My friend Rhonda sent me this post and so I reposted it to enlighten my audience about the terrific work she does with sightless performers.
AN ORIGINAL AND INSPIRATIONAL PLAY BY BRAILLE
INSTITUTE STUDENTS
Braille Institute offers FREE live performances of Victory, a play written and produced by our students. The play follows the moving saga of an eagle’s sight loss and his struggle to retain leadership.
Victory is one hour in length and is available on Tuesdays 10 a.m. – Noon. It is performed by a cast of 10 in a large room or on stage. There is also an in-service on sight loss included with the performance.
If you are a community organization or activities director and are interested in arranging a performance, please contact Rhonda Volotzky at (323) 663-1111, Ext. 1330 or 1325, or e-mailRKVolotzky@brailleinstitute.org
Photograph by Justin Rosenberg
This picture of the window I face every day gives life to the idea that your surroundings can influence your creativity. Actually six or seven of us at work look at the window and it affects each one of us differently. But it also connects us and somehow I feel it gives rise to better design and solutions than a normal wall made of cement, wood or painted drywall. What is does is make us kindred souls with the same colorful light and that is why this article from Mark Susnow resonates with me.
Hope you agree…
by Mark Susnow
Sometimes telling a story is the best way to say it. There was that moment. My heart was wide open. I felt inspired. Take a second and imagine that this story is about you.
“You’re on the way to the airport. You get on the plane with a book that you’ve been planning to read for quite some time. As you open your book, you glance at the person next to you. A few minutes later you are asked a question and you reluctantly answer. You lower your book a bit to be polite and after a few minutes you find yourself putting your book down and engaging in a conversation, although with a lack of enthusiasm. And then the person next to you, let’s call him John, makes an observation about you that’s quite perceptive and sensitive. You start to become curious about who John is and in the course of the conversation, he tells you of an experience he has only shared with a few people. You let John know that you have had a similar experience. By now you’re totally engaged and listening to every word he says. You notice every nuance in the inflection of his voice and the way he moves. Time seems to stand still and the next thing you know the plane lands. You say goodbye to the kindred soul you have just met.”
You now know what’s possible. We all would love to have these experiences more often. You feel heard and everything seems possible. It is communication at its highest level and is a lost art. When you integrate four fundamental truths of communication into your life, you can have these experiences more often.
The first truth is to know that what we all want on a deeper level is the ability to connect with another, to touch each other’s soul. Unfortunately, too many of our conversations are just an exchange of ideas and information and we very rarely penetrate the surface. Most of our focus is on how we are going to respond to what is being said instead of listening. When we know that what the other person really wants is connection, there is common ground to build upon. With this foundation, we can build relationships that deepen and empower those involved.
The second truth is to know that listening involves much more than just listening to the words. It is tuning into the energy beyond the words. It is understanding the needs and feelings of the other person. It is about being totally engaged and at the same time being in the rhythm of life. Yes, it takes a lot of energy but you will be energized by what you get back. Imagine living in a world where you are truly listening and fully engaged.
The third truth is to know that you must take responsibility for the quality of your communication. Because we all have long standing attitudes and beliefs we sometimes find ourselves trying to convince the other person of our viewpoints. Being right then becomes the goal of the interaction rather than communication and the next thing you know you are in a full-fledged argument. Just think of what happens when you discuss politics or religion. Is being right more important than experiencing one of those magical moments?
The fourth truth is that communication is a process and an art. Being a masterful communicator doesn’t happen over night but it starts with the intention to experience more connection in your busy life. Just like other art forms, i.e. dancing or music, there is a natural ebb and flow in the learning cycle. As your commitment deepens to this process you notice that you are experiencing frequent glimpses of the magic that is possible in your life. The ultimate communication occurs when you are able to touch each other’s soul and share who you are. This new found magic then becomes the gateway to a more fulfilling life.
