“Ever since I can remember, I’ve been troubled by the state of things.” That’s how Mark Bryan begins his artist statement. I read it after looking through a couple dozen images of his work, and it tied some things together for me.
Bryan’s work spans politics, popular culture, social commentary, and quiet contemplation. He says he usually starts with a beautiful landscape but can’t leave it at that. His subjects are by turns funny and mischievous and troubling and destructive. He’s thoughtful and respectful, even loving, in his work, but not sentimental. He manages to understate even in bizarre pieces.
The originals of much of the work at his portfolio site have been sold, I am delighted to see. He also makes prints available. When I started this entry, I wanted to compare him to another painter I also love, but Bryan deserves his own entry. “Apart from all the trouble we cause ourselves, I believe we are immersed in a powerful and beautiful mystery,” he says. All the most observant realists are passionate romantics, too.
Google has just launched a service hosting images from LIFE magazine, back to about … forever!
“Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.”
You can also browse by people, events, culture, and more, or use search terms.
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Oddly concurrently, Listverse recently published a haunting list of the last known photographs of - mostly - well-known people.
Other entries include Einstein, Monroe, Princess Di, and of course Hitler. (And Anne Frank.) Each item includes the circumstances of the photos and their discovery.
The incomparable Goopy is beginning a new Flickr feature: Monkey Monday! Lucky for us, he’s starting early!
See more wonderful illustrations of animals and their kin, the simple pleasures of life, strange new characters, and food for thought - and more at the Goopymart Flickr stream.
Flickr is having load problems - which means that just about all the images on my blog are inaccessible. They hope to have things smoothed out soon. I hope they do, too!
Update: Yay! They did!
The other day I overheard someone quoting “really like your peaches, wanna shake your tree,” and it’s been going through my head ever since. Really just because it’s funny. Then I saw this article in the New York Times about William Eggleston’s work, illustrated with the photo above, which now looks even more wonderful to me than usual.
Eggleston took pictures of “nothing” and “nobodies” in color when art photography was very serious and very monochrome. He also did this in the Mississippi delta. Now that the country is engaging in an extra helping of hand-wringing over regional divisions and, here in California, a new crisis of civil-rights, his intimate, loving photography of a deep South in transition is helpful and humanizing.
More about Eggleston at the Eggleston Trust site.
I’ve been taking a lot of bike rides at lunchtime this year. I nip out to Fort Point and back - about 10 miles round trip. Sometimes I bring a camera, because there are lots of birds on that route, but sometimes all I have is my phone - which almost did the job on this partly cloudy, drizzly day, when a rainbow stretched from Alcatraz to Fort Mason as I rode back to the office.
Congratulations to Senator - President-elect - Obama!
I am at an old boyfriend’s parents’ place. They’ve died, and I’ve inherited everything. He and I are no longer speaking - we were never all that close, and we don’t have anything to say. As I walk through the house, I can’t think why I’ve inherited.
The house is very beautiful, with simple lines and lots of glass walls. It is at the top of a steep hill that is thick with complicated rabbit warrens, all whitewashed stone and clay and glass. None of the houses have any surfaces that are more than one floor up from the earth, but because the hill is so steep and the houses so thickly built, there is a sense of a massive, towering edifice, with floors connected by narrow alleys and stairways so steep they are more like ladders.
My mother comes to visit me, and we are at the bottom of the hill when there is a flood advisory. We rush up the hill, and we talk about the house, which she hasn’t seen yet. When we get to it, my old boyfriend is inside. He has made a cup of tea and is watching the floodwaters rise in the distance below. We do not speak.
My mother and I start going through the rooms of the house, culling out things that don’t quite match with most of the contents of the various rooms. I am packing things to give to my old boyfriend.
When I look out the window again, it’s night, and I look through the glass roof into the sky. It is dense with stars, as in a developing country that cannot afford to have light pollution. You can clearly see the outline of the lower part of the African continent, with a completely thawed Antarctica balanced on its cape, curved up into the sky like an enormous breaking wave.
Several years ago, I found a portfolio of work by Bri Hermanson and fell in love with her viscerally effective work. Political, social, literary, epic, she’s used her woodcut-like technique and wonderful sense of muted, blocky color to tackle the World Trade Center bombing, the phenomenon of McDonald’s, and, recently a very quirky Tarot deck. (Go look right now. I’ll wait.) I just happened across this tonight, in an old blog entry of hers:
She made it for the New Yorker cover contest earlier this year, and I, well, I wish I had seen it then.
The city calls for green. The green calls for civilization.
I have been pretty tired this week, getting back to work and finishing processing my pictures, so I’m really only halfway through the last batch. My last full day in China involved a stop in SuZhou, a beautiful little town with at least 9 formal gardens. We spent a couple of hours in the largest one, UNESCO World Heritage Site the Humble Administrator’s Garden (Zhuozheng Yuan) [Wikipedia] [my pictures at Flickr]. I am in love with these dense mixes of nature and architectural detail. More in the next few days.
