Speaking of...

photography and painting. The always thoughtful and educational but does it float (an excellent curatorial blog, put it in your subscriptions!) recently put up this collection of Gerhard Richter paintings on photographs. Sometimes things just come in waves.

Love at first sight

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Dia, Gus Powell for The New Yorker

The September 28, 2009 issue of The New Yorker has this image at the top of the Goings On About Town page. It stopped me in my tracks and I have returned to examine it daily since. The image is in conjunction with the opening of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's chronotypes & dioramas at Dia at the Hispanic Society in New York. A very intriguing statement and examination on what is geography.

What keeps me coming back to the photograph is the apparent summation of Sommers' idea that painting is additive while photography must make sense of what exists for framing, and thus by re-framing that existence, becomes something new.

I have long admired Gus Powell's work. This photograph was love at first sight.

Side Note: be sure to follow the above link to the Dia Art Foundation site to read the exhibition introduction by Curator Lynne Cooke. Did you know that dioramas were first devised by Louis Daguerre? Neither did I!

Painting the town red

There seems to be a trend afoot....

Keeping it in context

So I opened my mouth and said "Yeah sure, I'll pick up the blog again." and I find myself at a loss for conversation. A while ago I had made a note to myself on Neil Freeman's Contextual Calendar from his Fake is the New Real site. I was happy to find it again since it very well sums up the sense I have of this year.

My thanks to all who wrote to welcome me back. This is the generosity of spirit I was referring to.

Now where was I?

The summer of 2009 is winding down and the circumstances and demands which have prevented me from posting have abated. My husband has hired staff, last weekend was my daughter's wedding. I have spent this week seriously considering whether I wanted to come back to the blogosphere, both reading and writing.

When Cigarettes and Purity started it was my first successful attempt at any kind of journal or regular writing. I have had countless false starts in my life going back to childhood and never got beyond 3 entries before I bored myself with what I had written. Somehow the keyboard has succeeded where the pen and bound book did not, at least in volume and regularity. This blog has served as a junk drawer (which is in no way meant to infer value) of sorts. It is the place I can throw ideas, writing (other's) and images that have caught my interest to the point of not wanting to throw them away (given my terrible short term memory for names). I can then come back and do a search for a book, an exhibit, an article or the name of the artist who's making the wonderful prints of .....(fill in the blank). Through this space I have met virtually and then actually with a large number of remarkable people who have been generous of spirit. I have not engaged in self promotion nor do I aspire to be a "force" in the Fine Art Contemporary Photography Web Based Wish We All Lived In New York/China/Germany Blah Blah Blah. It is what it is.

I was continuing to go round and round in my head this morning over whether to resume posting or just let it go (Have I bored myself sufficiently? Had the Law of Inertia come to bear? Given the volume and speed of the internet does it feel too much like "jumping in" on Double Dutch?). I looked up to see my husband, just returned from running, sitting across from me wearing the t-shirt pictured above. I picked up the dictionary to fully examine the origin and meaning of illiterate (etymology: 1556 from the Latin illiteratus meaning not furnished with letters). Happily this led me to the word aliterate, defined as a person who is able to read but chooses not to do so. I guess this post means that I am choosing not to be visually or conceptually aliterate and further, that I will continue to use this space to make notes on what I learn. As always you are welcome to drop in and look over my shoulder.