A Life's True Gift

Eternal Thread 

When twilight whispers secrets to the stars,
And moonlight dances soft upon the sea,
I think of fate, its ever-winding scars,
That led my soul through time to find thee.

Life's winding road, so rugged and unclear,
Held shadows deep, where dreams would fade and fall,
Yet through the dark, your light drew ever near,
A voice of hope, a whisper through it all.

Two hearts once lost now beat in perfect rhyme,
As if the heavens wove our paths as one,
A thread unbroken, stretching out through time,
Bound by the stars, beneath both moon and sun.

For life’s true gift is love we cannot see,
A timeless vow: "You are my destiny." 

Poem by American poet Bryan Taylor  

~ Happy St. Valentine's Day to all ~

 

Image: Eternal Love - Scupture by the Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj (1944-2014)

Naturally Dyed Tiffany Blue Easter Eggs

If you are still looking for an Easter Egg Hunt ideas, this article will inspire you to try something new. All you need is eggs, white vinegar, and purple cabbage. The whole project takes less than 12 hours. The outcome is more than amazing.

I used white free range organic eggs and an organic purple cabbage to minimize exposure to chemicals in our already over polluted world. This is especially important if you want to eat the eggs after the Sunday egg hunt.

For twelve eggs you will need a large head of purple cabbage, large pot, and twelve small Mason jars or small drinking glasses to dye each egg individually. You can dye the eggs in bulk, of course, but if you dye them individually, the eggs will be covered more thoroughly. 

Method:

• Wash and chop up the cabbage. Toss it into a large pot, pour enough water to completely cover the cabbage, and bring it to boil. Reduce the heat, cover the pot, and boil until cabbage is soft. 
• Once the cabbage is ready, allow it to cool off. Strain the liquid and toss away the cabbage. Add 4 Tbsp of vinegar and mix well.
• Boil the eggs. Put the eggs in a large pot and cover them with cold water. Bring water to a rolling boil. Once the water is boiling, remove the pot from heat and cover it with a lid. Leave the eggs in hot water for 12-15 minutes. Remove the eggs from the pot and put them into a bowl of ice cold water. 
• Place each egg in an individual jar or a glass. Pour the purple cabbage juice over the eggs completely covering each one, and allow eggs to take color for at least three hours. The color intensity depends on the time the eggs spend in the purple cabbage dye. To add some variation, let some of the eggs stay in the dye for a bit longer. For a more dramatic effect, leave them in dye overnight.
• Remove the eggs from the dye and place them on a baking cooling rack. Allow the dye to dry out completely. The little flaws in paint are more than welcome. They truly make the eggs prettier.
• Once the dye dried out completely you can place them in an Easter basket, on a decorative platter, or in your backyard. 

 Eggs in purple cabbage juice

This is the first time I used purple cabbage to dye the eggs. They turned out beautifully. No egg looks the same. I used a little 24ct confectioners gold leaf to add a little sparkle to them. You can use edible gold paint if you prefer, or simply leave them the way they are.

I hope this little project woke up your own creativity. You can use different plants to make the most beautiful Easter eggs ever. My mother used onion peel to create various shades of golden yellow and brown color. Purple cabbage gives various shades of aquamarine, Tiffany blue and turquoise. You can use beets to make your eggs pink, turmeric root to make them bright yellow, dried chokeberries (Aronia) to make them pink, or blueberries and blackberries to make them indigo blue. You can mix the plants to create different nuances. Also, using brown eggs instead of white will produce a much different color effect. Experiment! It's fun.

~ Wishing everyone peaceful Easter Holidays and happy Easter Egg Hunt! ~ Dominique 

 

Dominique Allmon©2018

Modern Culture and It's Discontents

 Jean-Michel Basquiat - Self Portrait as a Heel, Part Two 1982

By Robert Beaudine

Most of my conservative friends are fighting political battles heroically, but they continue to ignore the cultural wars – which began over two hundred years ago, first over religion, then over education, then over the media, and much later over modern art.

Progressives knew if they won the cultural battles, they would eventually win the political front by default. During the 19th Century, conservatives were engaged in these cultural battles, but they kept losing ground. When they ultimately retreated from the battle over education, all was lost. Their progeny became less and less educated and lost interest in the cultural wars. 

Many decades later, during the 1950's and 1960's, a confused and apathetic generation of conservatives accepted our culture as a natural development and immersed themselves in the newest art forms including modern music, movies, and television – without a clue that these were progressive productions that influenced their thinking. Later, their progeny retreated from the political front and merely cast votes. 

Finally in 2008, a nation of slumbering conservatives awoke to the danger of our political situation and realized they better engage and fight back or else. But they lacked any understanding of history, which is vital to understand the modern day. Because of their government schooling, they didn't understand culture and never conceived that it was captured by progressives long ago. 

This is why political victories will not restore our Republic. We certainly need a paradigm shift in politics, but more importantly, we need a spiritual awakening. We must restore our cultural heritage based on Christianity – not today's watered down version, but its original Apostolic form.

***

By Dominique Allmon

Mr. Baudine has touched here such a vast and complex subject. Without education and knowledge there is no understanding of history and the processes that govern a civil society, its literature and art. 

"Progress" seems to be a natural quality to humanity, or we would still dwell in caves if this was not so. New technology opens new, undreamed of, possibilities and always makes an impression on the human mind. It creates, directly or indirectly, the need for new ways of aesthetic expression. Conventions are broken and new styles appear to meet the persistent need for self-expression, self-knowledge and discovery.

