THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY

Canyonlands National Park

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:12:00 +0000

Zion Canyon National Park

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:33:00 +0000

Capitol Reef National Park

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:28:00 +0000

Bryce Canyon National Park

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:30:00 +0000

Goblin Valley State Park

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 09:45:00 +0000

To understand the scale, check these two people:

Arches National Park

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:52:00 +0000

Christiania

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:28:00 +0000

Rural Oregon

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:18:00 +0000

Grave Creek covered bridge was built in 1920, and restored several years ago.

Victorian house in the town of Drain. Note the lovely, homogenous second-growth forest, in the background. Only some 3% of Oregon's old-growth forests remain.

Clear cut and second-growth. Did I mention that only some 3% of Oregon's old-growth forests remain?

Mellow elk at Dean Creek.

When I spotted this, the sunlight light was perfectly centered on the dead tree. By the time I had clambered down another dead tree, which was the quickest path to the shore, the light had shifted. File it under "what might have been."

Cannon Beach. Night.

Cannon Beach. Morning.

More lovely, homogenous second-growth.

Luzern

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:36:00 +0000

Luzern is somewhere close to paradise. In the 14th Century, it helped lead central Switzerland to independence from the Hapsburgs. Today, with good reason, it is a popular tourist destination.

Behind the town is the 7000 foot Pilatus.

The posh waterfront.

The KKL, or Culture and Congress Centre, was designed by Jean Nouvel, and opened in 1998.

Carved into the limestone in 1821-1822, the Lion Monument commemorates the Swiss mercenaries who died in the service of the French King Louis XVI, including those killed in the French Revolution. At the time of the French Revolution, mercenary work was considered a respectable trade by the Swiss, and 40,000 of them were serving in foreign militaries.

The Glacier Garden is a modern museum on the site of some impressive remnants from the last ice age.

These striated rock formations were carved by the flowing ice. Some of the boulders weigh tons, and were carried from many miles away, being smoothed and rounded as they were tumbled by the ice and water.

Fossils embedded in rocks.

Melting water would seep through cracks in the glaciers, and flow underneath, gathering sand and pebbles, the pressure from the ice pack creating vortices with velocities of well over a hundred miles an hour, which carved these potholes in but a few years.

The museum itself is inside the 19th Century Amrein home.

Modern displays, such as this one, explain geological and archeological evolution.

On the boat to Vitznau, and the 4230 foot Rigi.

Some views from Rigi.

Back in town, the Kapellbrücke was built in 1333, but much of it was meticulously reconstructed and restored after a 1993 fire.

The old town.

The Spreuerbrücke was built in 1408, and has interior paintings by Kaspar Meglinger, from 1635. The two foot bridges over the Reuss River connect the old town center to the larger modern town.

The Rosengart Collection is a museum containing the marvelous modern art accumulated by father-and-daughter art dealers Siegfried and Angela Rosengart. Among its many works are over 125 by Paul Klee (many quite small, and brilliantly detailed) and nearly 50 by Pablo Picasso (including some very dramatic late pieces).

On Pilatus.

This is me. Um. Behind the camera. Taking the picture of the guy up in the air...

Back in town.

Thames Night

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:17:00 +0000

Thoughts For A Sweltering Summer Night

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 04:39:00 +0000

Cannon Beach, Oregon

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:45:00 +0000

Amsterdam: History And Art

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:07:00 +0000

Amsterdam means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but to me it is the city of Rembrandt van Rijn. More on that, but first the modern city.

And the old city.

The Oude Kerk was built from 1300 through the 1460s. The Calvinist iconoclast rampages of 1566 led to the destruction of the church's altars and its sculptures of saints.

The view of the nave, from the choir.

The figures on the misericords of the choir stalls wear clothing styles from 1480, so it is thought that they were carved that year.

The ceiling.

The great wood pipe organ was completed by Christian Vater, in 1726.

Rembrandt's wife Saskia was buried here. They already had lost three of their four children, at very young ages, and the artist was devastated then to lose his wife.

The Royal Palace and the Nieuwkerk.

The Nieuwkerk was closed for restoration work, so this is all we saw.

