USA: Boston & Providence

Many years have passed since I’ve landed in Boston’s Logan Airport. It was quite unrecognizable. To cap off a perfect week that began with a face plant on concrete, I christened my arrival by doing the same to my cellphone waiting for an Uber. It tumbled from where I foolishly placed it on my luggage cart. It subsequently landed face down flat on the pavement leaving spiderweb cracks over three quarters of its surface. This was especially displeasing since I had been given a fresh phone just two months before.

The good news is that I saw my brother Buell and wife Margaret for the first time in two years. We had a mere 36 hours to spend together, but we managed to have some good conversation and a number of tasty home cooked meals. Frankly that’s worth its weight in gold to me given the time spent on the road.

We also went out for lobster rolls at Legal Seafood which is a time honored New England Tradition.

The morning after my arrival, I set out to get two of my teeth bonded, and have a dental cleaning. The bill was triple of what I would have paid in numerous destinations in Eastern Europe for the same quality work. $975 of absolute robbery. Now I know why the dentist came into the room wearing a mask.

He must have charged the same for the little cup of mouthwash as a shot of 100yr. old Napoleon Brandy. I’m not doing any dental or medical in the states in the future if I can help it.

Reunited with my brother Buell, writer, storyteller and salty seafarer.

One of my brother’s many pieces of nautical paraphernalia which includes a vast array of ship models.

 

 

                       PROVIDENCE

 

 

PETA – These animal rights fascists are at it again. Now they’re coming for your lobster! It’s a goddamn, bottom feeding crustacean for Chrissakes. Years ago these idiots tried to rename fish as “Sea Kittens” to make it seem so inhuman to eat them. I dislike cruel factory farming as much as the next guy, but PETA’s goals are so extreme as to force everyone into Veganism.

What many of you don’t realize is that PETA is against all pet ownership and domestication of animals. So get ready to kick your pets to the curb, and let all of the animals out of the zoos. Then cut loose all of the chickens and cattle, and prepare for Animalgeddon.

The Three Other Brothers – Craig, Eric and John. It’s complicated.

Everyone engaging in some online quiz show trying to win big bucks on their smart phones.

WEDDING TIME

The Beginning of Chris and Jessica’s Excellent Adventure

On with the ring…

…and meet the new Mr. & Mrs. Griffin.

Eric & Marianne – My brother and his lady.

Becky & Eli – My fun loving niece and nephew.

Craig & Renée – My other brother and wife. The two most skilled people on the dance floor. They really classed up the occasion with their adept moves.

 

 

 

                                        NEWPORT

BEAVERTAIL LIGHTHOUSE

 

TIDEPOOLS

Those black elements make for a cool shot.

 

 

DOWNTOWN NEWPORT – The weather begins to grow cold.

 

 

After a busy weekend the bride and groom take it easy while Eli snoozes alongside, as Heidi sans warpaint gives a peace out.

RISD – Rhode Island School of Design

RISD MUSEUM – This is a surprising world-class museum.

A beautifully designed and well laid out museum.

ROTHKO, Mark – Untitled – 1954

If you are only moved by color relationships then you miss the point. I’m interested in expressing the big emotions-tragedy, ecstasy, doom. 

Soft-edged rectangles glow and dissipate, hovering over this deeply saturated red canvas. Rothko explored variants of this composition for more than two decades, staining, blotting, and layering paint with delicate brushstrokes to build expanses of atmospheric color. Purely abstract, lacking hard lines, and with no identifiable narrative content, this work expresses the artist’s profound concern with the spiritual, symbolic qualities of color.

WARHOL, Andy – Race Riot – 1964

Race Riot features a photograph of a police dog attacking a peaceful civil-rights protestor in Birmingham, Alabama. The photo was taken for Life magazine in 1963by photojournalist and activist Charles Moore, who explained in a 2005 interview, “I don’t want to fight with my fists. I want to fight with my camera.”

The removal of this image from its original news-oriented context significantly changes our understanding of it. By cropping and silkscreening Moore’s image, Warhol distorted and introduced emotional distance, commenting on how mass-media exposure desensitizes us to troubling events. Race Riot used a photograph of a current event to create a work of art that timelessly reflects of racially motivated conflict and the abuse of power.

ANUSZKIEWICZ, Richard – Primary Hue – 1964

Primary Hue creates an optical illusion of nested squares in differing shades of red, yet only a single color underlines the radiating lines. The lines alternate green and blue as they travel from the center to the painting’s edge, causing a seeming transformation in the red background.

Anuszkiewicz is identified with the Op Art movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, as was Bridget Riley, whose work is also presented in this gallery. That movement emphasized the abstract use of geometric forms to develop dynamic, visually deceptive compositions.

POLLOCK, Jackson – Magic Lantern – 1947

One of the earliest of Pollock’s poured paintings, Magic Lantern reveals his tight control of a technique through which he covers a canvas with looping skeins of color. The free form automatist drawings of the Surrealists inspired Pollock in his development of a personal language of abstraction. Improvising with gesture and materials, he used a variety of available paints to create the hard, dense surface of this compact image, scattering it with carpet tacks to intensify its physicality. Unlike its later poured paintings, Magic Lantern has an intimate scale that encourages close examination of its construction. It was given to the RISD Museum by Peggy Guggenheim, the legendary American collector who had encouraged Pollock by exhibiting his work in her Art of this Century Gallery in New York during the 1940’s.

