Picture for One Moment

We got up to High Ledges Wildlife Sanctuary on Saturday and as the windchill must have been in the single digits, we passed on a hike and had pancakes and delicious local maple syrup at Davenport's Maple Farm in Shelburne, Massachusetts.

 In addition to maple sugaring, Davenport's Farm raises cows. There were two calves in pens for the kids to pet. Being kids at heart, we couldn't resist them. This photo is of the shier, more skittish one

Below is The Future Mr. Pagan Sphinx petting the more friendly calf, whose look of ecstasy is priceless!  :-)

Linking to Scenic Sunday and That's My World!

Pagan Sphinx Photo 2011 © All Rights Reserved

Happy Hour Friday -- Billie Holiday

Goodbye Elizabeth Taylor

 This REM song is ostensibly about Courtney Love (ugh) but to me, it's all about Elizabeth Taylor. An amazing screen actress and a compassionate human being has passed on. Goodbye Elizabeth.

Artist of the Week - (Linking to ABC Wednesday)

J is for Jasper Johns

born May 15, 1930

Jasper Johns is an American contemporary artist who works as a painter, printmaker and sculptor. In the late 1950’s, Jasper Johns emerged as force in the American art scene. His richly worked paintings of maps, flags, and targets led the artistic community away from Abstract Expressionism toward a new emphasis on the concrete. Johns laid the groundwork for both Pop Art and Minimalism. Today, as his prints and paintings set record prices at auction, the meanings of his paintings, his imagery, and his changing style continue to be subjects of controversy. read the rest here.

 

"To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist."

 ~Jasper Johns

 Flag

 1954-55

 (encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted to plywood)

42 x 61 in.
Museum of Modern Art, New York

"One night I dreamed I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it. And I did. I worked on that painting a long time. It's a very rotten painting—physically rotten—because I began it in house enamel paint, which you paint furniture with, and it wouldn't dry quickly enough. Then I had in my head this idea of something I had read or heard about: wax encaustic."

~Jasper Johns 

 Target

1958

 MoMA, New York

"Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another. "
Jasper Johns

 Map

 1961

MoMA, New York

"I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason."

~Jasper Johns

Color Linoleum Cut
5 Linoleum blocks cut by the Artist and Printed on
Handmade Kurotani Mitsumata paper
22 3/4 x 17 inches 

Racing Thoughts

 1983

 (painting, collage and assemblage)

Collaboration was an important part in advancing Johns’ own art, and he worked regularly with a number of artists including Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Naumann. In 1967, he met the poet Frank O’Hara and illustrated his book, In Memory of My Feelings.

SOURCES:

American Masters

  JasperJohns.com

The Artchive

Joseph K. Levine Fine Art

MoMA - Jasper Johns: A Retrospective

Linking to ABC Wednesday, Round 8

Picture for One Moment

Saturday was brisk and windy but beautifully sunny. The-future-Mr.-Pagan-Sphinx (that's a nod to the style of hyphening one's name with one's spouse, era ;-) and I decided we had to go to the bulb show at Smith College Botanical Garden, as it was the last weekend before they closed up the bulb display for the season. We figured the last day would be less crowded but we were wrong. The place was busier than I've ever seen it on any weekend I attended this event in the past. The botanical garden is a small jewel among the laid-back, but busy pace of Northampton. And the view from of the lake from the knoll the greenhouse sits upon, is western Mass at its relaxed best. If you live in western Mass and you don't love Northampton, you have no heart!  :-D

Because it was so crowded, it was hard to take decent photos, let alone get any stand-outs. This is my humble photo offering from the bulb show, which I hope you will enjoy. For some photos of this bulb show that will really knock your socks off, go visit my dear friend The Cunning Runt at Little Bang Theory.  (for those of you who don't know him, CR is The Girls' Dad and my western Massachusetts neighbor to the west, not to mention my blog buddy.  (hi, guy).    :-)  

 

The Girls (and then there are three more girls, besides  ;)

As I look out the window my desk faces at home, a mixture of snow and freezing rain is turning to just rain. It's been coming down since around 9:30 this morning. I'm glad I had a chance to get some color and warmth on Saturday at Smith.  On this first day of the vernal equinox, I wish you....well...better weather than what we're getting around here today! But also love, peace and groovy things.

Pagan Sphinx

Linking to That's My World Tuesday

(fantastic folks from around the world gather in these places virtually to celebrate the beauty and interest that surround us through photos and other creative media)

Sunday Snippet

I write like

Gertrude Stein

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

 Gertrude Stein

(1874-1946)

I found the link for this thingy at my friend Dianne's blog Forks Off the Moment. Just for fun, I thought I'd include a snippet of the oetry of Gertrude Stein. Incidentally, she is one of my favorite literary "celebrities" who happens to be one of my least favorite poets. Perhaps I have not given her fiction a real chance but there is very little compelling me to do so.  Still, what a time she had in Europe with Alice B. Tokeless and all those intellectual and artistic types like Picasso and Hemingway!

This is a Stein poem in its entirety:

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

~Gertrude Stein