of the Humpty Dumpty of American democracy. Even many in the twin movements of MAGA and WW are concerned with the fractures being caused by a White House out-of-control. How long will it take to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? I fear that even should I approach my father's century mark, I may not see that day. I pray that my daughters and their children will bear witness to the repair of the nation, damaged as little as possible by the process.

There is Being There and Getting There

It is a phrase you often see on posters in high school students' bedrooms or college dorms, sometimes attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Life is a Journey - Not a Destination."

The hidden assertion, usually discerned by those who have outgrown those adolescent lairs, is - "That's only true if you don't know where you are going."

And it is fine, in high school or in college, to not know where you are going. Actually it would be strange if you do, or did. I had students change their major multiple times, and then after graduating with a degree in "multidisciplinary studies" say "Maybe I'll go to grad school, or law school." And what, assuming they could get in, would that change? The point is the first quarter century of one's life is actually a great time to savor the journey, and not worry a whole lot about the destination. These are the years when you can stuff your life into a backpack, get a Eurail Pass or some global equivalent, slip on a T-shirt with the Emerson quote, and wander off into the world.

But then eventually, you are surprised to discover that somehow you have stumbled into the seventh or eighth decade of your life and the Emerson T-shirt doesn't fit as well, or wouldn't if you had any idea where you has left it. The journey and the destination aren't as easily distinguished, or equally valued. The journey, "getting there", is now often radically different from the destination, "being there", and, as I am just now once again learning, "recovering from getting back from there."

So while the Emerson T-shirt might imply that "getting there" and "being there" are two sides of the same coin, nothing really can be further from the truth. When you ask people, those who have not yet retired, what they would like to do when they do retire one of the most common responses is "Oh, I'd like to travel. See the world, ya know?"

To further gild the stereotype, I would further assert that these may be folks who have never traveled far beyond their home town, state, or country. From that perspective, travel does have a nice ring to it. And truthfully, in many instances of "being there" is a lot of fun -  you see new things, you meet new people, you hear new languages  - there's just a whole lot to be said for being in a new place.

I would however, assert that "getting there" in the seventh decade is a far, far different experience than when the T-shirt was fresh.

Now, in the name of full disclosure, I need to report that I started this post sitting in the Munich airport having been bumped from our flight from Munich to Chicago last night and where we will spend the night in the strangely brutalist, maybe dorm?, that Lufthansa was willing to put us up in. It was not fun. Bad weather had delayed our flight from Florence here to Munich and Lufthansa didn't hold the connecting flight for us. 

But as we were waiting to get our overnight vouchers and so on, a very irritated woman was storming around the Lufthansa gate saying:

"I'm never going to come to Germany again! I'm never going to fly there again, never never never going to be here again."

She did have her point. Even with my semi-competent German, it was very, very difficult finding our way around the airport; contradictory instructions, wild gesticulations, pointing in many different ways which reminded me of one of my father's famous complaints about his two years trying to drive around Austria. You would ask for directions and the reply would be something like :"Gehen sie links ab und dann gehen sie gerade aus" which sorta means "turn left up here around the corner and then go straight ahead." But with no real clarification as to which corner you turned on and hence which street one was to follow straight ahead - which was further confused by slight jogs which could be seen as "straight ahead."

But I digress. We are now home, where I listen to Christine hacking and coughing her way through some virus we suspect she picked up on our delayed flight back to O'Hare. To continue:

So the seventh decade version of "getting there" also has a place for a backpack. But in this version it serves only to hold the various pills, potions, etc., that somehow have become necessary to everyday life. The second backpack - OK, roll-on luggage piece - contains the electronics necessary to remain in touch with where we are coming from, and to find our way around the places to which we are going. 

Which brings us to the other two monster piece of luggage deemed necessary. We were headed to two cities - Florence and Venice - one predicted to be cold, the other warm. And we had scheduled events both casual and formal. And, unlike the carefree and partner-free days of our youth, there are two of us. OK, so two more big suitcases, both under maximum allowable weigh - which does not automatically qualify them as being under maximum "liftable" weight.

Rather than go on with the inclination to "Oh, oh, tell them about the .  .  ." I am simple going to simply truncate Emerson and assert that, in the seventh decade the journey can be an incredible pain in the butt. A real pain in the butt - especially on 9 hour plane flights - which colors, but thankfully does not totally erase the delights of "being there." And there were those delights - the art, the architecture, the food, all of which were anticipated and lived up to the expectations. And then the unexpected delight of Carnival in Venice, and the "bucket list" experience at the opera at La Fenice.

But the travel calculus [a subject I never understood, but a verb I have always wanted to use] has changed. The question now becomes "What do you wish to experience in a destination that compensates for the discomfort increasingly associated with the journey?