With each generation, societies became more "permissive" and "daring." For an artist to break with the past became a way of life somewhere around 1870s when the old masters and their schools were finally relegated to the dark rooms of art history and made space for the new, daring, light-caring, scandalizing, "image-distorting" Impressionists. 

When Impressionism appeared on the cultural scene the society was also in a state of turmoil. And yet, for the most part, despite their divorce from the tyranny of artistic conventions of the past, Impressionists created masterpieces of such beauty that we cannot even imagine that some of the artists died in poverty. 

Things changed drastically, for the worse, in the beginning of the 20th century, especially after the incredibly bloody revolution in Russia. I remember a whole semester of the early 20th century European art and literature with the Soviets and the French leading the trends. Poets employed onomatopoeia to bring the sound of machinery; painters broke with the past completely and either deconstructed the human image or glorified the machine. Destroy the old, create the new! Movements such as Dadaism sprung in Europe like mushrooms after the rain. 

Soviet revolution not only uprooted wealthy tyrants, it destroyed their Christian values and their "decadent" love for beauty. A so called "Soviet Person" was created and this, of course, found reflection in artistic expression and literature. By force if necessary. Soviet censors made sure that art, literature, and film propagated their idea of the world. 

Elsewhere, intellectuals insisted that their was the desired way of life and broke off with ancient conventions. In 1950s France, for instance, the cool "cafe society" glorified the Soviet tyranny. Intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre were infatuated with Marxism and communism while at the same time countless people suffered unimaginable horrors in Russian gulags and Chinese re-education camps.

When we look back, the technology of the early 20th opened the doors to mass media. The whole process actually started much earlier, in France and Prussia even before the Industrial Revolution, but was perfected later to the point that the Y generation of today resembles spineless, ignorant zombies. 

We are at a turning point, but the future looks rather bleak. Art, music, cinema, and literature became incredibly permissive and allow for violence and ugliness of unheard proportions. If you do not understand or do not appreciate depravity you are not sophisticated enough. But is a butter stain on the wall or a crucifix immersed in the artist's urine really an art? It definitely is an artistic expression of the "rebellious" artist, but has little aesthetic value to a disturbed human soul constantly seeking solace in the urban jungle. Social alienation, depravity, mental illness, substance abuse and addiction are often the unexpected consequences of modern society. We are definitely free to do as we please, but often also completely alone in our struggle for sanity in the ever more complex world. Art, literature, and the media are not helping, unless we consider self-destruction to be the ultimate goal.  

So much more can be said and written on this subject, but I will end here and leave you, dear reader, to your own reflection. Change is inevitable, but how much of it we allow depends on our "capital" of knowledge. Unfortunately, when the educational system is distorted and schools are dominated by Fabian social engineers, our future is more than uncertain.

By Dominique Allmon
 

Dominique Allmon©2016

What Is Wabi Sabi

Gold leaf in concrete by Catherine Bertola, 2007

By Tadao Ando

Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It's simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all.

Wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores; aged wood, not Pergo; rice paper, not glass. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet-that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace liver spots, rust, and frayed edges, and the march of time they represent.

Wabi-sabi is underplayed and modest, the kind of quiet, undeclared beauty that waits patiently to be discovered. It's a fragmentary glimpse: the branch representing the entire tree, shoji screens filtering the sun, the moon 90 percent obscured behind a ribbon of cloud. It's a richly mellow beauty that's striking but not obvious, that you can imagine having around you for a long, long time-Katherine Hepburn versus Marilyn Monroe.

For the Japanese, it's the difference between kirei-merely "pretty"-and omoshiroi, the interestingness that kicks something into the realm of beautiful. (Omoshiroi literally means "white faced," but its meanings range from fascinating to fantastic.) It's the peace found in a moss garden, the musty smell of geraniums, the astringent taste of powdered green tea.

My favorite Japanese phrase for describing wabi-sabi is "natsukashii furusato," or an old memory of my hometown. (This is a prevalent mind-set in Japan these days, as people born in major urban areas such as Tokyo and Osaka wax nostalgic over grandparents' country houses that perhaps never were. They can even "rent" grandparents who live in prototypical country houses and spend the weekend there.)

Daisetz T. Suzuki, who was one of Japan's foremost English-speaking authorities on Zen Buddhism and one of the first scholars to interpret Japanese culture for Westerners, described wabi-sabi as "an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty." He was referring to poverty not as we in the West interpret (and fear) it but in the more romantic sense of removing the huge weight of material concerns from our lives. "Wabi is to be satisfied with a little hut, a room of two or three tatami mats, like the log cabin of Thoreau," he wrote, "and with a dish of vegetables picked in the neighboring fields, and perhaps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall."

In Japan, there is a marked difference between a Thoreau-like wabibito (wabi person), who is free in his heart, and a makoto no hinjin, a more Dickensian character whose poor circumstances make him desperate and pitiful. The ability to make do with less is revered; I heard someone refer to a wabibito as a person who could make something complete out of eight parts when most of us would use ten. For us in the West, this might mean choosing a smaller house or a smaller car, or-just as a means of getting started-refusing to supersize our fries.