At our core, we all have the same human needs and desires. We want to know that we matter and that our life has meaning and purpose. We have the need to love and to be loved. When we accept that we all have the same human needs and desires, we know that we are part of one human family. By working together as one, what is possible in our lives, communities, and the world expands. That’s when we know that we are all kindred souls.
I love this marvelous video morphing that works really well with Corot’s portraits and almost gives you a feeling on life in the young women. His work is superb and his output was prolific. We are lucky to have so many great works of his to gaze admire.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (July 17, 1796 – February 22, 1875) was a French landscape painter and printmaker in etching. Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.
Camille Corot was born in Paris in 1796, in a house at 125 Rue du Bac, now demolished. His family were bourgeois people—his father was a wigmaker and his mother a milliner—and unlike the experience of some of his artistic colleagues, throughout his life he never felt the want of money, as his parents made good investments and ran their businesses well. After his parents married, they bought the millinery shop where his mother had worked and his father gave up his career as a wigmaker to run the business side of the shop. The store was a famous destination for fashionable Parisians and earned the family an excellent income. Corot was the second of three children born to the family, who lived above their shop during those years.
Corot received a scholarship to study at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen,but left after having scholastic difficulties and entered a boarding school. He “was not a brilliant student, and throughout his entire school career he did not get a single nomination for a prize, not even for the drawing classes.” Unlike many masters who demonstrated early talent and inclinations toward art, before 1815 Corot showed no such interest. During those years he lived with the Sennegon family, whose patriarch was a friend of Corot’s father and who spent much time with young Corot on nature walks. It was in this region that Corot made his first paintings after nature. At nineteen, Corot was a “big child, shy and awkward. He blushed when spoken to. Before the beautiful ladies who frequented his mother’s salon, he was embarrassed and fled like a wild thing… Emotionally, he was an affectionate and well-behaved son, who adored his mother and trembled when his father spoke.” When Corot’s parents moved into a new residence in 1817, the 21-year-old Corot moved into the dormer-windowed room on the third floor, which became his first studio as well.
Corot was the leading painter of the Barbizon school of France in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting. His work simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. Of him Claude Monet exclaimed “There is only one master here—Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing.” His contributions to figure painting are hardly less important; Degas preferred his figures to his landscapes, and the classical figures of Picasso pay overt homage to Corot’s influence.
Historians somewhat arbitrarily divided his work into periods, but the point of division is never certain, as he often completed a picture years after he began it. In his early period, he painted traditionally and “tight”—with minute exactness, clear outlines, thin brush work, and with absolute definition of objects throughout. After he reached his 50th year, his methods changed to focus on breadth of tone and an approach to poetic power conveyed with thicker application of paint; and about 20 years later, from about 1865 onwards, his manner of painting became full of mystery and poetry, created with a more impressionistic touch. In part, this evolution in expression can be seen as marking the transition from the plein-air paintings of his youth, shot through with warm natural light, to the studio-created landscapes of his late maturity, enveloped in uniform tones of silver. In his final 10 years he became the “Père (Father) Corot” of Parisian artistic circles, where he was regarded with personal affection, and acknowledged as one of the five or six greatest landscape painters the world had seen, along with Hobbema, Claude Lorrain, Turner and Constable. In his long and productive life, he painted over 3,000 paintings.
Corot approached his landscapes more traditionally than is usually believed. By comparing even his late period tree-painting and arrangements to those of Claude Lorrain, such as that which hangs in the Bridgewater gallery, the similarity in methods is seen. Compared to the Impressionists who came later, Corot’s palette is restrained, dominated with browns and blacks (“forbidden colors” among the Impressionists) along with dark and silvery green. Though appearing at times to be rapid and spontaneous, usually his strokes were controlled and careful, and his compositions well-thought out and generally rendered as simply and concisely as possible, heightening the poetic effect of the imagery. As he stated, “I noticed that everything that was done correctly on the first attempt was more true, and the forms more beautiful.”