LÉGER, Fernand – Flowers – 1926

Intensely involved in the development of Cubist style in Paris, Fernand Léger developed a machine-inspired version that conveyed power through the use of mechanical and architectural components. His trademark vocabulary included the use of crisp outlines, bright colors, and densely packed tubular forms. In the 1920’s, he often applied his machine esthetic to still-life subjects. In Flowers, overlapping planes and flattened shapes press the composition’s elements against the painting surface to lock them into place in a static yet energetic grid. The curve of the vase and irregularity of the flowers’ sinuous stems suggest a poetic abstraction of nature amid alternating linear patterns and hard-edged blocks of color.

 

ADJAYE, David – Washington Skeleton Chair – 2013

PANTON, Verner – Heart Cone Chair – 1959

Verner Panton was a master of 1960’s “Pop” design. Unlike other Danish Modernists, who relied on natural wood, Panton readily used new materials in his colorful work. He often departed Copenhagen in his mobile studio, a converted Volkswagen van, to search for manufacturers to buy into his bold ideas. He created a distinctive legless cone chair in 1958. This departure from tradition caused a sensation, found an investor, and went into production. RISD’s cone chair features the addition of projecting wings, perhaps a humorous allusion to 18th-century wingback chairs. During the 1960s, Panton garnered international attention when he developed inflatable furniture and created a sleek stacking chair, the first produced from a single piece of molded plastic. He designed for a positive future, happily embracing forward-thinking forms, vibrant colors, and fantasy environments.

RIETVELD, Gerrit Thomas – Zig-zag chair – 1934

The remarkably simple appearance of this chair belies its complex dovetailed construction, leading Gerrit Rietveld to describe it as his “designer’s joke.” The four rectangular planes meet at angles, requiring dovetailed joints and reinforcement by screws and wooden wedges. Visually, however, the chair is cohesive and anticipates the single-piece molded construction of 1960’s plastic chairs. Rietveld aimed to design a functional chair reduced to its most basic parts and with minimal space displacement. As a prominent member of the Dutch De Stijl (The Style) design movement, architect/designer Rietveld adhered to the groups advocacy of pure abstraction and universality through reduction to the essentials of form and color. With just base, support, seat, and back, Rietveld’s totally deconstructed chair bears no resemblance to previous furniture forms.

PRIMMER, Joshua – Place Setting II

Ceramic, concrete, polystyrene, steel, IKEA table, silverware and napkin.

PEREZ, Lisa – What Gives – 2014

Blurring distinctions between painting and sculpture, What Gives presents both a two dimensional representation and a three-dimensional object that seems to float just in front of the wall. The black contours of the grid-like geometric pattern are echoed and complicated by the shadows cast behind it.

This work characterizes the practice of Providence-based artist Perez, who prompts us to consider painting as both a visual and a physical experience.

MATISSE, Henri – Still Life with Lemons – 1914

Matisse used vivid colors to render the simple forms and geometric background of this composition. An extended title,  Still life with lemons whose forms correspond to a drawing of a black vase upon the wall, points to intentional relationships between shapes. The pitcher echoes the curves of the plump lemons below, and its neck and base are repeated in the foot of the blue grass compote at lower left.

A book (titled Tapis, or Carpet) neatly aligns with the brilliant red wedge on which a lemon rests. The forms seem to float on the surface of this painting, unburdened by mass or by placement in space.

MONET, Claude – The Basin at Argenteuil – 1874,

The boat basin at Arganteuil, with its long promenade and terraced café, was a popular site for watching sailing regattas on the Seine. Monet set up his easel on an island across the river, distinguishing optical effects and textures with strategically varied brush marks. Using pigments direct from tubes and mixed on his palette, he evoked the bramble of grasses in the foreground with congested jabs of color. Horizontal dashes capture the water and the reflections of broadly painted sailboats, and tiny dark and light flicks mark a procession of plane trees.

RENOIR, Pierre Auguste – Square at La Trinité – 1875

This park-like square in the center of Paris is presented by Renoir as a theater of modern life and middle-class leisure, observed by two figures at the corner of a white balustrade. At right, a wide marble staircase descends from the church entrance, beckoning families to the flowerbeds and benches below. Renoir’s blurred brushstrokes lavish attention on the yellow-greens and shady blues of the intimate garden. He bathes the scene in a soft pink light that muffles the distractions of city life and reinforces the sense of a hidden oasis within an increasingly populated city.

MONET, Claude – A Walk in the Meadows at Argunteuil – 1873

In this glimpse of his wife and son in a flowering meadow, Monet captured the movement of light across the landscape. Highlighting a diagonal course of the grasses he juxtaposed their yellow-green hues with the complementary orange-reds of poppies in the foreground. He rendered the figures with short, notational marks and used soft, wide brushstrokes in the sky and middle distance to suggest the optical blur of an overcast day. In this informal view of figures in nature, Monet emphasized atmospheric sensations over traditional subject matter, anticipating criticism that “impressionists painted random views with self-invented technique.

MANET, Edouard – Repose – 1871

DEGAS, Edgar – Grand Arabesque, Second Time – 1885-1890

This sculpture was not intended for exhibition, but was cast in bronze after Degas’s death.

MANET, Edouard – Children in the Tuileries Gardens – 1861-62

In this oil sketch set in a public garden, Manet captures a trio of little girls in momentary stillness. Tilting their heads toward an older girl who gestures in their direction, they share the public space with an old man in a straw hat and a woman in a bright red headscarf. Manet records the mingling of different classes and defines their distinctive clothing with loose brushstrokes, rhythmically punctuating their activity with a screen of chestnut trees.

Paul GAUGIN – Busagny Farm, Osney -1883

VAN GOGH, Vincent – View of Auvers-sur-Oise – 1888

Paul CÉZANNNE – On the Banks of the River – ca. 1904-1905

Pablo PICASSO – Woman Seated with a Book – 1910

SARCOPHAGUS – Roman – 2nd. century CE