Will Rogers Parkway looking at the Amon Carter Museum

Although Will Rogers was from Oklahoma, there is a huge complex dedicated to Will Rogers here. This is the location of the Fort Worth Rodeo which begins the Circuit of events culminating in Houston. The barns and exhibit halls are immense and there is a succession of horse and rodeo events beginning the second week of January—lucky for me to be there the first week as the hotels are all packed during those weeks.

The Amon Carter Museum focuses on American Art. After touring the Stark Museum in Orange and the Steamboat Museum outside of Beaumont, I didn’t really see anything that was striking here. There were several groups of school children led by docents who spent a lot of time discussing the works of art.  I was amused to hear that impressionistic paintings were created by very quickly dabbing bits of paint on the canvas. The collection included a variety of sculptures and paintings including two Georgia OKeeffe’s—a flower and one of birch trees both early works. I was pleased to see an Eakens and a Remington—my favorite recent American artist.

A retrospective of John Marin’s work was on display. Marin was a painter in the 1930’s and 40’s who worked in both oil and watercolor trying to make each media behave and look like the other—not very successfully in my opinion. He included some symbols in faint black lines reminiscent of Kandisky—but the colors he used were dark and muddy. I could not find one painting that I ‘liked’ although his subject matter was cityscapes and seascapes. Marin was named the best American painter of his time and I am glad I had the opportunity to see it but certainly did not buy the exhibition catalog.

Caravaggio based a lot of his compositions on work by Michelangelo and the German printmaker Durer. I suspect he also studied some of the sculptures, perhaps the Dying Gaul. His influence is supposedly noted in the work of Rubens although I cannot see it. Rubens was a French painter of the court and specialized in elaborate portraiture of assorted moneyed people. He uses a lot of fat cherubs and ribbons and flowers and curlycues with a sweetness about his paintings that is certainly not present in Caravaggio’s work.

Rembrandt’s somber self-portraits are more in keeping with Caravaggio’s work with the darkened backgrounds, light focused on the face, and sumptuous clothing.

Unfortunately no photographs were allowed in this exhibit—and even if they had, all I would have had would have been backs of people’s heads.

The exhibit included painters from Spain, Netherlands, France and so forth who studied his work and tried to emulate it; none so successfully as his. The paintings were grouped by subject matter.

The first paintings were Bacchus and a young man being bitten by a lizard—the model in both of these being Caravaggio himself. The fruit and roses in these paintings look real enough to pick up. It is hard to believe he did no drawings—I suspect that he destroyed any drawings he did; he was trying hard to sell his work and sought something unique from all the other painters at the time.

The second group is card-sharks and fortune tellers. These paintings all tell a story with cards being held behind the back and someone else with their hands in the pockets of the card-shark or the fortune teller. Sumptuous velvet cloaks and hats and feathers and brocade gowns are beautifully painted along with ripped doublets and gloves with holes in them. These paintings were fun and full of surprises, a sharp contrast to those of Judith and the Holofernes or David and Goliath. These paintings had heads in baskets—rather gruesome.

Several saints are depicted including St. Jerome translating the Bible into Latin, St. Christopher carrying the Christ child across a river, St. Sebastian and St. Irene recovering from his death squad archery event. While all of these episodes had been depicted by countless artists, Caravaggio picks a moment of intense emotion and focuses in on that emotion rather than a rendition of what might be considered a documentary approach.

Caravaggio’s last painting was that of St. Francis, painted on his way to the pope to ask pardon for someone he had killed. Mysteriously he died on the way—whether he was murdered himself, set upon by thieves, or committed suicide, or died of previous injuries is unknown.

This painting is my favorite in the group. St. Francis stares at an open Bible propped on a skull—a favorite still life inclusion—but he is really staring inside himself. I wonder if it was a self-portrait.

More Tomorrow–sorry no pictures today or tomorrow.

In the parking lot of Museum of Modern Art Looking at the Kimbell

An interesting combination, no?

Last week I took the time to visit Fort Worth and take in several museums. It is about 5 ½ hour drive from Beaumont but there wasn’t much traffic until Fort Worth and the go-home-from-work crowd. I stopped at Collins Street Bakery in Corsicana both coming and going for coffee—people there are clearly NOT Cajun as the coffee was about 1/3 strength and not very hot. A small indulgence was a fruitcake—yes, I am one of THOSE people who actually like fruitcake.

Fort Worth is a relatively small city but cursed with multiple confusing roads with entry on the right and exits on the left across five or six lanes of go-home traffic. I hadn’t made a reservation for a hotel and the first few I found looked like rent by the hour kind—eventually I found a Holiday Inn Express. This was one of the most pleasant places I have ever stayed; my room was upgraded to a suite; the breakfast was quite nice with a pancake making machine; a nicety was a shuttle that would take me anyplace in Fort Worth AND pick me up even after I had checked out of the hotel. The driver was interested in art and gave me a short tour of the museum district before dropping me off at the Kimbell about half an hour before the museum opened.

I didn’t get to all of the museums skipping the Museum of Natural History and Science and the Museum of Modern Art—my feet were tired and I knew I had to get back home so as to be at work the following day.

“Vortex” by Serra was near the Museum of Modern Art across the parking lot and I spent a few minutes taking some photos; then hurried back to get in line.

The Kimbell isn’t a very large museum and nearly half of it was devoted to the Caravaggio exhibit. The exhibit was packed full of people as this was the last week of the show.

More Tomorrow

Last week we planted lettuce in my raised bed garden and today the letttuce is beginning to sprout. In about four weeks, we’ll have more lettuce than we can eat in a day. There’s just something about fresh produce picked that day from your own garden.

Alas nothing exciting or even mildly interesting. My laptop at home died but it took my husband several weeks before he declared it truly dead after a heroic two week resuscitation effort. I had fortunately backed everything up onto a hard drive just two days before the ultimate crash but then we had to figure out how to get things retrieved as this laptop and the computer he graciously lent me so I could do the checkbook (I could have gladly waited years for that to have occurred but then we’d be without water and electricity and heat—all of which I’ve become quite fond of) –back to my run-on sentence here—both of them use Windows 7 and my previous laptop was Vista (which I didn’t mind using)

So here I am with a new laptop and wondering what I should say.

I think I’ll start with anticipation. In two weeks, the Holus Bolus gang will congregate. I’m looking forward to spending time with them—laughing, sewing, eating chocolate, laughing, and telling tall stories. Before we get started we have to catch up on doings—here we all are (except me and Sherry) I’m working the camera and I think Sherry was in the kitchen doing something important or maybe she was ironing. Notice the second picture—we have made a grand mess. Three cutting stations were set up, two on side tables in the dining room and the other is upstairs in my sewing room. The ironing board is in the living room and the ‘design wall’ is the living room floor—a bit hard to see much over the oriental carpet flowers.

Mrs. Smith always contributes one of her pies—we have a goal of trying them all.

round Hay bale

Every day for the past month or so I see a truck with a
trailer hauling round bales of hay all heading west. Wildfires in western Texas
have forced ranchers to board their cattle. Drought has limited the amount of
natural feed available and so the farmers and ranchers of southeast Texas are
donating hay.

After Hurricane Ike, the pastures of southeast Texas were
poisoned by the influx of salt water. Ranchers of west Texas sent hay to feed
the cattle here while the pastures were purged by rainwater and time and
returned to normal forage status. And so now, ranchers here are baling up hay
in fields and places that have never been cropped and trucking it all west.

It is one of those quiet things that are just done—without fanfare.

Proud Papa

On Monday, I was gifted with a new grandson. Youngest son
and his lovely wife had their first baby at St. Luke’s in Houston. They were
both quite nervous; her parents were excited as this was their first
grand-child—my second.

The hospital room was filled with well-wishers and the baby
was handed from one grandparent to another under the watchful eye of both
parents. I found the picture of youngest son when he was born—amazing resemblance.

My first grandson made his appearance with his parents—he is
getting so tall and is so big, it is hard to remember him being so small. He
loved all the attention and was passed around amongst all those people much to
his great delight.

Black walnuts

Two weeks ago I leaped at the opportunity to return to
Wisconsin for a second week on my farm there. I grew up there and plan to spend
my summers there once I have hung up my stethoscope. Last summer I did not get
to spend any time on the farm due to illness and so this year was a special
treat.

My husband has been diligently working on the old farm
house; it now has modern windows, two lovely additions including a breakfast
room with two bay windows, a wrap around front porch, reworked stairs, a planned
large bathroom with walk-in shower on the south side of the house—not the
north!, and a lovely overlook on the top floor. Of course the interior is
studwalls with extension cords draped across nails here and there with
carpentry equipment and odds and ends of lumber, nails, used caulking tubes
etc.

Pumpkins at Shihata Orchard

Wisconsin is a beautiful state but the fall is particularly
nice. The trees had just begun to turn and harvest was in full swing. Tomatoes
were still growing and I picked half a bushel basket of Romas and regular
tomatoes. My husband had carefully dried quite a few on a drying rack stationed
in the cab of his truck. Black walnuts were everywhere looking much like a golf
putting range—I got a bushel of those to bring home as I wanted to try making
some walnut ink this year.

Romas

I have a new phone that includes a navigation system—my route
there involved the eastern side of Oklahoma and a stay in the Charles Wesley
Motor Lodge in Broken Bow—very clean and only $45 for the night. On my way
back, I traversed western Arkansas and again spent the night somewhere north of
Mena with a large group of motorcyclists who like me did not want to drive on
the mountains in the dark—again only $45 for the night, a fill-in clerk who
nervously filled out paperwork—the room was clean—the only problem was finding
coffee in the morning.

Sew Bee It shop somewhere in Arkansas

Both Oklahoma and Arkansas have a large number of quilt
shops—advertised on billboards—and of course I had to stop at one of them as I ‘needed’
more fabric.

Home is always sweet but it took me nearly an hour to unpack
the cab of my truck of all the tomatoes, walnuts, apples, canned goods and so
forth—a good kind of work. I put my lovely new sink and convection oven to
good use, peeling apples and slicing tomatoes for freezing and drying. The walnuts
are drying outside; I’ll process those husks into ink this weekend.