In the 1860s, Corot became interested in photography, taking photos himself and becoming acquainted with many early photographers, which had the effect of suppressing his painting palette even more in sympathy with the monochromic tones of photographs. This had the result of making his paintings even less dramatic but somewhat more poetic, a result which caused some critics to cite a monotony in his later output. Théophile Thoré wrote that Corot “has only a single octave, extremely limited and in a minor key; a musician would say. He knows scarcely more than a single time of day, the morning, and a single color, pale grey.” Corot responded:
“What there is to see in painting, or rather what I am looking for, is the form, the whole, the value of the tones…That is why for me the color comes after, because I love more than anything else the overall effect, the harmony of the tones, while color gives you a kind of shock that I don’t like. Perhaps it is the excess of this principal that makes people say I have leaden tones.”
In his aversion to shocking color, Corot sharply diverged from the up-and-coming Impressionists, who embraced experimentation with vivid hues.
In addition to the landscapes (so popular was the late style that there exist numerous forgeries), Corot produced a number of prized figure pictures. While the subjects were sometimes placed in pastoral settings, these were mostly studio pieces, drawn from the live model with both specificity and subtlety. Like his landscapes, they are characterized by a contemplative lyricism, with his late paintings L’Algérienne (Algerian Woman) and La Jeune Grecque (The Greek Girl) being fine examples.Corot painted about fifty portraits, mostly of family and friends. He also painted thirteen reclining nudes, with his Les Repos (1860) strikingly similar in pose to Ingres famous Le Grande Odalisque (1814), but Corot’s female is instead a rustic bacchante. In perhaps his last figure painting, ‘’Lady in Blue’’ (1874), Corot achieves an effect reminiscent of Degas, soft yet expressive. In all cases of his figure painting, the color is restrained and is remarkable for its strength and purity. Corot also executed many etchings and pencil sketches. Some of the sketches used a system of visual symbols—circles representing areas of light and squares representing shadow. He also experimented with the cliché-verre process—a hybrid of photography and engraving. Starting in the 1830s, Corot also painted decorative panels and walls in the homes of friends, aided by his students.
Corot summed up his approach to art around 1860, “I interpret with my art as much as with my eye.”
The works of Corot are housed in museums in France and the Netherlands, Britain and America.
With his parents’ support, Corot followed the well-established pattern of French painters who went to Italy to study the masters of the Italian Renaissance and to draw the crumbling monuments of Roman antiquity. A condition by his parents before leaving was that he paint a self-portrait for them, his first. Corot’s stay in Italy from 1825 to 1828 was a highly formative and productive one, during which he completed over 200 drawings and 150 paintings.[14] He worked and traveled with several young French painters also studying abroad who painted together and socialized at night in the cafes, critiquing each other and gossiping. Corot learned little from the Renaissance masters (though later he cited Leonardo da Vinci as his favorite painter) and spent most of his time around Rome and in the Italian countryside.[15] The Farnese Gardens with its splendid views of the ancient ruins was a frequent destination, and he painted it at three different times of the day.[16] The training was particularly valuable in gaining an understanding of the challenges of both the mid-range and panoramic perspective, and in effectively placing man-made structures in a natural setting.[17] He also learned how to give buildings and rocks the effect of volume and solidity with proper light and shadow, while using a smooth and thin technique. Furthermore, placing suitable figures in a secular setting was a necessity of good landscape painting, to add human context and scale, and it was even more important in allegorical landscapes. To that end Corot worked on figure studies in native costume as well as nude.[18] During winter, he spent time in a studio but returned to work outside as quickly as weather permitted.[19] The intense light of Italy posed considerable challenges, “This sun gives off a light that makes me despair. It makes me feel the utter powerlessness of my palette.”[20] He learned to master the light and to paint the stones and sky in subtle and dramatic variation.
Mordecai Ardon (Hebrew: מרדכי ארדון, July 13, 1896 – June 18, 1992), considered one of Israel’s greatest painters.