The words wabi and sabi were not always linked, although they've been together for such a long time that many people (including D. T. Suzuki) use them interchangeably. One tea teacher I talked with begged me not to use the phrase wabi-sabi because she believes the marriage dilutes their separate identities; a tea master in Kyoto laughed and said they're thrown together because it sounds catchy, kind of like Ping-Pong. In fact, the two words do have distinct meanings, although most people don't fully agree on what they might be. 

Wabi stems from the root wa, which refers to harmony, peace, tranquility, and balance.  Generally speaking, wabi had the original meaning of sad, desolate, and lonely, but poetically it has come to mean simple, non-materialistic, humble by choice, and in tune with nature. Someone who is perfectly herself and never craves to be anything else would be described as wabi. Sixteenth-century tea master Jo-o described a wabi tea man as someone who feels no dissatisfaction even though he owns no Chinese utensils with which to conduct tea. A common phrase used in conjunction with wabi is "the joy of the little monk in his wind-torn robe." A wabi person epitomizes Zen, which is to say, he or she is content with very little; free from greed, indolence, and anger; and understands the wisdom of rocks and grasshoppers.

Until the fourteenth century, when Japanese society came to admire monks and hermits for their spiritual asceticism, wabi was a pejorative term used to describe cheerless, miserable outcasts. Even today, undertones of desolation and abandonment cling to the word, sometimes used to describe the helpless feeling you have when waiting for your lover. It also carries a hint of dissatisfaction in its underhanded criticism of gaud and ostentation-the defining mark of the ruling classes when wabisuki (a taste for all things wabi) exploded in the sixteenth century. In a country ruled by warlords who were expected to be conspicuous consumers, wabi became known as "the aesthetic of the people"-the lifestyle of the everday samurai, who had little in the way of material comforts. 

Sabi by itself means "the bloom of time." It connotes natural progression-tarnish, hoariness, rust-the extinguished gloss of that which once sparkled. It's the understanding that beauty is fleeting. The word's meaning has changed over time, from its ancient definition, "to be desolate," to the more neutral "to grow old." By the thirteenth century, sabi's meaning had evolved into taking pleasure in things that were old and faded. A proverb emerged: "Time is kind to things, but unkind to man. 

Sabi things carry the burden of their years with dignity and grace: the chilly mottled surface of an oxidized silver bowl, the yielding gray of weathered wood, the elegant withering of a bereft autumn bough. An old car left in a field to rust, as it transforms from an eyesore into a part of the landscape, could be considered America's contribution to the evolution of sabi. An abandoned barn, as it collapses in on itself, holds this mystique. 

There's an aching poetry in things that carry this patina, and it transcends the Japanese. We Americans are ineffably drawn to old European towns with their crooked cobblestone streets and chipping plaster, to places battle scarred with history much deeper than our own. We seek sabi in antiques and even try to manufacture it in distressed furnishings. True sabi cannot be acquired, however. It is a gift of time.  

So now we have wabi, which is humble and simple, and sabi, which is rusty and weathered. And we've thrown these terms together into a phrase that rolls off the tongue like Ping-Pong. Does that mean, then, that the wabi-sabi house is full of things that are humble, plain, rusty, and weathered? That's the easy answer. The amalgamation of wabi and sabi in practice, however, takes on much more depth. 

In home decor, wabi-sabi inspires a minimalism that celebrates the human rather than the machine. Possessions are pared down, and pared down again, until only those that are necessary for their utility or beauty (and ideally both) are left. What makes the cut? Items that you both admire and love to use, like those hand-crank eggbeaters that still work just fine. Things that resonate with the spirit of their makers' hands and hearts: the chair your grandfather made, your six-year-old's lumpy pottery, an afghan you knitted yourself (out of handspun sheep's wool, perhaps). Pieces of your own history: sepia-toned ancestral photos, baby shoes, the Nancy Drew mysteries you read over and over again as a kid. 

Wabi-sabi interiors tend to be muted, dimly lit, and shadowy-giving the rooms an enveloping, womblike feeling. Natural materials that are vulnerable to weathering, warping, shrinking, cracking, and peeling lend an air of perishability. The palette is drawn from browns, blacks, grays, earthy greens, and rusts. This implies a lack of freedom but actually affords an opportunity for innovation and creativity. In Japan, kimonos come in a hundred different shades of gray. You simply have to hone your vision so you can see, and feel, them all.

Image source here 

Text source unknown

The Bowl

By John Hutchinson

I

In The Crest Jewel of Wisdom, the Indian philosopher Shankara tells us that just as stone, wood, grass, grain and straw are all in time reduced to dust, so the body, the senses, the mind and the life-breath return to the nature of the higher Self. Darkness is dissolved in the radiance of the sun, and all that is manifest melts away in the Eternal. And just as space remains untouched when a clay pot is destroyed, so the Eternal remains Eternal.

The first bowl was probably intended to contain water or food: its form is therefore dependent on one of the most basic of human activities, that of eating and drinking. On another, more metaphorical level, it can also be said that a full and open bowl both withholds and offers in a single measure and in the same gesture. An empty bowl is different, as it holds the potential for either giving or receiving. This coincidence is a reflection of the state of contemplative consciousness, in which all things are born and to which they all return.

When a potter throws a bowl, a plane of clay is extended into three dimensions. As it expands, the clay both contains and is contained by space. This ordinary and wonderful characteristic, which is shared by all objects in the world, is emphasized by the process of making; the potter causes the clay to move upwards, defying the law of gravity, and then counters that action by using centrifugal force to open out the rising mass into the shape of a bowl.

