It's an honor to be here!

Magnet #903 - W. S. Burroughs Adding Machine

I went on an impromptu DC family roadtrip a couple of days ago - 5 hours down on Thursday morning, 5 hours up on Friday night. So much fun!

Friday's itinerary included the "Design for the other 90%" sustainable development and the Da Vinci Inventions exhibit at the NatGeo Museum, the National Archives, the East and West Wings of the National Gallery - all before 1:45. And then American History museum and the Basilica by the time we left at 6.

I've never done NatGeo, but I plan on going back for any other exhibitions they have. The Da Vinci was totally cool, but man, all I could think of was how many of the inventions we saw Da Vinci use in the movie Ever After. (Shut it - you know it was a good movie.) It's scary though, cuz when you see his work, you have to wonder how unique his mind was to invent precursors to half of the machines we use now.

Learned a couple of new things at the Beatnik photo exhibition at the Gallery. They exhibited Allen Ginsberg's personal photos, complete with his personally handwritten captions to tell us the backstories. Amazing. I didn't know that Ginsberg and Burroughs (the grandson of the inventor of the adding machine on this magnet) were together, and lifelong friends. I didn't know they were pals with Jack Kerouac. Going through those halls, I really had to resist the urge to throw on a black beret, light up a cigarette, and snap my fingers.

I bought this magnet at the Archives - leftovers from a previous Patent Office exhibit. But, how cool is this drawing for the original adding machine?

The best part of the Archives though, wasn't the Declaration, or the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, or the Louisiana Purchase or Emancipation Proclamation - or shoot, even the Magnet Carta of 1297 that was shoved in the corner (even though it's older than our national documents by a good 500 years).

Nope. It was this little boy, about 5 or 6, and his very loud outdoor voice reverberating through the echo-y Archives Rotunda, telling the security guard - I'm HERE to see the DECLARATION of INDEPENDENCE!

And then in a much softer voice, he told the guard, It's an honor to be here! And promptly stuck his face in his mother's skirt.

Very sweet. Very humbling.

Seeing the whole picture

Magnet #710 - Gallen-Kallela's Lake Keitele

Ya'll know how I bought that magnet set from the National Gallery in London, the set that has a bunch of insets of famous paintings, and then I spend hours tracking down the name and artist of the paintings, by a sheer matter of guessing?

Heh. Success. I have found that magnet set, and they totally list what painting's whose. So fun! Or rather, really convenient, not to have to look through a thousand pages of the National Gallery's online collection. Not that I don't love doing that, too.

Anyway, I'm always amazed when I pull one of these magnets, and actually look at the full-on image. It's always interesting the places they thought to crop in on. This one was fairly obvious, but when you see the full image, it's amazing.

This particular painting's done by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, called Lake Keitele, which is, according to the wiki, is Finland's ninth largest lake, and is situated right in the middle of the country. This photographer caught this image of the real lake at 3am, and it, too, is just breathtaking.

Anyway, I picked it for today, not because I was about to draw some deep Jack Handey thought about being able to see the bigger picture in our lives, and how this, too, shall pass, but really I wanted to because when I saw the full image, I just had to share.

You can see the Monet influences there, and it's just so darn beautiful, I love it.

Courtyard de Hooch

Magnet #577 - The Courtyard of a House in Delft, by Pieter de Hooch

So I've been holding on to this one, because I wanted to use it for an antivamp and/or Buffy/Angel post - granted, it's daylight, but you can't tell me that Angelus wouldn't have totally bitten the heck out of this chick lurking in the doorway.

But, curiosity got the best of me, as today I was determined to find out what this painting was.

Whew. So I spent a goodly amount of time trying to figure it out. Seriously, that's the last time I throw away the backing for magnet sets. Thank goodness I remembered that it was from the National Gallery in London.

And yay for the National Gallery having such a wonderful search site for their collection! It's amazing! You can search by artist, or decade - or if you don't know which - you can just search their entire collection. Not that I did that. Really.

Anyway, I have to say, it was almost a needle in a haystack, especially if you take into account that this is the painting in its entirety. Oiy!

In the end? I found it where all good things are found. In the little shop. No joke. I started searching their prints for sale. Heh.

de Hooch was part of the whole Delft School, and painted this piece in 1658. You can just make out the signature to the left, in the cornerstone. There's a whole explanation for the painting, but this half of the cropped image is meant to be the mistress of the house. I do like how she's looking out into a lovely clean courtyard, but behind her doors, is so much more of her story.

I saw a couple of explanations for the inscription above the doorway, but I like this one from the Gallery best, as it mirrors my mood today:

This is in Saint Jerome's vale, if you wish to repair to patience and meekness. For we must first descend if we wish to be raised.

The Cycle of life

Magnet#489 - Escher Cycle

This is one of the magnets I bought from the Pomegranate folks at BEA, who licensed it from M.C. Escher estate...it's his lithograph called Cycle.

I know next to nothing about M.C. Escher, and it's kind of a shame, but my earliest memory of his work was seeing them as dorm posters on sale at the stationery store on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. But from what I gather, he's known for his lithographs and woodcuts and mezzotints - mostly mathematically inspired. Well, that's my problem right there - math does *not* equal joy. Heh.