Ardon was born Max Bronstein in 1896 in Tuchów, Galicia (then Austria-Hungary, now Poland). In 1933 he emigrated to Jerusalem in Mandate Palestine. He was granted Palestinian citizenship in 1936 and changed his name to Mordecai Ardon. He participated in the Venice Biennale of 1968.
Beginning in the 1950s Mordechai Ardon adopted a complex system of symbolic images in his paintings, taken from the Jewish Mystical tradition (Kabbalah), from the Bible and from a tangible reality. In his painting “Gates of Light”, for example, he expressed “the inner mystery and timelessness of the landscape.” His work seeks to impart a cosmic dimension to the present, linking it to antiquity and mystery. The same approach can be found in “At the Gates of Jerusalem” (1967), which shows the attempt to “convey his feelings about the cosmic significance of Israel’s return to the Old City of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War”.”Bird near a yellow wall” (1950) demonstrates his simplistic involvement with the Holocaust, a subject to which he was one of the few Israeli artists to devote a phase of his work, at that time.
As a teacher and director of the “New Bezalel”, Ardon conveyed his sense of social involvement, his tendency towards Jewish mysticism and local mythology, and the combination of personal national symbols with reality-always stressing masterful technique. Pupils such as Avigdor Arikha, Naftali Bezem, Shraga Weil and Shmuel Boneh absorbed these influences and integrated them into their later work.
In contrast to Yosef Zaritsky, the father of the Universalist “Ofakim Hadasim” (“New Horizons”) group, Ardon was seen as the father of the regional approach in Israeli art.
One of his most famous creations are the “Ardon Windows” (1980–1984), a set of large stained-glass windows displayed prominently in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, incorporating visual elements from the Kabbalah.
Ardon died in Jerusalem in 1992.
In 2006 his painting “The Woodpecker of Time” (1963) was sold at Christie’s for 643,200$.
It’s always interesting to hear the artists discuss his work and the inspiration behind it. It clarifies the work so you can better understand what they are trying to achieve. Posey does that well in this video.
Stephen Pusey (born 1952) is an artist. After graduating from St Martins School of Art, UK, in 1975, Pusey created monumental public murals around London, including the Brixton Academy mural until the end of the decade. In 1986 he emigrated to New York, USA. Although his New York debut at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center was an exhibition of paintings, by the early 1990s the focus of his work again became public art - using digital media and the world wide web.
In 1994 he founded the online art and discussion hub, Plexus, with curator Yu Yeon Kim with whom he curated, “Omnizone, Perspectives in Mapping Digital Culture”, in 1997. In 1996 he also helped establish, with other online organizations, the Foundation for Digital Culture. Stephen Pusey’s current works are large abstract paintings that contain a linear flux of shifting forms.
For those of you who have never been to Longwood Gardens it may be hard to understand just how incrdible this installation of Bruce Munro’s was. I was there in 2008 researching a book I wrote and photographed on “Treehouses” The grounds of Longwood are spectacular with outdoor and indoor gardens. There are also three treehouses on the property that are quite beautiful as well. It was formerly the Dupont Estate It is a shining example of what a legacy can be.
