August 10, 2005
Miniature Holiday
Kelly is at camp. To take advantage of that, I took today off, and Jean and I attended the Portland Art Museum. There were several nice travelling exhibits. We lingered over the exhibit of silver coffee and tea services. John Singer Sargent's portraits of children contained several large portraits that were quite striking. I enjoyed the Han and Chu dynasty artifacts, and of course visited the regular collections for my infrequent fix of Childe Hassam.
But the item that really intrigued me was the collection of lantern slides from the Wulsin expedition to Tibet in 1923. This collection is from the Peabody Essex Museum. "As the young American couple Janet E. and Frederick R. Wulsin, Jr. traveled in China, Inner Mongolia and the borderlands of Tibet between 1921 and 1925, they joined the ranks of explorers drawn to the people, cultures, and geography of unfamiliar and distant places."
About 80 of the photographs they took were mounted on glass plates, then hand tinted by artists in Beijing familiar with the culture, using tiny sable brushes. They then mounted the painted glass plates between two protective plates and sealed them, to be used as lantern slides. Until I got to the plaque explaining this, I was trying to figure out what the tinting process was, since of course there was no color film at that time. This article contains some sample photos to give you an idea. These photos made my trip to the museum, and if you're in the area and into photography, you should really make the trip.
Posted by dpwakefield at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2005
Simplicity?
Too soon to say. But Kelly and I pinned the patterns for the Simplicity dress onto our fabric, then she did the cutting, and I did the marking (with an ordinary #2 pencil, since we lacked the 'chalk' pencil mentioned in the directions). Now all the bits of cloth are sitting patiently in the bay window where Mr. Sun can get to work fading the floral prints!
I told Kelly yesterday that she was going to have to hand stitch everything, and she immediately asked "don't we have a sewing machine?" I told her about the antiquated machine sitting in the garage, and assured her that at 30+ years of age, it probably didn't even work. But she had me haul it in anyway. The complete absence of a power cord quickly put an end to that fantasy. So sometime during the week, we'll begin with the stitching. Cross your fingers!
Posted by dpwakefield at 09:45 PM
December 11, 2003
QOTD
On visible expression of emotion while performing music:
Faze, a Metafilter poster
Posted by dpwakefield at 09:07 PM
September 26, 2003
Portland Art Museum
I forgot to mention that we went to the Portland Art Museum Sunday. My workplace negotiated a free day for employees, so the family unit headed into Portland to check it out. It was a nice mild day and I enjoyed walking from our parking spot to the museum. It'd been so long since I last went there I wasn't sure I knew where it was, but we got there eventually.
The visiting exhibitions were the painted sculptures of Joan Miro, and the medicine themed paintings of Norman Rockwell. There were really only six or seven paintings by Rockwell, but the Miro exhibit was pretty big, mostly because the sculptures were.
I was more interested in the paintings, as their American collection included several paintings by Childe Hassam, one of my favorites. In particular I liked "Sunlit Nude in Woods" (bad guess at title from memory). There were many more, and I spent a long time looking. I was disappointed however, that they no longer had the JMW Turner painting I liked.
Kelly vacillated between boredom and fascination, and perked right up at the museum store, where she bought a plastic 'tangle toy'. I didn't buy anything, but had fun looking. The capper was when I lounged in the 'sculpture garden' outside the museum while Jean and Kelly paid for their purchases. I watched the long line across the street at the Historical Society, where the Declaration of Independence was on display. Wish I could have seen that too, but our time was limited.
Posted by dpwakefield at 07:58 AM | Comments (2)
August 31, 2003
Matrix Ping Pong
Okay, I missed this when it was making the rounds earlier (apparently around three months ago), but it's fresh to me, and well worth watching if you've got the bandwidth, even though the picture is really grainy. I wish there were a clean download I could get, it's that fun.
Here is the show, and here is a description of it. I found all this on Boing Boing.
Posted by dpwakefield at 09:36 AM
July 15, 2003
JMW Turner
I've been a fan of the works of J. M. W. Turner for years, so when I found out (via DangergousMeta!) that the Tate galleries had organized an online collection of his works, I had to link to it for future browsing.
Posted by dpwakefield at 09:23 AM