Sloth and Manatee

I recently got to visit the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. It’s such a special place, and it was packed, and there was this splendid sunset and it was very magical. You should go.

Going to a museum is like going visiting, especially if you have favorite paintings. There’s a Van Gogh painting called The Mulberry Tree at the Norton Simon in Pasadena that we visit, which we call “painting.” As in, “we’re going to see painting.”

Anyway, on this particular visit I thought about the paintings themselves, and how they are visiting with each other by way of being there on the wall together. Each one is a story of an artist and people and whoever is depicted, and how the thing got there and where it was before. Much of the Legion of Honor is populated with portraiture and historical epic canvases.

When you go to a sporting event or a concert, there you are sitting with some people, and this particular combination was impossible until you all arrived there. These paintings may or may not know each other, maybe the artists were acquainted, or maybe they were together in storage, or the people who acquired them maybe shot each other, which is what happened when Mr. Spreckels, the guy who helped found the Legion of Honor, didn’t like the news reporting of Mr. de Young, after whom the art museum in Golden Gate Park is named. That must have been quite a day. Nowadays, you can get one membership for both museums, which on the day of one of them shooting the another probably did not seem too likely.

A morose version of this is cemeteries - I mean, these people are buried there, right there, and they don’t even know each other! Maybe if they did meet, they would have loathed each other. Or partied together. There’s no way to know. And here they are in their rows, right there.

Back to something more palatable - I hung out with the paintings at the Legion of Honor, and by extension the artists who painted them, whose hand movements you could see in the brushwork right there forever, standing at arms’ length from the canvas just like they did, and considering the stories of how portraits got commissioned, and did they have pressure to touch up that little mole on the nose or make the matron’s hair tidier, and what about this lady shown with five of her kids who eventually had 18 children and then died young? And did the artists and patrons find hilarity in the weird images of religious figures as babies who were up walking around and blessing people? That’s silly, right? And were there arguments, and stuff scraped off the canvas, and periods of time when the painting just sat there, unfinished? Everything in there was a pile of stories, and all sitting right next to each other. What a thing! What a thing.

Sloth and Manatee Page

Brainwaves

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BunnyFrogCatSnake

Funny story, I drew the friends looking at some art, but I hadn’t put in the art, and I was like, what ever shall I put in that frame, and then I was like hang on, hold the phone, what if it was a cutout, and what if there was music, and

Things Of The Week

Oh my gosh it is 3D panoramas of the insides of Star Trek ships - even a Bird of Prey!

Oh wow make your own tiled patterns in all sorts of which-ways - to start your own click the link that says “creating your own tesselations” - whee!

Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you hang out with your favorite painted object, may you cruise around on a Star Trek ship, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy