The Best Thing I've Read All Year

 I saw this on my niece's Facebook page (thanks Ms. M) and it struck home:  I'm the mother of an openly gay, married daughter and I live just a hair south of the state of Vermont. The "V" stand for "Very"( mixed bag). While marriage equality is now the law, there is this mix of people that appear to really clash over a couple of issues:  not the least of which is civil and legal rights for GLBT people. The battle over legal unions was hard-fought in Vermont in 2000, and in 2009, marriage for GLBT people become legal.


This link takes you to a letter to the editor of the White River Junction, Vermont newspaper, from 2000, yet the spirit of this letter is timeless.

The Friday Evening Nudes - Mother's Day Edition

 Klimt

 Botero

Renoir

Women's History Month and Artist of the Week

"Well-behaved women seldom make history."
~ Laurel Thatcher Ulrich


This week,honoring American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt
Self Portrait
1878
gouche on paper 23x17in
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

 May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children. see entire wiki entry here

From Mary Cassatt: The Complete Works:

Even though her family objected to her becoming a professional artist, Cassatt began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the early age of fifteen, and continued her studies during the years of the American Civil War. Part of their concern may have been Cassatt's exposure to feminist ideas and the bohemian behavior of some of the male students, of which one was Thomas Eakins, later the controversial director of the Academy. About 20% of the students were female. Though most were not bent on making a career of art, they viewed art as a valid means of achievement and recognition, and a socially valuable talent. Cassatt, instead, was determined to become a professional artist.

 

Cassatt admired Degas, whose pastels had made a powerful impression on her when she encountered them in an art dealer's window in 1875. "I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art," she later recalled. "It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it." 

 In 1891, she exhibited a series of highly original colored drypoint and aquatint prints, including Woman Bathing and The Coiffure, inspired by the Japanese masters shown in Paris the year before. (See Japonism) Cassatt was attracted to the simplicity and clarity of Japanese design, and the skillful use of blocks of color. In her intrepretation, she used primarily light, delicate pastel colors and avoided black (a "forbidden" color

Painted in Seville, Spain, this picture depicts a young woman serving a refreshing panale (honeycomb or sponge sugar dipped in water) to a bullfighter. Cassatt had traveled to Spain to study the work of Old Masters. With its bold handling of paint and rich colors, Offering the Panale demonstrates the influence of such seventeenth-century painters as Diego Velázquez.

Note: Though I detest bullfighting (despite my Iberian roots), I love this painting. The flirtateous stances of the bullfighter and the young woman and the way Cassatt was able to capture the essence of the bullfighter's doubtless superiority! The painting is also a very familiar one, as I've seen it dozens of times at the Clarke Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The bold color is amazing.

The above work by Mary Cassatt is also at the Clarke

More works by Mary Cassatt

The Boat Ride

(larger)

Happy Birthday, Supergirl One!

Remember what your mama told you - there would be days like these. Chin up, darlin' or we can't see your dimple! ;-)

These are the days

These are the days

These are days you'll remember

Never before and never since, I promise

Will the whole world be warm as this

And as you feel it,

You'll know it's true

That you are blessed and lucky

It's true that you

Are touched by something

That will grow and bloom in you


~ Natalie Merchant

Nothing but love,
Mommy

What's Goin' On

There's a lot goin' on! I'm assembling my info for the application packet for the graduate (fast-track) program I'm enrolling in. The first class starts on June 29. That means that I have one precious week after school ends and before I start attending M-TH, from 2:30-7:30 daily, with an hour plus round-trip commute. This ends on July 9.

In two weeks SG1 and The Beloved are graduating from college; cum laude and with thesis honors. Several activities are planned that weekend, which is Memorial Day weekend. The girls are moving into their tiny apartment on the Santa Barbara University campus mid-August. That is starting to settle in, though it's still hard for me to imagine my daughter living a continent away from me. She has applied for a AmeriCorp job which she is eagerly awaiting word about. The Beloved will have her graduate studies and stipend and SG1 hopefully will be working a job with benefits. AmeriCorps is perfect: offers benefits, money toward the cost of paying off student loans and a small stipend. We're really hoping she gets it. She would be perfect in that setting.

SG2 is home for the summer and will be starting her summer job this weekend at the supermarket. She's somewhat despondent about leaving Boston and all her friends. She's settled in very nicely this year and immensely looking forward to returning. This is cause for relief for me, her mother, because her first year was not her happiest. She and her high school boyfriend have parted ways for a few months now and she is seeing other boys, having fun and doing very well in school.

This summer SG1 and SG2 and I are going on vacation together to visit my mother in Portugal; not far from Lisbon. But before we do that, we're making a little stop. I'm splurging on three days and nights in Barcelona for us. I can't imagine the next time we'll have such an opportunity. The Beloved is flying home to Sacramento to spend her last summer with her family before she and SG1 resume their life as a couple. This is the perfect time for the three of us to do some bonding and funning together. Then we go relax with my mother and see the rest of my family and enjoy some hot Portuguese sun, some Atlantic Ocean and lots of great food.

These family trips to Portugal have tended to have sibling rivalry all over them in the past but we're going to try to behave as if that's not so. We three are older and wiser and hoping for the best. And I think we're all really going to try not to get on each other's nerves. (keeping fingers crossed). Speaking of the past. Here's a digital photo of a print (cuz I can't figure out this scanner and I just never get around to figuring it out) of us on vacation in Portugal in 92', I think it was. That flash is glare and the one making the goofy face is SG1, in her own little world.



I think I've accepted the fact that I have to get through this program in order to get out of the trap I'm in at work, which I can't discuss in very much detail here. Today was just awful. Every day that I have like this at work is just another indication of how I need to move on from there. It is simply just a bad fit between this workplace and me.

World and national politics have me burned out. I'm discouraged by the escalation of war. Instead of bringing the troops home from Iraq, we're gearing up big-time for Afghanistan and Iran. I didn't expect such hawkishness from this president. Go ahead and lecture me, if you need to. I know a lot of people feel that Obama is between a rock and a hard place. But you can't convince me war is justified. It very rarely is. It should be a last resort. I know it's ideaistic but it's my conscience and I'm listening to it.

What are you all doing for the summer, do you know yet?

Selma Hayek

The Friday Evening Nudes

George Platt Lynes

Valentine's Day Edition

Two Nudes Standing

Francois Jacques Moulin

below

The Kissers
Rodin

Mother and Child
Tina Madotti


And a valentine from me,
with love