At the moment, I am embarrassingly comfortable just being here. It's not that I would not like to experience other things - lots of stuff. But they now seem to fall into the realm of "Star Trek" desires. By that I mean if I could just have Scotty "beam me up" to those far away places with strange sounding names and beam me back to the comfort of home when I was tired, I'd go in a heartbeat. But right now just seeing a suitcase is disquieting.

So for the time being I will savor distance digitally - great websites out there! Maybe even dip my toe into virtual or augmented reality. Who knows, maybe in some lab somewhere they are working on a app that will allow Scotty to overcome Emerson and beam us up and let us treasure the destination without enduring the trials of the journey - leaving the backpack and the Eurail pass to the kids.

Crane Flight 2.0

I quoted Rembrandt in the previous post, yesterday? "A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished." Well, I need to expand on that a bit: "A painting is finished when the artist is afraid that if they do anything more to the painting, they will ruin it."

That is the case with Crane Flight 2.0. I was a little leery of using my "random swirl" process as the background for this version of Cranes. "Would the background become the foreground? Should the color palette for the swirls mimic the cranes palette, or be an independent construction? Doing what the colors tell me to do, as I usually do? Or should I bag this and try, as Monty Python suggests, 'something completely different ?'"

I opted to stop fighting with myself - just finish the painting for crying out loud!  So I did.

Here is Crane Flight 2.0:

 

Serendipity

 Sometimes you start out doing one thing that turns into another. I started out to explore a background for Flight of the Cranes, as some of you suggested. I did that using a process that I have used before. You start with what Cezanne called "a terrible and wonderful thing;" a blank canvas. In this case just a 9x12 sheet from a drawing pad. Then you take a black marker and let it swirl over the sheet awhile until you satisfied. Then you fill in a few of the spaces of the swirl, again until you get an idea of whether or not you might use the idea.

I had forgotten about the meditative space to which the exercise could lead. So what started as just a quick "one off" turned into a nice few hours with calming lines and colors that I apparently needed after an enjoyable but exhausting fortnight in Italy. Here is the result:

So I decided to go with some version of Serendipity as a background for Cranes. I'm immersed in that now - which has taken me back to the words of Jock Gault, my sculpting mentor in Raleigh some 40 years ago. Jock was a purist. When we began to attempt a portrait bust he insisted we sculpt the skull first, "How are you going to know where the muscles that shape the face go without the skull?!"

Anyhow, he also taught me that in any creative process you go through stages of loving and hating that which you are creating. The idea is to stop when you are in a "loving it" phase. As Rembrandt is said to have said, "A picture is finished when the artist says it is finished."

I'll let you know when Cranes 2.0 is finished.

Spring Break in Florence

[Being Part 2 of the necessarily incomplete reflections on our recent sojourn in Italy.] 

So we packed up our two mega-suitcases and roll-along carryons and headed off to the train station in Venice. Departure was a normal "hurry up and wait" procedure, but soon we were heading south to Florence where we had spent a delightful time at Hotel Brunelleschi during our first trip to Italy together some seven or eight years ago. It is a neat location, set in a converted church and featuring a Byzantine tower dating from the 6th century. But our luck ran out a bit here. Our comfy little place had gone upscale - but rather unevenly.

The website features spacious rooms with luxe accommodations. Those were apparently all taken when we checked in. No doubt spoiled by our rather palatial digs in Venice we felt a bit let down when we were shown, by an unfailingly polite staff member - why did the quote from My Fair Lady, "oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor," spring to mind? - to a clean, fresh room with almost enough room to swing a dead cat.

The room did feature a nice sized bed and a bathroom that could be defined as well-appointed. I waffle a bit on that description as the room and the hotel at large had apparently been redesigned by a bright young designer from one of Italy's hip design schools - the one's that turn out Lamborghinis, Paganis, Maseratis, etc. The problem was that the fixtures were so ultra hip that it was a challenge to figure out how to use them. For example, what do you think this is?

It is a faucet. You pull out the middle part, which is a lever, to turn on the water and then twist it clockwise or counter - I was never sure which - to adjust the temperature. The water then spills into this crystal-like container - manufactured I assume in the Italian equivalent to Rivendell.

The light switches were toggles that came in ranks of three which illuminated various sets of lights - seemingly in random order. 

 The elevators on the other hand were all glass, quite roomy, and moved smoothly from floor to floor. And the breakfasts were again excellent, lacking the egg cooker, but beating out Venice with a great selection of pancakes with maple syrup, and again a benign tolerance of my doing "carry out" to Christine. However, given the close quarters in our room, it should not strike you as odd that we came to spend much of our down time in the very pleasant bar before striking out to enjoy the city outside.

Timing had presented us with a few options during our trip. We had planned for Carnival in Venice and found the experience delightful. We had not planned for Spring Break in Florence and since there were no beaches to speak of, the kids, often of seeming middle school age and lead by teachers cum tour guides, flooded the streets. And these were streets that shared in a dance, strangely reminiscent of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Their dance partners were motorcycles, cars, trucks and electric scooters, all seemingly very late for an appointment somewhere else. Shudder. Look both ways - no, look all ways.

Fortunately, we knew where we were going and Christine knew how to get there. Tho' I must add in my own defense, that when I bombed out and retreated to the hotel for a map, my trusty iPhone map got me there easily - some 80 to 90 percent of the time.

For me Florence is really about two things, art and meat. First the art. Historically, Michelangelo and Botticelli are the ones that pulls us back. It is naturally The David at the Accademia that draws the crowds and deservedly so, I mean the big guy is really impressive - 17 feet tall and made from a single flawed piece of marble - and all that by a guy who never did practice versions, just started hacking away at a huge stone to "free the statue lurking inside."

And over in the Uffizi Galleries Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera [aka Springtime] both make a visual bucket list and we did them both.

However, it is the more hidden workshops and galleries in Florence that I find attractive. There is one on a street that I can neither remember or spell that duplicates carousel horses. A big lathe that has a reference rod that passes over a finished pony that guides a couple of cutting blades that carve the new horse. Later that afternoon we were resting in a plaza where a carousel was being packed up to move, I assume to another location, and I wondered if those horses had sprung from that backstreet workshop.

But who am I kidding, Florence means meat to me. Two items in particular. First one that is ubiquitous, "bistecca alla fiorentina," is a T-bone steak made from Chianina beef, a breed of cattle native to Tuscany, and is cooked rare, many places refuse to cook it any other way. We get our fix at Il'Latini, a sort of hole in the wall, but with long lines out in the street. A few images - trigger warning for vegans and vegetarians:

Then there is La Giostra that we refer to as the Prince's place, because when we went there on our first trip to Italy, the owner was an actual Italian prince. He was the very essence of an attentive restaurant owner, poured our wine, hand-grated truffle on our pasta, cared for us without hovering. We just loved him. He has passed but the family still owns the restaurant and we had a lovely time reminiscing with his daughter. And, of course, went back twice to get the grilled goat chops. 

As with the Chianina beef, we spent significant time trying to decide how one would describe these flavors - and decided you simply cannot. Color to the blind, music to the deaf; one could make a sincere effort, but one doomed to fail.

The rains set in for our last couple of days in Florence, and growing tired from our extended travels, we pretty much cocooned in the hotel, hanging out with Spritzes in the bar. The rain was an omen. Made our flight late out of Florence into Munich, missed the connector to O'Hare, stayed in a strange little hotel provided by Lufthansa and headed off to O'Hare the next day.

Really neat Lufthansa plane, comfortable big seats in extended economy, contained so leaning back or forward didn't intrude on the space behind you. Free drinks. Airplane food served with real utensils, but even Lufthansa couldn't make a silk purse out of that particular sow's ear. Watched a lot of video on screen with real full-sized headphones.

Good times, but glad to be home. Exhausted, not quite as young as we used to be. 🙂 it will take awhile to transition to life in this hemisphere.

 

Venice in the Rearview Mirror

 [Being Part 1 of the necessarily incomplete reflections on our recent sojourn in Italy.]

I read, somewhat ironically in a book about Venice, that everything that could be written about Venice had already been written. So let me proceed.

Venice is a city of windows. Centuries ago they might have been stain glass windows in a myriad of churches and squolas  - ornate guild halls. Today they define the endless, gleaming, ranks of various commercial entities. High end luxury outlets nestle against Michelin-starred eateries, corner bars and walk-up sandwich shops. All strung together by mask shops, glass and art galleries and kitsch tourist traps. Windows, windows everywhere nourished by millions of eyes.

And there are some interesting distinguishing characteristics regarding those eyes, and the faces in which they are housed. The majority of our time in Venice fell during Carnival - a mixed blessing. First, I must point out that Carnival is a very different critter than Mandi Gras in New Orleans or the similarity named Carnival in Rio; both of which border on the bacchanalian.  In Venice, Carnival is a rather sophisticated costume affair. Elegantly dressed figures in full medieval costumes parade the streets - you may rent your own finery at any number of shops - and then greet the dawn, perhaps as a gondola slides homeward on sable dark canals. While I am compiling a full reel to provide to the family - which you can request by dropping me a note - Here are a few more edited selections of the endless shots we felt compelled to gather:

Yes, it is both gracious, and incredibly crowded. While Venice itself can only boost of a modest population of somewhere between 50 and 70K, it can swell by an additional 120,000 visitors during the busiest days. Carnival itself brings in 3 million a year. During these influxes the streets, all delightfully auto-free but often tiny, are packed with folks doing the Venice Shuffle, feet sliding along but rarely approaching what your phone or whatever devise would register as an actual "step." And here I must admit to having made some gender-based observations regarding the Venice Shuffle. Women are relatively unfazed by the Venice Shuffle, and will occasionally come to a full stop in front of a particularly attractive version of one of the aforementioned windows.

A metaphor might be helpful here. Consider, if you will, the impact of a log suddenly getting snagged on the banks of a flood-swollen waterway. Nothing as overwhelming as the Mississippi or the Nile. Some waterway that is normally just a fair to middlin' stream, but quite respectable come springtime. Well, that log brings that whole side of the stream to a dead standstill as other hunks of flotsam and jetsam jam up behind it trying to bust through or find away around.

Now imagine that stream is a Venetian street at Carnival with a woman suddenly entranced and frozen before such a window. Chaos ensues, but with typical Venetian subtlety. The flood halts momentarily, then surges around them, leaving eddies of various degrees. And caught up in those eddies will be any guy who is accompanying the blockage: "What the h'?" he mutters, but then quickly gloms onto the closest wall and lets the stream rush past, a force of nature and/or Carnival. The phenomenon can be further exacerbated when the aforementioned window-gazer sees, reflected in her window, an equally entrancing window in the wall behind her and sets forth fearlessly - crossing the flood to gaze stolidly at that window. Use your imagination and your grown-up words.

But enough of street fighting - let me move on to two of the three neatest things about our stay.

I am intentionally leaving out the art and the architecture - both stunning and available on numerous online sites. But I must mention going to The Marriage of Figaro at La Fenice, the historic opera house in town. It was truly stunning. Of course the building takes your breath away - but the voices, the staging, the silly but delightful story. Really one for the bucket list. Look for images online - more than my phone could capture!

More prosaic but delightful in their own way were our our hotel and the food. Christine found our hotel, The Palazzo Pisani online. It was a classic old Venetian building on the Grand Canal. Upon checking in we discovered that we had been upgraded to a sort of suite on the top floor. The good news was that we had three large marble-floored rooms and a full bath all to ourselves. The main room contained a huge queen/king-sized bed, a desk, coffee table, large screen TV, and a lounge, with four big windows with little balconies looking out over the Grand Canal. Then there was a reading room with an expresso machine, sofa and a couple of chairs, and, a second bedroom with a queen-sized bed. Here take a look, first the main room and then the view out the windows:

[I go into such detail about the accommodations partially to compare them to the "four star" facilities we found in Florence. But I also feel compelled to mention that the staff in both places were incredible! Kind, accommodating, gentle. Need to send a bunch of folks from our "service industry" over there for some lessons!]

And now the food. Venice sits on over a hundred little islands in what is called the Venetian Lagoon off the Adriatic Sea. It is absurd to order any land-based meals here. Beef will get its just deserts when we head up to Florence. Here if it swims eat it, usually on top of pasta. We had things that go by the same name at home - Sea Bass, crabs, scallops, clams, salmon, etc. But they just tasted different, fresher, a "just out of the lagoon" flavor that was wonderful. And, of course, gelato, as different from what we get by that name at home as were the swimming thingies. And then of course there was the wine which we felt obliged to sample. There were the traditional "black rooster" vintages which we did splurge on, but then there was this "mico-vinyard" which produced a very tiny number of bottles, each numbered and signed by the wine maker! Yummy!

And then there were the breakfasts - included naturally. Heavy on the pastries and a nifty little boil-your-own egg station with cool little nets into which you placed your egg - scooping it out after the duration of your choice into one of those neat little European egg cups. And, of course, fresh fruit and a cappuccino and some type of juice on the side. And the gentle staff were all very understanding as I hustled various portions back up to the room for sleeping beauty. I mean I was taking the stairs!

Which leads me to what would I change about our little sojourn by the lagoon? The stairs. There were 60 of them leading to our aerie above the Grand Canal. I counted them - every time. I mentioned the incredibly chivalrous staff, who, upon observing that we were people "of a certain age" did inquire if we wished to use the "lift." I ventured it once. 

You entered using a different door and key from the main entrance to the hotel which gave you access to what I can best describe as a mirrored phone booth, maybe a touch smaller. Upon pushing the button to your floor - for us the top - the doors closed and with no further sound or indications of floors or movement, and after what seemed a very long time, the doors opened to an alcove around the corner from a large sitting room leading eventually to our door.

I am a touch claustrophobic, and Christine's picture appears in most dictionaries that define the condition. Stairs are good for you. Great cardiovascular workout. Enough said.