The interplay of these movements, one vertical, the other horizontal, is revealed as a balance of opposing energies. This relationship is individualized by the film of clay, which has the capacity to retain, in three-dimensional form, every trace of the potter's touch. This form, perhaps glazed or otherwise decorated, is then sensed and interpreted in relation to other things, both found and made. A 'good' bowl is brought to a point where all these qualities cohere and coincide. There it rests, suggesting the possibility of further growth, but restrained by poise and balance. 

II

In the Daodejing, Laozi speaks about the importance of 'what is not'. Although the spokes are indispensable, he says, they are not the hub of the wheel. Cut doors and windows into the walls of a house, using their nothingness to make a room. Mold clay to make a vessel. Adapt its nothingness for the purpose in hand.

Is the bowl a specific form of spatial articulation, or is it that with which the space is articulated? It is both these things, and neither. A bowl, in its totality, is beyond definition. A truly beautiful bowl is suggestive of infinity; it is perched on the boundary between fullness and emptiness, revealing their inseparable identity.

Such bowls have the capacity to lead us back from the physicality of an object to the state of pure consciousness in which it was conceived and manifested. When this happens, the bowl, as a material object, seems barely to be present. It challenges and plays with our understanding of reality; it defies conventional notions of substantiality. Something that is beautiful, according to this definition, holds our attention without allowing it to become static, leading us effortlessly to that which is present but non-objective. In that respect, the beautiful thing could be said to 'vanish'. It follows that there is little that can helpfully be said about a bowl of this nature; it leaves little trace of itself and yet transforms the viewer or user - not dramatically, but with subtlety and gentleness. Such a bowl is both impersonal and intimate.

The making of this kind of impersonal object, perhaps paradoxically, demands extraordinary attention to detail. Every aspect of the creation of a beautiful bowl must be considered with great clarity and affection, and it may take many years of mastery of all the physical and technical aspects of making pots before the prerequisite skills are internalized and become instinctive. Even then, this special element of selflessness cannot deliberately be attained; it chooses, in a sense, to be manifested. Consequently, the artist or craftsman cannot directly aspire to the accomplishment of beauty, but if the potter's work is going to be anything other than physically functional or superficially attractive, this ideal must be embraced and given the opportunity to realize itself.

III 

The quality of selflessness cannot be understood, much less attained, without a degree of transformation, or clarification, of individual consciousness. This clarification involves the unfolding realization that all activity (be it thinking, feeling, sensing, perceiving, or acting) is fundamentally spoiled and reduced by the belief or feeling that what we are is limited, finite, or separate. The dawning of the understanding that real being is, in fact, infinite, is not a great or extraordinary experience; it is, rather, thoroughly intimate and familiar, precisely because it is always before and within us, even though it may be temporarily veiled by the conviction that the opposite is true.

A consequence of this understanding is the perception that beauty is not the property of an object, and that it is inherent in the true substance of all things. Substance, pure consciousness, is externalized as loving awareness and action. The more clearly that this is seen, the less certainty there can be about anything other than the presence of selfless being. A condition of fearless uncertainty, open and unknowing from moment to moment, that is both vulnerable and indestructible, then makes itself felt.

From such a perspective it might be proposed that a bowl embodies a form of consciousness. In that respect, the maker of bowls is involved in an outward activity that is the reflection of an inner openness, a state of absence that must, with all possible dedication and commitment, be maintained. It is a task that is difficult and demanding, offering the ego's sense of permanence little hope or consolation. In a certain sense it is the lifelong remaking of a single, and utterly unique, bowl - a bowl, what is more, that is ultimately invisible. It is, and contains, no thing.

John Hutchinson is an art historian

 

Summer Day

Colorful chair on Canyon Road  in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

By Mary Oliver

My Symphony

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is my symphony. 

William Ellery Channing, (May 25, 1810 – December 23, 1884), American Unitarian clergyman, writer and philosopher.

Celebration of Nature - Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy - Happy Earth Day!

My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made. - Andy Goldsworthy

Stick path by Andy Goldsworthy

"Andy Goldsworthy is known for his outdoor sculptural interventions and indoor installations that transform nature's most familiar elements into graceful designs. Using color and geometric form to order found materials - such as stone, trees, mud, grass, snow, ice, and leaves - he creates art in which the changing nature of the materials is as much a part of the work as the design itself. His creations impart a sense of wonder, drawing attention to the inherent power, beauty, and mystery of nature." 

What is a better way to celebrate the Earth Day if not to talk about a remarkable artists whose work lives in a symbiotic embrace of human creativity, aesthetics and nature.

To visit the artist's website, please click here

Wabi Sabi

Old umbrella

Wabi sabi describes a traditional Japanese aesthetic sensibility based on an appreciation of the transient beauty of the natural world. It embodies the melancholic appeal of the impermanence of all things, especially the modest, the rustic, the imperfect, and even the decayed. Wabi sabi represents the passage of time and what remains. - Donna Watson

Image source here 
Quote source here

African Influences on Modern Art

Yoruba mask, Nigeria

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris. - Mason Cooley

By Denise Murrell - Department of Art History and Archaeology at the Columbia University

During the early 1900s, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed an avant-garde in the development of modern art. In France, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends blended the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented Cubist shapes helped to define early modernism. While these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they encountered, they instantly recognized the spiritual aspect of the composition and adapted these qualities to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

German Expressionist painters such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner of Die Brücke (The Bridge) group, based in Dresden and Berlin, conflated African aesthetics with the emotional intensity of dissonant color tones and figural distortion, to depict the anxieties of modern life, while Paul Klee of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) in Munich developed transcendent symbolic imagery. The Expressionists' interest in non-Western art intensified after a 1910 Gauguin exhibition in Dresden, while modernist movements in Italy, England, and the United States initially engaged with African art through contacts with School of Paris artists.