The Rembrandthuis was the home and studio of the great artist, from 1639 to 1658, at which point his dire financial state forced him to leave. It also includes a fine collection of his brilliant etchings.

The kitchen.

Many of his greatest pieces were painted in this studio. His assistants prepared his paints and canvases, and the room was filled with various objects which he would incorporate into his works.

Not far from the Rembrandthuis is the Nieuwmarkt.

The Waag was built as a city gate in 1488, but became the Weighing House in 1614. It now houses a restaurant.

By the Seventeenth Century, the triumph of Protestantism had liberated Dutch artists from Catholic Church strictures on subject and style, although the iconoclast movement reversed the dogma, at times forbidding depiction of many religious subjects. But this meant a flowering of the exploration of secular matters, and because every wealthy Dutch family wanted itself immortalized on canvas, Dutch financial prosperity saw a proliferation of artists and artistic schools.

If the Renaissance had been largely about the discovery and perfection of the depiction of visual realism, such realism largely had been depicted in stasis, or near stasis. There was little attempt to show these perfected forms in movement. With Seventeenth Century Baroque art, and at times to great excess, visual realism came alive and took flight. In Protestant Holland, however, such depictions of movement remained relatively subtle and restrained, and Dutch art is all the more gracious for it. You would have to move south, to Belgium, to see the tumbling, twining, twisting forms of Rubens and his followers.

The Baroque also was about explorations of the play of light, and the Dutch, more than anyone, took Caravaggio's revolution and mastered it. The Rijksmuseum is one of the world's finest, and among its many treasures are numerous Baroque masterpieces.

Among the great works in the museum is the 1628-1630 The Merry Drinker (or Jolly Toper), by Frans Hals, the great portraitist of middle class Haarlem. Hals uses an almost impressionistic technique to create a visceral sense of the man's teetering drunkenness.

H.W. Janson:

Everything here conveys complete spontaneity: the twinkling eyes and half-open mouth, the raised hand, the teetering wineglass, and-- most important of all-- the quick way of setting down the forms. Hals works in dashing brushstrokes, each so clearly visible as a separate entity that we can almost count the total number of "touches." With this open, split-second technique, the completed picture has the immediacy of a sketch. The impression of a race against time is, of course, deceptive. Hals spent hours, not minutes, on this lifesize canvas, but he maintains the illusion of having done it all in the wink of an eye.

The Rembrandt collection includes the Landscape With A Stone Bridge, and some of his most famous works, including what many consider to be his masterpiece, The Night Watch.

Janson:

His famous group portrait known as The Night Watch, painted in 1642, shows a military company assembling for the visit of Marie de' Medici to Amsterdam. Although its members had each contributed towards the cost of the huge canvas (originally it was even larger), Rembrandt did not give them equal weight. He was anxious to avoid the mechanically regular designs that afflicted earlier group portraits--a problem only Frans Hals had overcome successfully. Instead, he made the portrait a virtuoso performance of Baroque movement and lighting, which captures the excitement of the moment and lends the scene unprecedented drama. Thus some of the figures were plunged into shadows, while others were hidden by overlapping. Legend has it that the people whose portraits he had obscured were dissatisfied. There is no evidence that they were. On the contrary, we know that the painting was much admired in its time.

Other works include a contrasting pair of self-portraits, the first from 1628, and the second from 1661. Rembrandt often painted himself, and it often was because he couldn't afford to pay a model. His self-portraits are brutally honest, with no attempt at vainglory. They also reveal why I consider him to be one of the handful of greatest ever artists: his humanity. It's not only that he depicted people with such intense tenderness, but that he captured their souls with an almost supernatural vitality. When you look into the eyes of one of Rembrandt's portraits, you feel that you are looking into a living, breathing being.

Also in the museum is another great group portrait, from 1662.

Helen Gardner:

In Syndics of the Cloth Guild, representing an archetypal image of the new businessmen, Rembrandt applied all that he knew of the dynamics and psychology of light, the visual suggestion of time, and the art of pose and facial expression. The syndics, or board of directors, are going over the books of the corporation. It would appear that someone has entered the room and they are just at the moment of becoming aware of him, each head turning in his direction. Rembrandt gives us the lively reality of a business conference as it is interrupted; yet he renders each portrait with equal care and with a studied attention to personality that one would expect to be possible only from a long studio sitting for each man. Although we do not know how Rembrandt proceeded, this harmonizing of the instantaneous action with the permanent likeness seems a work of superb stage direction that must have needed long rehearsal. The astonishing harmonics of light, color, movement, time, and pose have few rivals in the history of painting.

One of my favorites, because it so typifies Rembrandt's sense of humanity, is the sweetly tender and loving 1667 The Jewish Bride.

The Vermeer collection includes the masterful 1657-1658 The Little Street, the layered planes so typical of Vermeer, and of his influence on later Dutch artists, right up to the abstractions of Piet Mondrian. But Vermeer's genius was in capturing moments of such solitude and intimacy that the viewer almost feels like an intruding voyeur. Superb examples from the museum are the 1658 The Milkmaid, the 1663-1664 Woman In Blue Reading A Letter, and the 1667-1668 The Love Letter.

Janson:

The carefully "staged" entrance serves to establish our relation to the scene. We are more than privileged bystanders: we become the bearer of the letter that has just been delivered to the young woman.

But what is the meaning of their expressions. The maid seems almost amused, the recipient surprised, perhaps even a little afraid. We are shown the mystery, but not invited in.

As usual with Vermeer, however, the picture refuses to yield a final answer, since the artist has concentrated on the moment before the letter is opened.

But Vermeer also was revolutionary and brilliant in his technique, and as was the case with most Baroque painters, he was enchanted by the dance of light. This painting, too, reveals Vermeer's fascination with layered planes.

Vermeer's real interest centers on the role of light in creating the visible world. The cool, clear daylight that filters in from the left is the only active element, working its miracles upon all the objects in its path. As we look at The Letter, we feel as if a veil had been pulled from our eyes, for the everyday world shines with jewellike freshness, beautiful as we have never seen it before. No painter since Jan van Eyck saw as intensely as this. But Vermeer, unlike his predescessors, perceive reality as a mosaic of colored surfaces-- or perhaps more accurately, he translates reality into a mosaic as he puts it on canvas. We see The Letter not only as a perspective "window," but as a plane, a "field" composed of smaller fields. Rectangles predominate, carefully aligned with the picture surface, and there are no "holes," no unidentified empty space.

The Van Gogh Museum collection consists mostly of the paintings Vincent Van Gogh gave to his beloved brother and benefactor, Theo.

The permanent collection includes Vincent's first great masterpiece, the 1885 The Potato Eaters.

Janson:

Van Gogh, the first great Dutch master since the seventeenth century, did not become an artist until 1880; as he died only ten years later, his career was even briefer than Seurat's. His early interests were in literature and religion. Profoundly dissatisfied with the values of industrial society and imbued with a strong sense of mission, he worked for a while as a lay preacher among poverty-stricken coal miners in Belgium. This same intense feeling for the poor dominates the paintings of his pre-Impressionistic period, 1880-1885. In The Potato Eaters, the last and most ambitious work of those years, there remains a naive clumsiness that comes from his lack of conventional training, but this only adds to the expressive power of his style.

The stark unbeautified characters already reveal Van Gogh's sensitivity to depicting things as they were, not as we would like them to be. The precognitive visualness of the Impressionists would be a natural fit. So would their brilliant colors.

When he painted The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh had not yet discovered the importance of color. A year later, in Paris, where his brother Theo had a gallery devoted to modern art, he met Degas, Seurat, and other leading French artists. Their effect on him was electrifying. His pictures now blazed with color, and he even experimented briefly with the Divisionist technique of Seurat. This Impressionist phase, however, lasted less than two years. Although it was vitally important for his development, he had to integrate it with the style of his earlier years before his genius could fully unfold. Paris has opened his eyes to the sensuous beauty of the visible world and had taught him the pictorial language of the color patch, but painting continued to be nevertheless a vessel for his personal emotions. To investigate this spiritual reality with the new means at his command, he went to Arles, in the south of France. It was there, between 1888 and 1890, that he produced his greatest pictures.

My photo blog of Van Gogh's years in southern France can be found here.

Works from this period, now in the Van Gogh museum, include the 1888 Yellow House, his home in Arles; the 1890 Irises and Almond Blossoms; and the haunting 1890 Wheatfield With Crows, which was painted the month of the artist's suicide, and which reveals a psyche now so fractured that the usual tight imagery is literally breaking apart.

We've been to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and to Terezin and Auschwitz, but there is something particularly powerful about the human scale of the Anne Frankhuis. When you walk up the narrow stairs, it hits you in the gut that this small group of people walked these same steps to their years of necessary self-imprisonment, and were forced to walk back down them, on their way to their eventual murders.

And back outside.

It's considered uncool to take photos of the Red Light district, but here are some of Amsterdam's other pop culture attractions...

Van Gogh's Ear

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:46:00 +0000

Vincent Van Gogh's turbulent and tragic life makes for romantic legend, and much of it is true. But one common misconception is that he cut off his ear over the love of a woman. In fact, the official story long has been that he cut it off after a fight with his sometime friend, Paul Gauguin. The official story now has been called into question.

From The Guardian, in May:

According to official versions, the disturbed Dutch painter cut off his ear with a razor after a row with Gauguin in 1888. Bleeding heavily, Van Gogh then walked to a brothel and presented the severed ear to an astonished prostitute called Rachel before going home to sleep in a blood-drenched bed.

But two German art historians, who have spent 10 years reviewing the police investigations, witness accounts and the artists' letters, argue that Gauguin, a fencing ace, most likely sliced off the ear with his sword during a fight, and the two artists agreed to hush up the truth.

In Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, published in Germany, Hamburg-based academics Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans argue that the official version of events, based largely on Gauguin's accounts, contain inconsistencies and that both artists hinted that the truth was more complex.

Van Gogh and Gauguin's troubled friendship was legendary. In 1888, Van Gogh persuaded him to come to Arles in the south of France to live with him in the Yellow House he had set up as a "studio of the south". They spent the autumn painting together before things soured. Just before Christmas, they fell out. Van Gogh, seized by an attack of a metabolic disease became aggressive and was apparently crushed when Gauguin said he was leaving for good.

Van Gogh had wrapped the ear in paper, and when he handed it to Rachel, asked her to "keep this object carefully." Van Gogh soon was taken into custody, and placed in a hospital, where his mental state was far worse than his physical. The hospital is now a cultural center known as Espace Van Gogh.

Van Gogh had arrived in Arles in early 1888.

The Yellow House stood just outside the town's medieval walls, near what is now this roundabout.

This was the site of the Yellow House. In a letter to his brother and protector, Theo, he wrote:

If Gauguin were to examine himself thoroughly, or have himself examined by a specialist, I don't honestly know what the result might be. I have seen him on various occasions do things which you and I would not let ourselves do, because we have consciences...

Among Van Gogh's works in Arles were a few paintings from the town's Roman necropolis, Les Alyscamps. They can be found here, here, and here.

His painting of this cafe at night can be seen here.

Van Gogh painted from memory a bullfight in the town's great Roman amphitheatre. The painting can be seen here

Van Gogh didn't like the great Romanesque church St-Trophime, but its portal is considered to be a masterpiece of Romanesque sculpture. Helen Gardner:

Here, the rigid lines of the architecture of the facade as a whole (rather than just an enframing element, such as a tympanum) now are determining the placement and look of the sculpture, and the freedom of execution appropriate to small art has been sacrificed to a simpler and more monumental adjustment to architecture."

Van Gogh's psychological state continued to deteriorate, after he left the hospital. Locals thought him a dangerous madman. He was forcibly institutionalized, then released. In May 1889, he had himself committed to the mental hospital at the former monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, near the tiny medieval village of St-Remy.

In a May 1889 letter to Theo, he wrote:

I think I have done well to come here, for by seeing the actual truth about the life of the various madmen and lunatics in this menagerie, I am losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing. And the change of surroundings is doing me good.

The idea of work as a duty is coming back very strong, and my faculties for work will also come back to me fairly quickly. Yet work often so absorbs me that I think I shall remain absent-minded and awkward in shifting for myself the rest of my life.

The hospital is still in use, but it is open to visitors. Van Gogh continued to paint, creating some of his most famous works, including The Starry Night.

The monastery cloister dates to the 11th and 12th Centuries CE.

Van Gogh's room is still occupied by patients, but a facsimile can be viewed in a similar room. He likely would have seen views such as this, from his window.

The hills, viewed from the entry.

Maybe a ten minute walk from the monastery is the archeological site from the 1st Century BCE Gallo-Roman town of Glanum.

Theo eventually moved Vincent back north, to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he remained in a doctor's care. In July 1890, he walked out into a field and shot himself in the chest. Two days later, he died.

Pont du Gard

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:32:00 +0000

Near the town of Nimes, and built either in the last century BCE or the first century CE, the aqueduct and bridge known as the Pont du Gard may be the best remaining example of the genius that was Roman engineering.

Monaco And Nice

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:45:00 +0000

Monaco

Monaco is a tiny independent nation, tucked into the southern French coast. Its national defense is the responsibility of France, but it is a constitutional monarchy, ruled by the Grimaldi family since 1297, and a full member of the United Nations. The vast majority of its population is wealthy foreigners, who live there because it is a tax haven. Its chief industry is tourism, and its botanic gardens and casino are world famous.

We stopped in for just a couple hours, on a drive from Torino to Nice, and the gardens already were closed.

Beneath this long garden and series of fountains is an enormous garage.

The casino has a strict dress code. Shorts and tee-shirts don't cut it. We didn't go inside.

The royal palace is behind the marina, just before the hill begins rising, on the right.

Either side of the casino.

Nice

The Promenade des Anglais, at night and in the morning.

We didn't stay here, but it's a good example of the grand architecture.

Roman ruins, near the Musée Matisse.

The Musée Matisse does not allow photography.

Matisse spent many years in Nice, and although the museum doesn't have many of his major works, it does have a fascinating collection of drawings, paintings, sculptures, and personal artifacts. His passion for Japanese culture, and the powerful simplicity of his genius, are everywhere apparent.

This was the real reason we stopped in Nice. The Musée Chagall.

Back on the streets.

The 17th Century Baroque Cathédrale Sainte-Réparate de Nice.

A last view of the beach.

Three Small Towns In Provence

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:34:00 +0000

Carpentras

Carpentras dates at least to Roman times.

Medieval tower.

Its 14th Century synagogue is the oldest in France that is still used for services.

Capital of the Comtat Venaissan, Carpentras was controlled by the Avignon papacy, and was home to some of the Avignon popes. The Cathédrale Saint-Siffrein de Carpentras was built in the 15th and 16th Centuries, after the papacy had returned to Rome.

A modern alley.

Chateauneuf-du-Pape

This small ruin is all that remains of the palace, built by Pope John XXII, in the early 14th Century.

The tiny medieval town is just below the ruin, and sells the region's famous wines.

The palace was destroyed during the 16th Century Wars of Religion.

The 14th Century Avignon popes did much to spread the reknown of the local wines.

Les Baux-de-Provence

Les Baux is a tiny medieval village, dramatically situated on a rocky hilltop.

On a plateau at the top of the hill is the 10th Century fortified Château des Baux. Its powerful feudal lords once ruled a wide region of Provence, and held a lavish court, but they were deposed in the 12th Century. The chateau reached its zenith under the rule of 15th Century barons. A center of Protestant revolt, it was demolished in 1633, by order of Cardinal Richelieu. It is now controlled by the Grimaldi family, rulers of Monaco.

Avignon

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:51:00 +0000

By the beginning of the 14th Century, Italy was wracked by wars between rival religious and political factions, rival merchant states, and rival factions within these factions and merchant states. The "Holy" "Roman" "Emperor" Heinrich VII invaded, but failed to take Rome. And amidst this violent turmoil, Giotto reinvented art and launched the southern Renaissance, while Dante and Petrarch reinvented poetry. And also amidst this turmoil, and with his papacy threatened, Pope Clement V, under pressure from the French King Philippe IV le Bel, moved the papal court to Avignon, which was not actually in France, but was in the Venaissan enclave granted to the papacy by its Angevin clients. The next seven popes would be French, but not all Catholic nations would accept them. The Catholic Church again would be torn by schisms.

The 14th Century saw Europe torn apart and reinvented, and France was at the heart of it. The Black Death would kill perhaps eight million people, in France alone. Jews and lepers would be burned, on order of King Philip V. The Hundred Years War with England would rage. The Capetian dynasty would end. The Dukes of Burgundy, who controlled not only that modern French region, but also what are now the modern Benelux nations, sided with England, attempting to form a sort of middle kingdom, between the war-ravaged France and Germany. Under their patronage, Claus Sluter would launch the northern Renaissance.

In the 1330s, Pope Benedict XII began the massive renovation of the Avignon ecclesiastical palace, tranforming it into the grand Palais des Papes. In 1377, St. Catherine of Siena convinced Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome, which soon led to yet more schisms within the Church, including the election of an alternate pope in Avignon.

The Palais des Papes

A collection of medieval catapult balls.

A courtyard.

The interiors have been thoroughly ransacked and pillaged, but host exhibitions, and display some art.

Views from the ramparts.

The Gothic palace chapel.

Evening.

The Romanesque cathedral Notre-Dame des Doms is right next to the palace, and was mostly built in the 12th Century.

Avignon's medieval city walls.

The 12th Century Pont Saint-Bénézet crumbled, through the centuries, and was largely destroyed in a 1668 flood.

Modern Avignon.

In The Footsteps Of Cezanne

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:55:00 +0000

One's favorite paintings are purely subjective. Since I first discovered but a poster of it, Paul Cézanne's Le Lac d'Annecy has been among the handful of mine. The real thing resides in London's Courtauld Gallery, but I first saw it when the Courtauld Institute was being remodeled, and the collection was shipped exclusively to Toronto. The future Mrs. T and I were headed to a friend's wedding, in rural Ontario, and had decided to drive across the country. I'd never been to Toronto, so we planned to stay for a few days. We drove in from Indiana, had our car searched at the border, and only made it to our hotel after midnight. Except that there had been a screw-up with the reservation, so it wasn't our hotel. And it was Gay Pride Week, which meant that almost every room in the city was booked. But the hotel manager managed to reach a friend who ran another hotel, and we ended up in a lavish business suite for the price of a small room. We got to bed around 3 a.m., woke the next day, went out exploring, and saw the banners on lampposts: The Courtauld Collection! In Toronto! Right then! It became our first stop!

(massive version here)

The haunting magic of the painting simply cannot be captured online. For one thing, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are very much about physical texture, and unless you can see the brush strokes, you're not really seeing the painting. And in Cézanne's case, and specifically with this work, that often meant palette knife strokes, because Cézanne's fascination with intersecting planes often led him to craft his art with his knife rather than with a paintbrush. And when we found the room with this painting, I could not leave. The future Mrs. T later told me she began to wonder if I would try to walk out with it.

My enchantment led a couple other visitors to inquire about it. I began explaining. A small crowd gathered. I told them to stand ten to fifteen feet back, relax their eyes, and observe the near photo-realism. The perspective is so perfect that you are transported into its depths, from the foreground tree, across the rippled reflections on the water, to the buildings and landscapes across the lake, and on up into the mountains. It's an astonishing achievement. Because when you then walk closer, to observe the detailed knife and brush strokes and the physical texture, the image dissolves into what is almost Expressionism. Only the best Cubism similarly shimmers between near three-dimensional realism and pure abstraction. Little wonder some art historians say modern art begins with Cézanne.

Helen Gardner:

Although a lifelong admirer of Delacroix, Cézanne allied himself, early in his career, with the Impressionists, especially Pissarro, and at first accepted their theories of color and their faith in subjects chosen from everyday life. Yet his own studies of the old master in the Louvre persuaded him that Impressionism lacked form and structure. He said: "I want to make of Impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums."

In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art did a superb restrospective on the collaborative friendship of Cézanne and Pissarro.

