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Archive for the ‘Neat Stuff’ Category

Travel Notes

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged , , , , on June 5, 2010| 3 Comments »

Well, my show for next week’s opening at the Principle Gallery has been delivered.  It was an easy day of traveling, the traffic relatively light and no major aggressors menacing the four-lanes.  Smooth.

Going through Pennsylvania there are these large gas stations/convenience store plazas that line Rte. 15.  Sheetz runs a number of these always bustling havens for the road traveler.  They have dozens of gas pumps and fast food and aisles of snacks.  They’re almost always packed with cars and people.  As I drove  yesterday, I noticed one such plaza that was almost empty, shockingly.  I looked at the sign and noticed the colors.  It was a BP-ran plaza. The actual BP logoat the top of an obelisk-like sign  had been covered with what looked to be  heavy white plastic that had been shrink-wrapped around it, obscuring the logo except for the outline of their trademark sun symbol.  Apparently, the driving public had cast a vote of extreme disapproval for the company in the most potent way– with their buying dollars.  It was an interesting thing to note and, while I wish no business harm, it heartened me to see that people were making conscious choices and, in their way, voicing an opinion with their pocketbooks rather than just shrugging it off as another “Oh well, what can I do about it?” moment.

Just interesting.

Also, I heard a story on NPR about the ukulele revival around the world.  I have featured ukulele pieces here a couple of times, with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, so I was happy to hear that I wasn’t alone in my admiration of this much maligned instrument.  Apparently, for many years now, many schools throughout Canada use the uke in teaching music to elementary grade students, giving each kid their own ukulele.  On this program, they played a clip of a performance where a large number of the audience had brought their own ukes and at a point in the concert joined with the onstage performers in a version of Keep on the Sunny Side of Life.  It was great and made me wish that people were required to carry ukuleles with them at all times.  How can you be mad with a uke in your hands?

Anyway, here’s a peformance from the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain that doesn’t feature the uke but is  great fun nonetheless.  Sounds pretty good on a Saturday when I can relax for a bit now that my studio is emptied…

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Painting With People

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged , on May 31, 2010| 1 Comment »

Arthur Mole Photo- Marine Corps Insignia

On this Memorial Day, I thought I would show some patriotic images photographed in the first part of the 20th century by Arthur Mole.  Mole made a name for himself at the time by assembling large groups of people in formations and photographing them from a specially constructed 80-foot tower.  He started at church conventions and later did the same for a number of universities but was probably best known for his symbols of the US and its military. 

 Needing large groups for his intricate compositions, military bases seemed like the perfect place to find massed groups of people to use as the paints on his palette.  For instance, the Marine Corps insignia shown here was shot at Paris Island and took 100 officers and 5000 troops in order to fill out all the details in the composition. 

Athur Mole Photo- Shield of the United States

It took  quite a few more people to fill out the upper details in his compositions as, in order to maintain perspective from the perch where he shot, these areas were considerably larger in size than the than those nearer the camera.  Take this US Shield shot in Battle Creek, Michigan  for example.  It took 30,000 troops to complete this but most of these troops were used in the area above the first row of stars. 

The varying shades were achieved by having the troops wear different clothes obviously.  For the light areas, they simply wore t-shirts and for the dark areas they wore their uniforms.  In the shield photo, those in the dark areas also wore their hats to make the tone more uniform on film.  No shining faces breaking up the dark shades.
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Arthur Mole= Liberty Bell

These are pretty amazing photos when you consider that they were taken in world long before Photoshop or any type of computer generation.  It must have taken a tremendous amount of planning and effort to pull off these shoots, from the building of the tower to the precise placement of each soldier.  For that alone they deserve a tip of the hat.
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And on this Memorial Day, the sight of troops who sacrificed in some way for our country standing side-by-side to create the symbols tht embody our nation is a  fine way to remember them outside of the battles they fought and the blood and lives they gave. 

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Mitchum Sings

Posted in Favorite Things, Neat Stuff, tagged , , , on May 27, 2010| Leave a Comment »

You come across some goofy stuff when you’re looking up things.  I was looking up some info on screen icon Robert Mitchum, for instance, and ran into some really interesting nuggets that surprised me.  I’ve always been a fan of Mitchum and his distinct brand of movie masculinity, the sort of which is absent in today’s cinema.  He looked like a man, not a movie star.  Moral ambiguity was not present in his screen portrayals.  The good guys he played were good guys and the bad guys bad.  Really bad. 

He was the first Max Cady, the evil ex-con intent on destroying his prosecutor ,  in Cape Fear and brought new meaning to the word menace without the embellishments that Robert DeNiro needed in his portrayal.  Then there was his lead in the beautifully creepy The Night of the Hunter as Reverend Harry Powell, the serial killing minister with the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles.  He brought a realism to these parts that took away all implausibility.  I saw both of these films as a kid and they scared the hell out of me because, unlike horror films where you could rationalize away the fear, the evil in these films could be right outside your door with a smile on his face.

Okay, he was a great actor.  But it was some of the other details of his life that caught my eye.  I discovered he was one of the “wild boys of the road” during the Great Depression, young men and women, often no more than 15 or 16 years old, who were cut loose from their families during those dire times, told that they were a burden on the family and that they must go out on their own.  It was estimated that during the peak years of the Depression, when unemployment was over 25%, that there were over 250, 000 of these wild boys riding the railroad boxcars and hitchhiking around the US seeking work and a better life.  It was a life of violence, depravation and hardship, one that is a little known footnote to the history of that time. 

