Monet on Christmas Day

Monet has been in my thoughts today. Primarily about light. Light from my window here in Astoria. Start with the light from the stars at 2 am. Then the moon descending across the sky until it sets and the stars became even brighter. The overall brightness of the sky increased with the sunrise and the glow of pink on the clouds. Then the sun reflected from the water and now the pink of the sunset. It's been almost the full cycle. During all of those changes I thought of Monet and his various series – the haystacks, the cathedrals, the waterlilies. I'm most grateful that the Portland Art Museum has one of Monet's Waterlilies.

And for me this particular painting is one of the best. Waterlilies has a level of abstraction that attracts me. And yet I know without looking at the title that the subject is waterlilies. How much better can that be? The color is vibrant. Some say that was because Monet's eyesight was deteriorating from cataracts and that intense hues would have appealed to him. Even without cataracts they appeal to me. Look at it closely and you can start to see fish swimming in the water. Those little circles are most definitely from fish. Ask any person who fishes and they'll tell you. Like all of the pieces of art featured here in the last year, to truly appreciate the wonders of this painting, you'll need to see it in person.

Since I'm not near the museum, on this Christmas Day my present to myself was watching the light reflected from the Columbia River here in Astoria, Oregon. Different light and different water than Monet's but light and water nonetheless.

Voice from the Couch: Nice choice of river photos. I like the verticals of the piers with the verticals from the Waterlilies.

Ruth Bernhard ~ Seeing Lifesavers in a Different Light

What to photograph today? Some of us walk the streets. Others take photos of loved ones. Some of us are drawn to flowers. Ruth Bernhard was drawn to light early on. Armed with her first camera and with little money, she evidently bought a package of Lifesavers and some straws. This was back in 1930 when she was twenty-five years old.

Here in her own words are how her career started...

“I became a photographer by accident, after I came to the United States. When I arrived in 1927, I had no job, no profession, and no money. My father supported me while I learned English, but in 1929, he announced that it was time for me to have a job. An acquaintance by the name of Ralph Steiner, who worked for the magazine The Delineator, was looking for a darkroom assistant. That is where I learned to be a photographer. However, the job itself was very uninteresting. After six months I was fired. I used the ninety dollars I received as severance pay to purchase an 8 x 10 view camera, a tripod, and other darkroom equipment. With only pennies left, I purchased straws and Lifesavers at the dime store, which became the inspiration for my first two photographs”.

So there you have it. You just don't know where life will take you. From a package of Lifesavers, Ruth Bernhard lived a full life, all 101 years of it. To end the week of Ruth Bernhard here on Fifty Two Pieces, I'm reposting her Recipe for Life.

Michelin ~ Boots

Some people have suggested that the family in Jean Michelin's painting were waiting to time travel. Set apart from their surroundings it is as if they're in a portal to another century. Think about them the next time you see shoes left out. Who belongs to them? Where did they go? Why did they leave behind the shoes? Could the shoes belong to the father from this week's painting? If they do, then he has travelled to Portland -- they have been sitting for several days on NW Thurman between 23rd and 24th. Socks included. Keep looking around, you may see the father from the painting on the streets of Portland.

Louise Nevelson ~ Arnold Scaasi, Arnold Newman and Edith Sitwell

If you were friends with Louise Nevelson, you could be fairly certain that any night out with her would include scavenging the streets. Arnold Scaasi, the renowned dress designer who has clothed the very rich and famous, recounts such events in his interviews and books. In his book Women I Have Dressed, he devotes an entire chapter to his client and friend Louise Nevelson. His memories include dining with Nevelson and her companion Diana MacKown at a restaurant near Nevelson's home on Spring Street. While there Nevelson waved to her many Mafia friends, men who made certain she was taken care of in those perilous days of the sixties and seventies near Little Italy. Like with many other dinners and events, including those when they were being driven in Scaasi's car, Nevelson would command that the driver stop the car, she would exit, pick up bits of wood and other detritus. With the help of all of the other occupants including Scaasi and his driver, the bootie would be loaded into the trunk and carried away to Nevelson's Spring Street home.

Scaasi will always remember Nevelson's love of black. In addition to his home on Central Park South, he owned a home in the Hamptons, a natural shingle mansion of sorts. One weekend he invited her and MacKown to spend some time away from the city. Lured by the promise of lobster (she loved that from her days in Maine), she was holding court one afternoon and cheerily proclaimed that Scaasi's house would look ever so much grander if it were painted black. Within the month, Scaasi had implemented that suggestion and became the talk of the neighborhood. He did love his all black mansion though.

Arnold Newman, the world renowned photographer, had a special affection for Louise Nevelson. His photograph of her is on the US Postal Service's stamp honoring her work as a sculptor. The photo on the left was taken at a fundraiser and shows Arnold with Louise's granddaughter Maria Nevelson. Maria is also a sculptor and had met Arnold when she interviewed him about her grandmother. Louise Nevelson's family relations were strained so Newman was able to provide her granddaughter with an insight into her that Maria was unaware of. Especially poignant was Newman's story of the time he photographed Nevelson at the Whitney in 1980. This was the day she learned her brother died. They continued the photo session even though Louise was visibly upset. Maria stated "I had never seen my grandmother cry, always strong and composed." Juxtapose that with "My work is delicate; it may look strong, but it is delicate. True strength is delicate. My whole life is in it...." and you get a clear picture of Louise Nevelson's inner psyche. The photo on the left is of Newman, Maria Nevelson and Newman's photo of Louise Nevelson.






Knowing what someone reads is another insight into their personality. Dame Edith Sitwell was one of Louise Nevelson's favorite poets. Her Façade suite of 1967 was created in homage to Sitwell who died in 1964. It is comprised of twelve prints that involve photography, silkscreen, and collage on paper and acetate sheets, each including a Sitwell poem. To the right is the image that was created for Lullaby for Jumbo below.

Lullaby for Jumbo
Jumbo asleep!
Grey leaves thick-furred
As his ears, keep
Conversations blurred.
Thicker than hide
Is the trumpeting water;
Don Pasquito’s bride
And his youngest daughter
Watch the leaves
Elephantine grey:
What is it grieves
In the torrid day?
Is it the animal
World that snores
Harsh and inimical
In sleepy pores?
And why should the spined flowers
Red as a soldier
Make Don Pasquito
Seem still mouldier?
Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)

Japanese Screens and Aerial Photography

If the screens of The Shrines of Itsukushima and Wakanoura can be thought of as a bird's eye view of that part of Japan, I decided to take a look at what the aerial photography of Japan looks like today. Yann Arthus-Bertrand's website is full of aerial photographs from all over the world, including Japan. All of the images are stunning. However this one of landscape filled with Japan's new agriculture caught my eye for a number of reasons. I could easily see, patterns moving across the frame with each having its own textural qualities. Arthus-Bertrand has this to say about these Greenhouses between Nara and Osaka.

Since the 1960s, Japan has undergone important changes in agriculture, including the development of dairy farming and fruit production, and the increase in industrial production of meat. These changes are reshaping the rural Japanese landscape. Vinyl greenhouses for the intensive farming of fruit and early vegetables have multiplied in the suburban areas of the main cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. They have even extended into such traditional rice-growing areas as the plain of Nara, the island of Honshu, and even Okoyama, to the point of supplanting rice altogether. Traditional crops such as blackberries, tea, wheat, and barley are diminishing to such an extent that Japan must import large quantities of wheat, barley, and silk. Just 30 years ago, Japan was the largest silk exporter in the world.

Japan's dietary changes are affecting not only the people but also the landscape. How would a screen painter paint these scenes? It's easier for me to see an abstractionist take on that project than a painter from the 17th century.

Cubes Cubes Everywhere

Check out this picture LaValle took on the way to the museum this morning. And yesterday she stopped us in front of a baby blue neon sign on an old building in Northwest, so she could shoot that. She has this big black purse full of cords from headphones and ipods, iphones, and she's got lipstick and wallets and books in there. It's like being with a magician, because every once in a while she pulls something like this out of her purse and emails it to me on the spot. So I'm at my desk, I'm sitting here considering what to post and boom- she blasts me with these 3 complete and one incomplete cubes. What a photo, I think, and the subject line of the email it's attached to simply says "from this morning."

Every morning is like this though, I think. Every morning is a puddle with a reflection if you just stop and see it.

Childe Hassam Visits Paris - Red Shoes, Green Shoes

Seeing the ballet shoes in yesterday's post inspired me to find this image of Childe Hassam's wife, Maude Hassam, having a petit dejeuner in the Hôtel de l'Empire, a moderately-priced thirty-room hotel in Paris, France. Centrally located in Paris it catered to an American clientele. Hassam was on his fourth trip to Europe; it had begun in June 1910. He and Maude had travelled through England, the Netherlands and on into Belgium before arriving in Paris by the second week in July. The city, the artist wrote to his friend J. Alden Weir, was "a huge Coney Island-noisy, dirty." Cleanliness aside, the Hassams' room seems quite lovely. We see the blue-white patterns of the interior of the bed, the red tones of the outer canopy and the vivid green-orange texture of the room's wallpaper. Looking in the mirror on the left, it does seem the room is not too very large. Their night clothes are on the chair in the foreground. Black dress shoes are at the foot of the bed. And for me the most memorable item -- red slippers. Click those slipper/shoes and get transported back to New York.









Admittedly these green pumps are part of the 21st century but they and their owner who was sitting in Manhattan's Bryant Park would have likely drawn the attention of Childe Hassam.

The Dancer

Last year the Portland Art Museum* brought us The Dancer; Degas, Foraine and Toulouse Lautrec. When I saw Degas' tutus up close I found a new respect for his work. Nothing more than speckled dots of light on frothy clouds of crinoline, but magical. The tutu was begging to be painted by an impressionist.
We have this print "A Dancer Adjusting her Dress" by Degas in our collection. It's a pastel on paper from 1885. He did more than 1500 representations of dancers.

I too have been inspired by the dancer, as seen in this photograph of my niece at ballet practice six years ago. I no longer remember which feet are hers, this is the only photo on the negative contact sheet that doesn't show her face. It is also the one I most experimented with in the dark room. I have yet to perfect the portrait photo, the one that takes two subjects, both the face and the light.

Photography to Impressionists and Poetry is History

I've just read the article Poetry Don't Love History No More, by J. Dennis Robinson. His theory is that poetry and history have been happy bedfellows since the dawn of civilization but in our present society the cry for instant gratification replaced our attention span and appetite for epic verse. This is too bad, he says, because there are some fine stories in poem that you won't find yourself moved by if read in the style of a history book. I suspect the Impressionists felt similarly when the photograph was invented. They were not about to give up the epic poetry of painted visual representation because something simpler could be done. The Impressionists took on the challenge the photograph created; to do more than capture the outward appearance of things. In an attempt to capture emotion and the inner life, many artists often felt their work was incomplete, this is especially true of Monet and Renoir.
A contemporary critic Theodore Druet said of the Impressionists “Winter is here. The Impressionist paints snow. He sees that in the sunlight, the shadows on the snow are blue. Without hesitation he paints blue shadows. So the public laughs. Roars with laughter.”
Of course the photographer has a task, to see what is there, but is the patience to examine every hue and every shade of color required? She learns to frame, to wait for or search out the light, or set the lighting, but does she read light like an epic poem, taking days and weeks at a time? Does she read it in shades of blue? Does she know it that well?
I've posted a picture I took last summer from under a cherry tree, where I sat for an hour waiting for a bird to come to a branch low enough for me to capture him with a cheap point and shoot. The afternoon was still. I needed the mission of capturing an ordinary bird to get me to sit there long enough to remember I sat there. Childe Hassom wasn't part of this fast paced immediate gratification society, he took the time to paint New England Country Road, in the painting the slow movement of an old man on a country road is a reminder of the time painting takes. The half second halt of a bird in a cherry tree, the reminder that shooting a photograph takes but a second.

