Monday Smiles – 11/10/2014

Our weekend started early with a Friday afternoon trip to the Huntington Library in Pasadena.  The website for the library says that, The Huntington was founded in 1919 by Henry E. Huntington, an exceptional businessman who built a financial empire that included railroad companies, utilities, and real estate holdings in Southern California.   Huntington was also a man of vision – with a special interest in books, art, and gardens.  He began his career working for his uncle Collis, who was an owner of the Central Pacific Railroad.  Money builds money and he eventually built his own financial empire which included the Pacific Electric Railway and Newport News Shipbuilding.  The mansion that is now the centerpiece of the Huntington Library was completed in 1911.  The guide for the library casually mentions that in 1913, Henry married the widow of Uncle Collis.  She was his age and shared his interests in collecting, the guide says.  Unmentioned is the fact that His divorce from his first wife, Mary Alice Prentice, birth sister of his Uncle Collis daughter, in 1910 and marriage to Arabella in 1913 after Mary Alice’s death shocked San Francisco society.  I wonder if ever slipped and called his new wife Auntie in bed?

Sacred Treasures

Basilica of the Sagrada Familia

I’ve been home from our trip to the Mediterranean for a little over a week.   I’m back on California time doing California things (today Muri and I went to lunch at the Corner Bakery).   And this old brain is starting to put in perspective the sights we saw.  Perhaps nothing stirred me more than the churches, cathedrals and basilicas, particularly if you allow me to count the Sistine Chapel.   While the duration of our trip didn’t allow us to tour many museums, we did get a whirlwind of the Vatican Museum, which holds an amazing collection of art, both secular and sacred.   Walking through St. Peter’s Basilica, I had a short but interesting philosophical discussion with my friend Ron.  Essentially what he said was that he’s bothered by the vast wealth the Church possesses and that makes it hard for him to appreciate the art and antiquities.  I suggested that most of this was acquired in the distant past not by the modern church but that belies the fact that nearly €30,000,000 a year in admissions to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is being used to finish the cathedral instead of help the poor.  And that outside the lovely Church of Santa Croce in Florence’s Piazza di Santa Croce, there were countless poor selling tchotchkes or outright begging.  My friend. Ralph, back home in Socal had the same thoughts.  It would be a lot easier for me to appreciate the art if it were in a library or public museum, he said. Looking online, I see there many people who question whether the Church should have such wealth when people are starving.   There’s a particularly stimulating discussion on AskaCatholic.com, here.

Friday Favorites – 9/12/2014

It is almost 3:00 pm in the afternoon.   On Friday.   And once again, I’m having trouble coming up with a Friday Favorite.   Oh, I’ve come up with a few ideas but upon searching the Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog archives, they’ve been done before.  After almost four years … 201 posts … I think this well is dry.   It’s not that there aren’t things I like enough to post about, I just don’t like them enough to call them a Favorite.  So, I’m making an executive … maybe an executive editor … decision.  This will be the last Friday Favorite, leaving only one theme day on Bud’s Blog, that being Monday Smiles.  It’s one thing to run out of favorites … running out of smiles would be a sad day indeed.  So this will be a Friday Favorites retrospective.

Roy G Biv

red

orange

yellow

green

blue

indigo

violet

Easily Distracted

I’ve probably said it before here on Bud’s Blog but I’m going to say it again.  I am easily distracted and it sometimes drives people crazy, particularly if we are outside.  We’ll be having a serious conversation and I’ll catch a flash of color in my peripheral vision … and I just have to look.  Oh, yes, and comment.  Look at the color of that flower, maybe.  Or, Look it’s a male goldfinch.  People who know me may glance in the direction of my find to shut me up, then go on with what they were saying.  People who don’t know me may just keep on talking.  I’m used to it.  Now, since as Laurie Tarken says in an article on CBSnews.com, “I think I have ADHD” is the line of the year–or maybe the decade, I suppose I should wonder.   But no, I don’t think so.  I can be very focused when I need to be and besides, I only exhibit three of the nine signs of ADHD she lists in her article (she says there’s no need to call my MD unless I have six).  And no, it’s not that I have particularly uninteresting friends, either.  I actually have an assortment of very interesting friends and they must find me interesting because they put up with my distractedness.  A study done at Harvard suggests that easily distracted people are more creative, so I”m going to go with that.  Not ADHD, just Easily Distracted.  And creative.

Friday Favorites 5/23/2014

I love the smell of linseed oil.  Like many smells, it is linked closely to memories like the smell of my mother’s oil paints when she enrolled in painting classes while I was in high school.  Linseed oil is made from flax seeds and because it is a drying oil, it is used as a base for most oil colors.   No, the smell of linseed oil is not my Friday Favorite but it certainly leads there.  As my Mom was learning to paint, she took the time to show me what she was learning … I learned to scumble a blank canvas, how to mix colors both on the palette and canvas, and to apply paint with both a brush and knife.  And for about twenty years, I painted intermittently.   I loved oil painting for more than the smell of the paints.  I liked it that the medium was forgiving of mistakes … I could paint over them or just scrape them off with a palette knife.   I loved the texture of the paint on the canvas, particularly when applied with a knife, and the richness of the colors.   And, of course, I liked it that it seemed to come naturally to me.  If I were asked, What’s your best art medium? I’d answer, Oils.   Yet, I haven’t done it for years.  For me, an oil painting is a long term project, one that requires a space where canvases can be left up while they dry or while I decide what’s next.  I can do a watercolor in a day or two, although there are certainly more paintings that turn out poorly in watercolors than in oils.  There’s just more space in my busy schedule for watercolors, although these days, writing seems to take precedence.

Dark

Eclipse by Older Eyes

Friday Favorites 5/9/2014

I think that some people would say that, for a man, I love flowers just a little too much.  For some reason our society does not regard liking flowers as an especially masculine trait.  If you listen to the local sports talk weenies, you’ll hear them urging you to call 1-800-FLOWERS to send Mom a bouquet for Mother’s Day but for Father’s Day it’s tool or a fancy camera.  Of course, once Dad has that fancy camera, you may catch him in the garden, taking pictures of (gasp) flowers, since their colors often make for stunning close-ups.  And, of course, artists like Monet and Van Gogh painted flower for that very reason.  True, the same weenies who think that a man shouldn’t love flowers often see art as not very manly either.  If I listened to those guys, I’d be a dull man indeed.

Framed

I have been a closet artist for perhaps twenty years.  No, I don’t paint in the closet … that’s where I store my works, in piles and in artist’s watercolor pads and an occasional left over frame.  Yes, a few paintings have found their way to the walls of my office and several hang in our Little House.  A portrait I did of my three grandkids as a Christmas present hangs in my daughter’s house.  But for the most part, my art is confined to closets.  Occasionally, I feature something here on Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog.  But I was in Micheal’s Arts and Crafts the other day and they were having a two for one sale on frames.  I decided I would start framing some of my work.  The plan is to create a gallery in our front entryway, not so much to show our (millions of) visitors my art but to show myself it deserves a better fate that residing with the printer paper and staples in my office closet.  Here’s a mock-up of a gallery using the first five I’ve framed.

My art is coming out of the closet … to reappropriate a phrase that these days means other things.

Red