Below is a story about Bruce Munro’s Installation from Artdaily.org
KENNETT SQUARE, PA.- As night fell on Friday in the eastern states of the USA ‘Light: Installations by Bruce Munro at Longwood Gardens’ was unveiled to the US press. On Saturday visitors poured in to see the much-anticipated artworks, and they were not disappointed. The heart-stopping 23-acre show marks the first time Munro installations have been seen outside the UK, and his debut large-scale one-man-show anywhere. It has been commissioned by Longwood to run from June 9th to September 29th this year. Longwood Gardens has a special place in East-Coaster’s hearts and is one of the great display gardens of the world. Timed tickets to Munro’s exhibition there have been selling out weeks in advance and iPhone/iPad apps are now available on iTunes. The historic gardens have antique glasshouses not dissimilar to those at Kew Gardens outside London, and they regularly feature world-class musical and arts events as well as educational programmes. Munro’s ‘LIGHT’ consists of six large-scale outdoor installations, two installations within the 4-acre Grand Conservatory, and a small collection of illuminated sculptures in the Music Room. There are many new works by the Wiltshire-based Munro as well as never-before-seen views of Longwood at night. “The unmatched beauty of Longwood Gardens inspired me in so many ways,” said Munro. “It’s been an exciting artistic challenge. I hope that guests will see in these works the beauty of melding light and landscape to become one.” The Installations: FOREST OF LIGHT is a serene forest of 20,000 illuminated stems scattered along a forest walk. WATER-TOWERS is a monumental maze of 69 towers in the water meadow, which seem to move in a monumental glowing dance as they change colour in synchronisation with music. In WATERLILIES, Munro pays homage to Longwood’s iconic waterlily by floating platters of shimmering CDs onto the Large Lake. Nearby on the banks, the 7,000-stem FIELD OF LIGHT beckons visitors toward its enchanting glow. ARROW SPRING artfully mixes the horticultural splendour of Salvia plants and sparkling LEDs to create a meandering hillside stream. For ‘CANDLELIGHT’, in Longwood’s tree house, Munro has placed ceramic candles lit with xenon along the beams and angled mirrors to refract their glowing light. Inside the Conservatory, the Orangery is hung with six SNOWBALLS suspended from the ceiling. Each chandelier is more than nine feet in diameter and encircles 127 glass balls. LIGHT SHOWER rains more than 1,600 drops of twinkling light over the flooded Fern Floor, creating a magical reflection that intensifies the luminous shower. Finally, the Music Room features a collection of 6 smaller sculptures by Munro [Beach without Sand, Restless Fakir, Gnasher’s Big Raspberry, Boogie Woogie Tower, Rapunzel’s Towers and Mettabhavana]. One of these small pieces – Mettabhavana – is a model for an extraordinary building. “I saw it in a dream. I couldn’t tell where the light was coming from, it seemed to shine through the walls,” said Bruce. A special website at Mettabhavana.com explores Munro’s passionate hopes of finding a patron to build this sculptural edifice. Surrounded by water channels and lit by candles, its sole use is for practicing the ‘Loving Kindness’ meditation. Munro has made small contributions to group-shows in the USA in the past, including Contemplating The Void at New York’s iconic Guggenheim Museum, and a show of contemporary glass at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. To date, his best-known artworks are CD Sea at Long Knoll Field, and Field of Light at The Holburne Museum in Bath and the Eden Project in Cornwall. His work has also been much admired at the 12th century Salisbury Cathedral and at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. “Longwood Gardens is thrilled to host Bruce Munro’s first large-scale exhibition in the U.S.,” said Paul Redman, the Director. “His imaginative works will enchant and amaze our guests with their beauty and ingenuity, but also inspire them to see and experience gardens in a whole new way.” “What also appealed to us about Bruce’s work is its focus on low-energy output and his sensitivity to the landscape,” said Redman. “Bruce shares Longwood’s commitment to sustainable practices.”
I have taken note that my article about the french painter Balthus gets quite a lot of traffic and I wondered why. I started to dig deeper into Balthus, his life, his work and attitudes he possessed. It’s well known he had a “thing” for underaged girls and young women who were at most half his age. He didn’t seem to care and his attitude made him more controversial, dangerous and perhaps marketable.
Below are some of his quotes from “Brainy Quotes” and they do reveal a little about Balthus the man.
I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings. Balthus
I refuse to confide and don’t like it when people write about art. Balthus
I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings. Balthus
One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil. Balthus
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really. Balthus
Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish. Balthus
Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible. Balthus
Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle. Balthus
The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings. Balthus
The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.
