Shadow Shot Sunday

We actually experienced a strange weather phenomenon here in Western Massachusetts on Tuesday:  a microburst. It was very quick but there were a lot of trees and powerlines down in the roads, branches and lawn furniture flying and people taking cover. This photo was taken just minutes after the microburst passed, leaving everything calm and the sun trying to come out.  The new spring-green leaves of our sugar maple caught my eye and I snapped.

Happy Mothers Day to all the moms out there!

Shadow Shot Sunday is hosted by Tracy from Australia and features lots of excellent entries weekly, from all over the globe.

The Friday Evening Nudes - Mother's Day Edition

 Klimt

 Botero

Renoir

My World, Watery Wednesday and SkyWatch Friday

 My World

Watery Wednesday

Sky Watch Friday

 The Great Falls Discovery Center

Great Hall Meeting Room

Turners Falls, Massachusetts

taken end of April, 2010

Visit the Great Falls Discovery Center and learn about the Connecticut River Watershed's rich natural, cultural and industrial history.
The Center is fully accessible and is housed within a complex of old mill buildings and includes open habitat exhibits, fish tanks, and a multipurpose program room.
Exhibits highlight various habitats found in the watershed, timelines put perspective on today's view of the threats to habitats and what we can do to safeguard them.
The four-acre park that surrounds The Center has butterfly gardens, native plantings views of the canal and river as well as safe play areas. This park is linked to a railtrail that runs from Turners Falls to Deerfield, a walking tour through downtown Turners Falls, and the watchable wildlife areas of Barton's cove and along the canal.

Just a short walk from the discovery center is the Gill-Montague Bridge with way too much traffic and way too many structural problems to be photogenic, but the view of the Connecticut is really glorious on a bright, clear day.

 Looking over toward Unity Park 

It was a beautiful day in the Happy Valley!

Canal Side Bike Trail

the old railway bridge portion of the four-mile bike trail in our town

(taken on April 23, 2010)

Radio On - Mumford and Sons - Little Lion Man

 This type of drama just wrecks me in a song.   ;-)

Very good, indeed-y.

Artist of the Week: Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero (1932–)

Fernando Botero's distinctive style of smooth inflated shapes with unexpected shifts in scale is today instantly recognizable. It reflects the artist's constant search to give volume presence and reality. The parameters of proportion in his world are innovative and almost always surprising. Appropriating themes from all of art history-- from the Middle Ages, the Italian quattrocento, and Latin American colonial art to the modern trends of the 20th century--Botero transforms them to his own particular style.

Born in 1932 in Medellin, Colombia, Botero became interested in painting at an early age. His artistic precocity was evident in an illustrated article he contributed to the Medellin newspaper El Colombiano when he was seventeen. Titled Picasso and the Nonconformity of Art it revealed his avant-garde thinking about modern art. Botero moved to Bogotá in 1951 and held his first one-man exhibition there at the Leo Matiz Gallery. The following year, at the age of twenty, he was awarded a Second Prize at the National Salon in Bogota. Read entire biography here

“A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. And man needs spiritual expression and nourishing. It's why even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. Man needs music, literature, and painting-all those oases of perfection that make up art-to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.”

  

"All my life I've been trying to produce art that is beautiful to discover all the elements that go to make up visual perfection. When you come from my background you can’t be spoilt by beauty, because you've never really seen it. If you're born in Paris, say, you can see art everywhere, so by the time you come to create art yourself you’re spoilt – you're tired of beauty as such and want to do something else. With me it was quite different. I wasn't tired of beauty; I was hungering for it."

"I describe in a realistic form a nonrealistic reality."

~Fernando Botero

”Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life."

"When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting."

Music for Sunday - Ani Difranco, Joni Mitchell and Lucinda Williams

...cuz when I look around I think this, this is good enough
I try to allow whatever life brings
Cuz when I look down, I miss all the good stuff
and when I look up, I trip over things...

~Ani Difranco

Ah. But what a lovely pain in the ass she is! ;-)

Shadow Shot Sunday

Shadows in my garden, in mid-April

Shadow Shot Sunday

Surealistic Sunday

 Since I'm sure the true definition of "surrealism" is hotly contested in the art world, I'm not claiming that these images are truly in that category. After all, I have never professed to be an art expert. The Pagan Sphinx blog is a sort of personal art history project for me. I welcome true experts to comment and correct me where I am wrong. Otherwise, enjoy the art! I believe that is what it's all about, yes?

All artists are linked to a website, their own or a collective, if you'd like to find out more about their work.

Daniela Ovtcharov

 

 

Benoit Polveche

 

Lukas Kandl

 

 Brian Hoover

 

David Stoupakis

(an interesting bio)

Madeline von Foerster

 

Naoto Hattori

 

 Serena Brewer