99 and counting

Will Barnet is a Massachusetts-born artist and art educator; his career has both evolved and endured, his style is smoothly intriguing—and beyond all that, he'll be celebrating his 100th birthday next year. He began focusing on art at an early age, attended the Art Students League in New York and later became an instructor at the League himself. I like this particular pictured work of his very much and I look forward to wishing Mr. Barnet a happy century of being next May.

Pictured: Soliloquy -- Will Barnet (Canton Museum of Art)

painting of the month

A Summer Shower -- Charles Edward Perugini, 1888

cleaning hydrotherapy

Whenever it gets this hot I wish I could reenact that scene from Marguerite Duras' novel The Lover, wherein the mother goes on a water-wash cleaning binge in their house in 1929 French colonial Vietnam. Duras writes how the house was raised above the Mekong, so it "can be cleaned by having buckets of water thrown over it, sluiced right through like a garden. All the chairs are piled up on the tables, the whole house is streaming, water is lapping around the piano in the small sitting room. The water pours down the steps, spreads through the yard toward the kitchen...[we] splash each other, then wash the floor with yellow soap. Everyone's barefoot...[the] whole house smells nice, with the delicious smell of wet earth after a storm, enough to make you wild with delight...."

Pictured: Waterfall, Blue Brook -- John Henry Twachtman, ca. 1895 (Cincinnati Art Museum)

white zone

There are lots of people visiting Chicago in the summertime, and whenever I happen to see any interesting city place that's strangely and briefly empty in the midst of crowds, I try to get a picture of it (kind of an eye of the hurricane effect). Like this was a pure white noiseless view of the Art Institute's Modern Wing last week before a wave of museum-goers came off the elevator....

a minute of georges

The 1952 film Moulin Rouge isn't as glittering or fast-paced or romantic as the 2001 version, and it is heavily weighted with moments of melodrama and the mental and physical anguish of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It also has poor José Ferrer doing a wonderful job suffering for his art and playing Lautrec on his knees without even winning the Oscar he was nominated for, which seems like a travesty. Still, according to Wikipedia, John Huston wanted the movie to look as if Toulouse-Lautrec had envisioned it himself, and it truly does with beautiful or striking scenes and intense color combinations. And it features a young Christopher Lee, one of the great lords of horror films, in the role of pipe-smoking Pointillist Georges Seurat. Lee as Seurat has only about a minute of screentime, but he looks very fine and painterly and not particularly menacing at all.