Gardner continues:

His aim was not truth in appearance, especially not photographic truth, nor was it the "truth" of Impressionism, but rather a lasting structure behind the formless and fleeting screens of color the eye takes in. If all we see is color, then color gives us every clue about structure, and color must fulfill the structural purposes of traditional perspective and light and shade; color alone must give depth and distance, shape and solidity. Rather than employ the random approach of the Impressionists when he was face to face with nature, Cézanne attempted to bring an intellectual order into his presentation of the colors that comprised it by constantly and painfully checking his painting against the part of the actual scene--he called it the "motif"--that he was studying at the moment. When he said, "We must do Poussin over again, this time according to nature," he apparently meant that Poussin's effects of distance, depth, structure, and solidity must be achieved not by perspective and chiaroscuro but entirely in terms of the color patterns provided by an optical analysis of nature."

The irony of Cézanne's comment about the work of Nicolas Poussin is that Poussin is considered one of the masters of Seventeenth Century naturalism and classicism. His work can be seen here. But Cézanne had a paradigmatically different view of the meaning of naturalism.

Gardner:

To apply his methods to the painting of landscapes was one of Cézanne's greatest challenges. The problems of representation were complicated by the need to select from the multiplicity of disorganized natural forms those that seemed most significant and to order them into pictorial structures with cohesive unity. Just as landcsape had been the principal mode of Impressionistic theory and experiment, so it became the subject for Cézanne's most complete transformation of Impressionism. His method was to use his intense powers of visual concentration to observe the motif and its colors, sustaining the process of minute inspection through days, months, and even years. He resembled the contemporary scientist who proves his hypothesis with repeated tests. With special care, Cézanne explored the properties of line, plane, and color, and their interrelationships: the effect of every kind of linear direction, the capacity of planes to create the sensation of depth, the intrinsic qualities of color, and the power of colors to modify the direction and depth of lines and planes. Through the recession of cool colors and the advance of warm ones, he controlled volume and depth. Having observed that saturation (or the highest intensity of a color) produced the greatest effect of fullness and form, he painted objects chiefly in one hue--apples, for example, in green--achieving convincing solidity by the control of color intensity alone, in place of the traditional method of modeling in light and dark.

H.W. Janson summarizes:

When Cézanne took these liberties with reality, his purpose was to uncover the permanent qualities beneath the accidents of appearance. All forms in nature, he believed, are based on the cone, the sphere, and the cylinder. This order underlying the external world was the true subject of his pictures, but he had to interpret it to fit the separate, closed world of the canvas.

And to emphasize, here is Gardner:

Cézanne immobilized the shifting colors of Impressionism into an array of clearly defined planes that compose the objects and spaces in his scene. Describing his method in a letter to a fellow painter (Emile Bernard), he wrote:
Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that is a section of nature.... Lines perpindicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air.

And by reducing images to basic forms and planes, depicted with attention to their many sides, Cézanne here clearly was pointing towards Cubism. His abstract approach also clearly pointed towards what would become the various flavors of Expressionism.

Gardner:

By reducing the importance of subject matter, Cézanne automatically enhanced the value of the picture he was making, which has its own independent existence and must be judged entirely in terms of its own inherent pictorial qualities. In Cézanne's works, the simplification of shapes and their sense of sculptural reliefand weight give a peculiar look of stable calm and dignity that is reminiscent of the art of the fifteenth-century Renaissance and has led modern critics to find in Cézanne some vestige of that ancient Mediterranean sense of monumental and unchanging simplicity of form that produced Classical art.

Ancient to Classical to Renaissance to Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, and pointing towards Cubism and Expressionism. And beyond that, his work is simply, powerfully, viscerally beautiful.

Now, let's look at some photos of his hometown, Aix-en-Provence...

Although there are some wide boulevards, lined with cafes and restaurants, the center of the town consists of narrow, brightly painted streets...

And alleys...

And many large and small squares.

Cézanne's biography can be traced by following these small street markers. The route includes all his family's homes, his father's businesses, the schools he attended, and other various places.

His father's business, the Cézanne and Cabassol Bank, opened when he was nine.

14, Rue Matheron was the Cézanne family home from the time he was eleven until he was thirty-one.

At Ecole Saint-Joseph, he met his friend Henri Gasquet.

Many years later, he painted Gasquet's portrait.

At the Bourbon College, Cézanne met his lifelong friend, the great writer, humanitarian, and political activist Émile Zola.

For several years, including while in law school, he took classes at the Municipal Art School.

At the church of Saint-Jean Baptiste du Faubourg, he married Hortense Fiquet. Later that same year, the church held his father's funeral.

Cézanne sometimes hung out at Les Deux Garcons.

He mostly painted it from other angles, but Mont Sainte-Victoire was Cézanne's mountain.

Maybe a ten minute walk outside the town centre was Cézanne's atelier, where he worked for the last several years of his life.

His studio.

Never financially successful, and long separated from Hortense, he spent his last years in a small apartment, in this building, in central Aix. He died there, of pleurisy, on October 23, 1906.

Emile Bernard:

On Sundays we used to go to church. He would dress in his best clothes. He would sit in the factory pew and listen carefully to the sermon. As soon as he got to the little cloister before the Cathedral, he would be assaulted by beggars ...He would prepare his money before leaving his room, and would dish it out in handfuls whilst walking past them.

"I’m having my share of the Middle-Ages," he would whisper to me near the font. "I had seen Cézanne here, under the big painting of the Burning bush, in which Moses looks uncannily like him."

His funeral was held at the Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur d'Aix, which was built in the 12th Century, and remodeled many times, over the centuries.

Chihuly At The De Young

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 05:15:00 +0000

What you don't know...

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:09:00 +0000

Washington Post:

The lead author and peer reviewers of a government report raising the possibility of public health threats from industrial contamination throughout the Great Lakes region are charging that the report is being suppressed because of the questions it raises. The author also alleges that he was demoted because of the report.

Chris De Rosa, former director of the division of toxicology and environmental medicine at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), charges that the report he wrote was a significant factor in his reassignment to a non-supervisory "special assistant" position last year.

The House Committee on Science and Technology is investigating De Rosa's reassignment, in light of allegations that it was related to the Great Lakes report and his push to publicize the possibility of a cancer risk from formaldehyde fumes in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers housing victims of Hurricane Katrina.

De Rosa said his agency cited the Great Lakes report being below expectations as one of the reasons for his removal from the post he had held since 1992. The ATSDR is housed within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC spokesman Glen Nowak said he could not discuss personnel issues.

The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative group, has obtained a copy of the draft report and posted portions on its Web site.

Diversity matters

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:06:00 +0000

Science Daily:

Human migration from Africa to Europe more than 30,000 years ago appears to have left a mark on the genes of Europeans today.

A Cornell-led study, reported in the Feb. 21 issue of the journal Nature, compared more than 10,000 sequenced genes from 15 African-Americans and 20 European-Americans. The results suggest that European populations have proportionately more harmful variations, though it is unclear what effects these variations actually may have on the overall health of Europeans.

Computer simulations suggest that the first Europeans comprised small and less diverse populations. That would have allowed mildly harmful genetic variations within those populations to become more frequent over time, the researchers report.

Egypt's first agricultual community

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:02:00 +0000

Science Daily:

Archaeologists from UCLA and the University of Groningen (RUG) in the Netherlands have found the earliest evidence ever discovered of an ancient Egyptian agricultural settlement, including farmed grains, remains of domesticated animals, pits for cooking and even floors for what appear to be dwellings.

The findings, which were unearthed in 2006 and are still being analyzed, also suggest possible trade links with the Red Sea, including a thoroughfare from Mesopotamia, which is known to have practiced agriculture 2,000 years before ancient Egypt.

"By the time of the Pharaohs, everything in ancient Egypt centered around agriculture," said Willeke Wendrich, the excavation's co-director and an associate professor of Near Eastern languages and cultures at UCLA. "What we've found here is a window into the development of agriculture some 2,000 years earlier. We hope this work will help us answer basic questions about how, why and when ancient Egypt adopted agriculture."

Why not everyone's celebrating

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:56:00 +0000

Spiegel Online:

Kosovo is turning out to be a huge source of conflict, both in the Balkans and across Europe. Six EU member states are against recognizing Kosovo's independence, because they fear it could lead to problems with their own ethnic minorities.

Star stocking food and water

noreply@blogger.com (Turkana) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:53:00 +0000

Science Daily:

New calculations by University of Sussex astronomers predict that the Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun in about 7.6 billion years unless the Earth’s orbit can be altered.