The Light Is Different

Wherever you go, the light is different. It's different at any time of the year. Childe Hassam, and the other Impressionists knew that. They would set up canvases and paint each one of them at different times. That concept of light was driven home most decidedly when we were in Stockholm several years ago. The time was autumn. The days were shorter but the shadows were longer. And in those seven days in Stockholm the shadows were always longer. What I found each day when the sun would appear was that it never rose above what we would have considered four o'clock here in Portland at that time of the year. Four o'clock is the perfect time for making images with your camera whether it is film or digital. I loved those days in Sweden, long walking days filled with the golden yellow of its fall. In actuality it was the fall of the heritage of myself and my husband, otherwise known as "Voice from the Couch". Bless him, he thinks of himself as being all Swedish, but he's only half as am I. But those halves must have constituted a whole in the minds of the locals. They consistently addressed us as if we were one of them and knew where they wanted to go when we didn't know much more then "hej".

The Window

"Photography, by its nature, deals with particulars -- with specific things and the light that bounces off them."
A. D. Coleman

From the article, A Poetics of the Quotidian: George Tice's Paterson Photographs

I am going to shed even more light on the subject by admitting that my husband John took this photo.

Childe Hassam – New England Country Road

Childe Hassam is known as an Impressionist painter. A charter member of the Ten, he painted in France for three years in the late 1880's, returning to the United States where he lived in New York City. Here in Portland, we know that he visited Oregon twice as the guest of CES Wood, one of the founders of the Portland Art Museum. Hassam was known for his paintings of New England and New York City done in the Impressionist style capturing the fleeting of effects of sunlight on his surroundings. This painting is of a New England Country Road and hangs in the American Galleries next to Hassam's Mt. Hood and Julian Alden Weir's portrait of CES Wood.

In celebration of light, this week's posts will be of Amy and LaValle's photographs. George Tice, photographer and PAM's guest lecturer on photography this last weekend, spoke about light and that in the case of photography by its nature deals with objects and the light that bounces off of them. Starting the stream of photos is this shot from Luang Prabang, Laos. The colors are very similar in both the Hassam and the photo. It's all in how the light hits each of them.

Carrie Mae Weems -- Portland Native

Carrie Mae Weems' work focuses on gender and racial issues in our country. Her first body of work dealt with the journey of her family to Portland where she was born in 1953.

"My work reflects my desire to understand my ex-perience in relation to my family and my family's experience in relation to black families in this country.... I am fascinated by the distances between people in the same family, between men and women, and between ethnic groups and nationalities through the use of language derived from experience. There's a certain language that comes out of sharecropping and cotton farming, that comes out of the way men and women, women and children, and women and women share experiences. That's the vitality of language."

She has continued to push the envelope of photography producing many different series and venturing into video to produce pieces such as "Italian Dreams" in which she walks with her back to the camera through the hallways and gardens of Cinecitta. Cinicitta is the studio in Rome made famous by Freerico Fellini. Being a feminist Weems has love/hate relationship with Fellini and in the video challenges his denigration of women.

Many of Weems series reflect her anthropological and folkloric training in her academic studies. When she moved from Portland to San Francisco after high school she intended to study dance. To support herself she took jobs in the garment industry and became politically active. She received her first camera as a twenty-first birthday present and it's as if that was a prophetic gift. In 2005 she received 2005 Distinguished Photographers Award from Women In Photography International one of many awards she has received for her photography since the 1980's. Her education includes degrees from the California Institute of Arts in Valencia and the University of California in San Diego. After receiving her MFA from San Diego she entered the Graduate Program in Folklore at the University of California in Berkeley.

Her series include themes around slavery, life in Cuba, and the Changes in Beacon, New York with the emergence of DIA in that community.