Dogon mask, Mali

These avant-garde artists, their dealers, and leading critics of the era were among the first Europeans to collect African sculptures for their aesthetic value. Starting in the 1870s, thousands of African sculptures arrived in Europe in the aftermath of colonial conquest and exploratory expeditions. They were placed on view in museums such as the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris, and its counterparts in cities including Berlin, Munich, and London. At the time, these objects were treated as artifacts of colonized cultures rather than as artworks, and held so little economic value that they were displayed in pawnshop windows and flea markets. While artworks from Oceania and the Americas also drew attention, especially during the 1930s Surrealist movement, the interest in non-Western art by many of the most influential early modernists and their followers centered on the sculpture of sub-Saharan Africa. For much of the twentieth century, this interest was often described as Primitivism, a term denoting a perspective on non-Western cultures that is now seen as problematic.

The Stylistic Influences of African Sculpture

Modernist artists were drawn to African sculpture because of its sophisticated approach to the abstraction of the human figure, shown, for example, by a sculpted head from a Fang reliquary ensemble and a reliquary by an Ambete artist. The provenance of the Fang work includes the collection of London-based sculptor Jacob Epstein, who had Vorticist associations and was a longtime friend of Picasso and Matisse; the Ambete reliquary was once owned by the pioneering Paris dealer Charles Ratton and then by Pierre Matisse, a son of the artist.

The Fang sculpture exemplifies the integration of form with function that had created a centuries-old tradition of abstraction in African art before the European colonial period. Affixed at the top of a bark vessel where remains of the most important individuals of an extended family were preserved, the sculptural element can be considered as the embodiment of the ancestor's spirit. The representational style is therefore abstract rather than naturalistic. The abstract form of the Ambete piece goes even further to serve its function. Because the figure is the actual receptacle for the ancestral relics, the torso is elongated, hollow, and accessible from an opening in the back. The exaggerated flatness of the face in these reliquaries, and its lack of affect, typify elements of African aesthetics that were frequently evoked in modernist painting and sculpture.

Woman with a Fan by Pablo Picasso, 1907

Matisse, Picasso, and the School of Paris

Matisse, an inveterate museum browser, had likely encountered African sculptures at the Trocadéro museum with fellow Fauve painter Maurice de Vlaminck, before embarking on a spring 1906 trip to North Africa. Upon returning that summer, Matisse painted two versions of The Young Sailor  in which he replaced the first version's naturalistically contoured facial features with a more rigidly abstract visage reminiscent of a mask. At about the same time, Picasso completed his portrait of the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein, finalizing her face after many repaintings in the frozen, masklike style of archaic sculptural busts from his native Iberia.

In the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1913), Stein wrote an account of Matisse's fall 1906 purchase of a small African sculpture, now identified as a Vili figure from the Democratic Republic of Congo, at a curio shop on his way to visit her home. Since Picasso was present, she recalled, Matisse showed the sculpture to him. Picasso later told curators and writers of the pivotal visits he subsequently made, beginning in June 1907, to the African collections at the Trocadéro, famously describing his revulsion at the dimly lit, musty galleries but also his inability to turn away from his study of the objects' inventive and elegant figural composition. The African sculptures, he said, had helped him to understand his purpose as a painter, which was not to entertain with decorative images, but to mediate between perceived reality and the creativity of the human mind—to be freed, or "exorcised," from fear of the unknown by giving form to it. In 1907, after hundreds of preparatory sketches, Picasso completed the seminal Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting to whose faceted female bodies and masklike faces some attribute the birth of Cubism and a defining role in the course of modern art throughout the twentieth century. He continued to make major paintings, sculptures, and sketches of mask-faced figures composed of fragmented geometric volumes throughout the Cubist period, including Bust of a Man from 1908, Woman's Head from 1909, and the 1909-10 Woman in an Armchair.

A younger member of the School of Paris, painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, was a key contact between the School of Paris and the Futurist artists based in his native Italy. He was singular in his adaptation of stylistic influences primarily from the Baule of today's Ivory Coast. Modigliani made sketches of the elongated faces of Baule masks and figures, heart-shaped and narrowing to a point at the chin beneath a small mouth placed unnaturally low on the face. He later adapted this distinctive facial style in a series of sculptures including the 1912 Woman's Head and later retained it in paintings such as the 1917 Reclining Nude. Constantin Brancusi, Modigliani's friend and Montparnasse studio neighbor, embraced African art because it, like sculpture of his native Romania, was directly carved from wood. Having trained with Rodin, then perhaps one of Europe's most prominent sculptors, Brancusi at times rejected the master's bronze casting technique due to its expense and its remove from the direct hand of the artist, in favor of carvings from wood and, as in Bird in Space from marble.