Apparently, he's also known for his work being impossible constructions, with wonderful architectural explorations in planes and infinity. Supercool - I suppose one could spend hours just looking into one of his works. Oddly, I wondered why I hadn't seen his work in any galleries, so I looked up where his work is, and it seems to be spread around the world - the Escher Museum in The Hague, National Galleries in DC and Ottawa, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Huis ten Bosch in Nagasaki, and the Boston Public Library. Looks like he's my next artist exploration in DC. Heh.

I particularly like this Cycle piece because it closely matches my mood of late. When I was young, people used to talk about the rat race, and I had this image in my head of people all over the world (on different time tables), waking up, leaving their houses, getting into their modes of transit, working their jobs, coming home, going to sleep, and starting all over again - en masse, like little drones. And nothing ever got accomplished, really, no real goal except to clock the most mileage on our little human bodies.

I just realized that this image closely resembles my vision - the little guy leaves his house at the top of the stairs, and as he descends, he slowly loses his individuality, and joins the dozens of carbon copies of the 2-dimensional figures at the bottom, with his house behind him, and the real (3-dimensional) world of nature behind his house at the top of the magnet.

Well, that's quite maudlin, no? What can I say - it's hard to live up to my name some days. So, here's a happier thought to end this magnetpost:

This work is called Cycle, I suppose, for a reason. So imagine...this little guy in this painting does get to go back up the stairs every day, back to his home and family and become a 3-dimensional guy again...and I bet, every once in a while, he even leaves his house from the other side, and gets to go frolic and play in the hill and dale behind his house.

Yes. I said frolic and play.

And hill and dale.

That's kinda happy-making, no?

The measure of a chair

Magnet #431 - Van Gogh's Chair and Pipe

Ok, so for as long as I've had this magnet from the London's National Gallery, I thought it was really just an inset/cutaway of the chair in Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles.

I loved that painting, because it was on the cover of a desk calendar from the Van Gogh Museum that my first boss at this company gave me. I remember, because it was the best desk calendar I've ever had design-wise, and I've spent the last 11 years trying to find that exact calendar layout. No, I'm not even joking.

Turns out, this chair, is actually Van Gogh's Chair and Pipe. (Seriously, there was some major magnifying of both paintings on my part to verify. Heh.) It's kinda cool on its own, I guess - especially now that I know that Van Gogh painted it as a companion piece to a chair that he painted for Gauguin, as a representation of the vast difference between the two men - as artists, and I'd bet, as men.

It's odd thinking about a chair being the measure of a man. I mean, these days people sit in myriad chairs all over the place - at home, at work, commuting, etc.

But, if I were to think about what my favorite chair would be, it'd be a big, soft ploppable number, where you can burrow down into it and stay for hours and hours. And it'd be blue. With blankets. And have a tv with cable, an overflowing DVR, and DVD player in front of it and maybe the remotes, some chips and chocolate beside me.

None of this straight-backed, woven seat crap. Heh, sorry Van Gogh. Nice painting, though.

Here's something else superodd. I just randomly picked this magnet for today. It wasn't until I started to write that line about my first boss here that I realized - today's my 11th anniversary at the same company. Huh. Odd that I should be thinking about that, on today of all days.

Symbol me this

Magnet #113 - Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait

I've dubbed the front of my refrigerator my own little magnet art gallery - paintings and other classic pieces of the grand masters. There are quite a few, and we'll get through them all in time.

But, look, I wasn't an art history major, so I'm going to keep these entries as short and sweet as I can, mainly because:

1. There's a part of me that thinks that the grand masters really shouldn't have their paintings on magnets. Like if Van Gogh knew I had any of his work on a magnet, that he'd likely cut his other ear off.
2. Honestly? While I love art, and think it's beautiful to look at and marvel at the skill it took to paint it and whatnot - I can't stand when people stand in front of the painting and try to dissect every. little. thing. that the artist was thinking. Sometimes, a bowl of fruit really is just a bowl of fruit!

Having said that, van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, which I saw at the National Gallery in London has some weird aspects to it. Like for years, they thought that it was the portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini guy and his wife Giovanna Cenami in their Flemish bedchamber. But then, they found out that the couple was actually married 13 years after the date on the painting...and hello, like six years after van Eyck died. Do what?

Now they think it's actually the guy's cousin, and either his first or second wife. Really. The painting was done in 1434. It's ummm, 2008. Does it really matter who the guy was? I'm just askin'. Honestly, I just thought it was a pretty damn good painting, no matter who the subjects were.

Oh, but then there's like all sorts of stuff about the symbolism: like how the dog's the symbol for how they wanted kids (maybe it was just a pet), or like how she's looking down and nearer the bed and farther into the room and he's nearer the window and looking directly at us that it's a symbol for gender roles (maybe she likes standing on the right and he likes the breeze from the window), and how she's wearing green symbolizes hope (maybe she loved the color green), how the one lit candle in the chandelier is the Holy Ghost (maybe the lighting was better with one candle).

But, you can read all that here, in the surprisingly robust wiki for it. Actually, I'm not kidding - read the wiki, it got some pretty intriguing some of the symbolism they've come up with for this painting...and how there's controversial views about whether or not it's a memorial painting or a wedding painting, and why they're wearing winter clothes when it's spring. Oh! And they actually show the detail of the writing on the wall, and the two people reflected in the mirror.

As for me, I'm thinking if I wanted a short blogpost today, I should have chosen that bowl of fruit over there on the fridge.