Modernism in America

Matisse and Picasso were key figures in the spread of interest in African-influenced modernism among the avant-garde in the United States. In 1905, the American artist Max Weber moved to Paris and studied painting with Matisse. By 1908, Weber, a frequent guest at the Sunday evening salons hosted by Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, had visited Picasso in his studio, where he may have viewed Picasso's extensive collection of African art. After returning to the United States, Weber wrote to photographer Alfred Stieglitz about the African influences that he had observed in the work of Picasso and other Paris-based modernists; and Weber's own paintings featured mask forms rendered in an increasingly abstract style. Stieglitz later presented the first Picasso exhibition in the United States at his small gallery, named "291" for its Fifth Avenue address, and then worked with Mexican artist Marius de Zayas on a 1914 exhibition which was among the first in the United States to present African sculpture as art. A 1923 exhibit at the Whitney Studio Club, a precursor of the Whitney Museum in New York, was among the earliest to present Picasso's paintings together with African sculptures. 

German Expressionism

 

Artists in Germany between the world wars worked extensively with African compositional devices as they rejected naturalism as inadequate to their project of representing the anxiety, dislocation, and utopian fantasies of interwar German society. Paul Klee developed a distinctively individual abstract style while teaching at the Bauhaus. Mystical connotations are evoked, in paintings like his 1923 Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor and the 1938 Comedians' Handbill by massed signlike forms. Some scholars have suggested affinities between these works and masks of the Bwa culture of modern Burkina Faso and geometrically patterned fabrics from the Bambara of Mali.

Ex-Dadaist George Grosz masks the melancholy figures crowding his 1931 Berlin Street in a more generalized style, which became influential for his students after he emigrated to New York, where he taught at the Art Students League. Max Beckmann overlays memory, nightmare, and dream in his allegorical 1949 triptych Beginning completed after he, too, relocated to the United States. 

The Mature Work of Matisse and Picasso

The work of Picasso and Matisse continued to reflect the influence of African aesthetics well into the mid-twentieth century, and important aspects of this later influence have been disclosed by recent scholarship. Some of Picasso's most significant early sculptural work, and his monumental 1930s busts of his young mistress Marie-Thérèse, have been linked, respectively, to Grebo and Nimba masks in his collection of African sculpture. Matisse, whose family had been weavers for generations, owned several Kuba cloths from Central Africa, as well as opulent fabrics from North Africa and eastern Europe.

Kuba cloths had been shown in early African art shows in Paris that Matisse may have attended, and several remained in his collection at his death. These handcrafted nineteenth-century fabrics from the Democratic Republic of Congo were woven from raffia palm fibers and used in dowries; the larger ones served as festive attire at funerals. Matisse's correspondence indicates their inspiration for the paper cutouts, such as the 1951 Snow Flowers that were his final major works. These collages blend Matisse's vivid color palette with the allover patterning of the textiles to produce abstract floral forms free-floating in space, creating perspectival shifts between foreground and background. After hanging panels of the Kuba textiles across his studio walls, Matisse wrote in letters to his sister that he often looked at them for long periods, waiting for something to come to him. 

Legacy for Postwar and Contemporary Art

 

By the early twentieth century, African American modernists had joined other American artists in exploring the formal qualities of African art. In 1925, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, black philosopher Alain Locke argued that African American artists should look to African art as a source of inspiration. A variety of influences informs the work of artists such as Elizabeth Catlett and Romare Bearden, who came of age in the aftermath of this important period in black cultural history. Bearden studied under George Grosz in New York; in The Woodshed from 1969, he composed Dadaist-inflected collages from materials including fragmented photographs of African sculpture. This method was elaborated in The Block, an epic-scale celebration of everyday life in a Harlem neighborhood.

The Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, who was closely involved with the Surrealists in Paris, and whose dealer was Pierre Matisse, painted hybrid figures, such as in the 1942 Goddess with Foliage, blending an uncanny Surrealist sensibility with African figural styles and references to spirituality. Several members of the postwar Abstract Expressionists, including the sculptor David Smith and the painter Adolph Gottlieb, were known to have viewed and collected African sculpture as their abstract styles evolved.

In the contemporary postcolonial era, the influence of traditional African aesthetics and processes is so profoundly embedded in artistic practice that it is only rarely evoked as such. The increasing globalization of the art world, which now includes contemporary African artists such as Malian photographer Seydou Keita and Ghana-born sculptor El Anatsui, renders increasingly moot any term that assumes a distinct divide between Western and non-Western art. The Primitivist worldview is being relegated to the past. It is in efforts to understand the full spectrum of the aesthetic foundations for early modernism that an investigation of African influences in modern art remains relevant today.

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Nothing More to Be Said...

Beauty is an ecstasy; 

it is as simple as hunger. 

There is really nothing to be said about it. 

It is like the perfume of a rose: 

you can smell it and that is all. - 

W. Somerset Maugham

Chopin's Small Miracles

 Frédéric Chopin by Bogusław Orliński

By David Dubal

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), whose 200th anniversary it is this year, is the overwhelming favorite composer for the piano. He possessed the most subtle intuitions and fathomed the mysteries of the world. Oscar Wilde once said of him, "After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own."  

Most of the 24 Chopin Preludes were sketched out between 1837 and 1838. They are the ultimate miniatures. In an age when the symphony and sonata still held sway, writing these aphoristic Preludes was revolutionary. All except two contain a single musical idea, each boiled down to its essence. Never had brevity been so brief. Ten are under a minute in length; nine last just over a minute. Only the celebrated No. 15, the so-called "Raindrop Prelude," attains the length characteristic of a small piece, clocking in at 4½ minutes.

Fourteen of the Preludes are full of light, gaiety, serenity and a kind of happiness. Seven contain anguish, rage and fury. Three are simply sorrowful. No matter how tiny, the Preludes loom large musically. Each one is a masterpiece of compressed emotion blended with an unequaled pianistic ingenuity and originality. Many of them are horribly difficult to play. When Robert Schumann read them, he proclaimed Chopin to be the "proudest poet soul of the age."

What was the inspiration? As a child in Warsaw, Chopin was nourished on the then practically unknown preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, composed in each of the major and minor keys and collectively known as "The Well-Tempered Clavier." Chopin was one of the rare pianists of his time who played most of them, and Bach remained his ideal. During the creation of the Preludes he was particularly obsessed with Bach, and took "The Well-Tempered Clavier" with him on a vacation to Majorca in November 1838, where the Preludes were refined and polished.  

Bach's preludes, some of considerable length, need their fugues, but Romantic composers did not often use this musical form. Each of Chopin's Preludes is self-sufficient, but they were composed, like Bach's, with one for each major and minor key. Since nothing follows them, one may ask what these works are a prelude to - certainly to another Prelude or, poetically speaking, perhaps a prelude to the infinite. We don't know if Chopin intended them to be played as a cycle, although today's pianists usually perform them that way in recital.

The completion of the Preludes formed one of the most harrowing episodes in the composer's short life. When Chopin and his companion, the novelist George Sand, first got to Majorca he was ecstatic. But he soon became nervous, as the piano his friend Camille Pleyel, the music publisher and piano builder, had promised to send him had not yet arrived. By early December Chopin had become gravely ill and the Majorcans, terrified of what was known as consumption (tuberculosis today), made life very unpleasant for the group. To make matters worse, the piano was stuck at customs for weeks, forcing Chopin to rent a wretched replacement. Pleyel's piano was finally delivered in early January, and the Preludes were finished late that month. 

In these tiny microcosms Chopin established the hegemony of the Romantic miniature. His Preludes would find progeny later in the preludes of Scriabin, Debussy, Rachmaninoff and others. 

Space does not permit a detailed analysis of all 24, but mention of a few may give a sense of their character: 

•No. 1 in C major : An exquisite example of Chopin's devotion to Bach. Pulsating and agitated, it is over in half a minute, leaving the listener yearning for more.

•No. 2 in A minor: A lugubrious melody seems to hang in the air. Ingmar Bergman made impressive use of the piece in his film "Autumn Sonata." 

•No. 4 in E minor: A slender melody over rich, slow-moving chordal harmonies with the left hand. It, along with the B Minor (No. 6) and C Minor (No. 20) Preludes, was played on the organ at Chopin's funeral at the Church of La Madeleine in Paris on Oct. 30, 1849. 

•No. 7 in A major: Sixteen bars of pure grace.

•No. 8 in F-sharp minor: A highly textured polyrhythmic piece, the melody of this feverish, throbbing vision is played entirely with the right thumb. One of the greatest of the Preludes.

•No. 19 in E-flat major: Pure azure contentment in triplets for both hands, marked "Vivace." To play it through unscathed is an achievement. 

•No. 24 in D minor : Marked "Allegro appassionato," a tremendous discharge of despairing passion, concluding with three foreboding D's from the bowels of the piano.

Probably more people have come to great music through Chopin than from any other composer. In my case, growing up in Cleveland, I used to listen to a radio show whose theme music entranced me at first hearing but was never identified by the host. Although the show aired much past my usual bedtime, I would occasionally sneak down the stairs, turn the radio on at low volume and drink in the strains of this music, over so quickly that I listened with all my might. It was not until somewhat later, when I was taking piano lessons, that I found out that it was No. 7, the Prelude in A Major. Not too long after that I could play it myself, which was bliss! Only later did I find out that there were 23 more Preludes that I would love equally, and in later years would come to study and teach.

About the author:

Mr. Dubal is a professor of piano performance at the Juilliard School and the author of "The Art of the Piano" and "The Essential Canon of Classical Music." His radio program, "The Piano Matters," can be heard world-wide on www.wwfm.org.


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Cabinet of Curiosities

Originally, a cabinet of curiosities, also known as a cabinet of wonders or the Wnderkammer, was an intricate piece of furniture designed in Italy during the Renaissance for storing and display of rare and precious objects.

By the 17th century, a cabinet of curiosities had evolved into a room within a house in which ever growing private collections of curios and oddities were displayed.

Keeping in par with the developments in natural sciences, men of social distinction began collecting prints, ancient manuscripts, fossils, rocks, shells, feathers, insects, taxidermied animals, antlers, and preserved specimen with congenital deformities or the wax models of such. 

Such eclectic collections bore testimony to a slightly morbid fascination with the bizarre, but they were also a proof of man's growing desire to better understand the physical world that surrounded him. They seemed to satisfy his hunger for knowledge and the need to explore the world.

This almost puerile curiosity was paired with a compulsion to gather the most unique or exotic specimen and gave birth to an entire industry. Not only the adequate display cases had to be made, but the specimen had to be collected and preserved. Those who could not travel to far away places had to resort to other means. They purchased their treasures from antiquaries and curio shops.

With time, these collections grew in size and complexity and began losing their randomness. They became invaluable precursors to a more elaborate enterprise, namely, the museum of natural history, where a thorough classification and systematization of specimen was taken into a new level after Charles Darwin presented his Theory of Evolution.

Institutions such as the Royal Society or the Smithsonian Institution promoted learning and intellectual curiosity and contributed greatly to a systematic research and collecting.

What began as a hobby of a few cultured and curious men was transformed into a scientific endeavor to mark humanity's  place on this planet and put it in a greater context of evolution.

By Dominique Allmon

 

Dominique Allmon©2012

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Antilope - A Scent of Distinction

Antilope by Weil

Long forgotten and mostly unknown, Antilope by Weil was my favorite fragrance in late 70s. Sweet, woody, and elegant, it suited my taste back than. It was probably much too extravagant for a young person, but I liked it a lot. It came in a tiny bottle with a stopper. The scent is well etched into my olfactory memory even if I have a slight difficulty describing it today. It was fresh and wild and musky at the same time. I was mesmerized when I first smelled it.

Antilope was launched in 1945 by a Parisian furrier Les Fourrures Weil upon their return from American exile. 

The House of Weil made furs since 1912, but following the trend, launched its first fragrance in 1928. A number of fragrances were created at that time by various perfume makers to mask the unpleasant smell that a fur coat would exude with age. The specially designed fur fragrance was to camouflage the smell without damaging the fur coat. 

The House of Weil made its first fur fragrance at the direct request of a wealthy client. Weil's first fragrance was the Zibeline made in 1928 by the legendary Claude Frayssee and his daughter Jacqueline. A few more followed until the outbreak of the second World War when the Weils were forced into exile. The war did not really interrupt their creativity as they continued to make furs in the United States. Their return to Europe at the end of war was marked by the launch of two luxurious fragrances - Antilope and Padisha.

Antilope is an elegant, but slightly old fashioned floral woody aldehydic chypre perfume. It reminds me rather of the glamorous and capricious ladies who accompanied their husbands on African safaris rather than of the wild scent of hunted game.

There is something luxurious and exotic about the perfume whose "soul" is full of temperament - more like a difficult to catch antelope than a wild animal trying to attack its prey.

The top note is composed of neroli, bergamot and aldehydes that open to fresh and floral  heart of clary sage, rose, lily of the valley, jasmine, carnation, iris and violet. This olfactory structure rests on a woody base with a touch of musk and amber: sandalwood, vetiver, patchouli, tonka bean, amber, oak moss and musk.

I haven't smelled the Antilope for ages. I thought Antilope had disappeared from the market, but when the company was restructured in 2002 under a new ownership, the perfume was re-launched in a new, fresher, more herbal and slightly less "powdery" version of the old classic. Who knows, I might even give it a try.

By Dominique Allmon

 

Dominique Allmon©2012 

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Celestial Realm

 Eighteen Disciples of Buddha by Wang Wusheng, 1984

"Dogen, one of Japan’s foremost medieval Zen masters, wrote in the "Sansui-kyo" chapter of the "Shobogenzo" that “to view sansui (Chinese style mountain-water landscape painting), is to meet yourself before you were born.”

The self before birth is a self beyond time and space. Dogen, wrote that this self is a ‘formless self’ no one has ever seen. This yet unformed self is the essence of sansui. A depiction of something beyond time and space whose appearance is yet unformed.

A dark mass of mountains is not dead space but the very soul of the living mountains. The white sky in his photographs is not an empty sky  but a sky shown after the passing of a raging storm, now bathed in sunlight."  - Seigo Matsuoka in "Photographic Sansui"

Wang Wusheng was born in 1945 in the city of Wuhu in Anhui Province, China. He graduated from Anhui University's School of Physics. Beginning in 1973, Wusheng worked as a photographer for a news magazine in Anhui Province. He studied at the Art Institute of Nihon University in Japan beginning in 1983 and studied for three years at the Tokyo Arts University. Wusheng currently works as a fine art photographer in Tokyo. 

Peaks and Clouds, by Wang Wusheng, 2004

For more than three decades, Wang Wusheng has been captivated by the beauty of Mount Huangshan, also called Yellow Mountain. Located in the southern part of the Anhui province in northern China, Mount Huangshan has often been described as the world's most beautiful and enchanting mountain. Over many centuries, this mountain, with its seventy-two peaks, has been the subject of Chinese landscape painters, whose singular works are so haunting make it appear impossible for these mountains to exist in nature. Inspired by the legacy of these paintings, Wusheng has sought to portray Mount Huangshan in his own way, expressing his "inner worlds" through this scenic wonder.

Wusheng captures mist-shrouded granite peaks emerging from an ever-changing veil of clouds, sculptural craggy rocks on lofty cliffs and weathered, oddly shaped pine trees. He records the appearance of Mount Huangshan in all seasons and at various times of day. As one critic says, "Wang's pictures are gorgeous, but their beauty does not come directly from the natural scenery. Rather, the mountain's natural wonders have been transformed into artistic spectacles through the artist's commitment to the medium of black-and-white photography, his insistent pursuit of dynamic movement and metamorphic images, and his deep emotional engagement with his subject. His mountain peaks are often densely dark -a kind of velvet darkness that seems full of color."

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