After leaving this life as a hobo (the term is supposedly derived from hoe boy when migrant workers followed the crops by riding the boxcars) Mitchum found himself in the world of movies and never looked back.  He was a star of the highest magnitude for many decades until his death in 1997.  Part of his legacy are a few albums he recorded of  songs from his films,  including the title song from  Thunder Road, which was a country hit for him in the 50’s.  And no, it’s not the same song as the Springsteen song.  But my favorite album of his has to be Calypso- Is Like So…

Mitchum came to know and love the music of the Caribbean  while filming there in the 50’s.  Whether this love required him to make such an album is questionable but the fact remains, he did.  It may not be your taste but credit the guy for not giving a damn what you might  think and just doing it.

Give a listen…

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Exile on Main Street

Posted in Favorite Things, Neat Stuff, Video, tagged on May 25, 2010| 4 Comments »

There’s a lot to do this morning so I’m a little distracted by my work.  So I’ll quickly make quick work of something I meant to mention earlier,  last week’s reissue of the Rolling Stones’ 1972 classic LP, Exile on Main Street.  I grew up with the Rolling Stones’ early albums and over the years my appreciation for this album has grown time I hear it.  Love or hate the Stones, this is great stuff.  And it has a great album cover, to boot.

So, even though this is not off this LP, I’m playing their earlier Get Off My Cloud,  mainly hoping that that infectious guitar line and defiant chorus will  keep me away from simply railing against all the crap that is going on in this world.

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Yelling at the Moon

Posted in Favorite Things, Neat Stuff, Television, tagged , , , , , on May 23, 2010| 5 Comments »

The term bucket list has become very popular over the last several years.  I suppose everyone has things they would love to do before they kick the bucket, fantasies they want to fulfill.  I don’t have anything formalized myself, anything written down, but a few weeks ago I saw something on television that I might have to have at the top of the page if I ever were to assemble such a list.

Yell at the moon with Buzz Aldrin.

In a recent episode of the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, Liz Lemon, Tina Fey’s character, discovers that her mother in her younger days had been in love with Buzz Aldrin and sets out to reunite them.  When Liz finally meets Buzz, he tells her how awful her mother’s life would have been had she stayed with him and that she was lucky to have left.  Having always fantasized about marrying her own aerospace hero, the imaginary Astronaut Mike Dexter, Liz is disappointed and seeing this Buzz asks her if she would like to yell at the moon with him.

“I walked on your face!” Aldrin yells as the two stand looking at the moon from a lofty apartment in NYC as the moon hovers in the daylight.

“I own you!”

“Stupid moon!” Liz chimes in.

I know it’s goofy.  And even though Aldrin’s delivery is a little stiff and stilted, it reminded me of the way Chief Dan George spoke and acted  in Little Big Man.  There’s something in it that feels honest and sincere that makes it more endearing. Unreal but real.  And the idea of Buzz Aldrin, the wizened old astronaut standing in the window and yelling out at the moon as though it were a living being to him, as though it were a kid he was shooing off his lawn, has an almost mythic quality.  This feels magical to me.  It would be great to be able to stand, next to Buzz Aldrin,  there and tell the moon where it could go.

So, if I ever get down to making a bucket list, that would have to be at the top.  Especially since Edmund Hillary is dead.  I would have loved yelling at Mt. Everest with him.

Stupid mountain…

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PS: The painting at the top of this post is a new piece, A Time to Rest, and is about 11″ by 15″ on paper.  It will be shown at the Principle Gallery show in June.

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Final Faces

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged , , on May 19, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Death Mask of Benjamin Franklin

I was looking up some biographical info on Thomas Paine, the English-born pamphleteer whose treatises helped ignite both the American and French Revolutions.  His life would make a wonderfully thought-provoking and sad movie.  Anyway, in the course of doing this research, I came across an image of his death mask.  There was a link that took me to an interesting site, the Laurence Hutton Collection at Princeton University.

The site is a collection of masks of many notables,  some made while the subjects were alive but most from after their death.  It may seem somewhat morbid to some but there was something very beautiful in these faces, as cool and vacant as they may seem.   It’s as though all the layers of history and mythology are stripped away, revealing their true being and common humanity.  There is no posing, no interpretation by the artist to make them appear more heroic or wise.  Just what remains quietly at the end of their existence.  They are what they are.

Death Mask of Napoleon

Death Mask of Thomas Paine

Death Mask of Sir Isaac Newton

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Names From the Past

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged on April 28, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I’ve written in the past about my attraction to cemeteries and walking around them, reading the names on the stones and trying to form an idea of the lives of the people behind them.  I suppose that’s one of the attractions I find in searching in genealogy as well– finding interesting names and wondering about their owners.

There are always the typical biblical names.  In my family lines there are plenty of Ezekiels, Jedidiahs, Zachariahs, Zephaniahs and Abners.  Even a few Abels.  No Cains thus far.

Some sound biblical and may well be.  Names like Jerusha, Philena, Sylvanus, Mehitabel and Uzel.

There are names of virtues.  Names like Thankful, Temperance and Mercy.  My favorite of this sort is Blessed. 

Some are named after presidents or other famous people.  We have a Ulysses Grant and a Christopher Columbus in our family.

Some just sound neat off the tongue.  Names like Ichabod and Lulu and Lola.  Freelove.  That one always make me think of what it represented in the 1790’s when it was the first name of an ancestor.

My wife has some great names in her lines.  Her grandmother was Carmelita Badger which simply evokes a femme fatale in pulp fiction.  Then there’s one of the saddest names I came across:  Lowly Lola Foote.  I can’t really tell how people reacted to their given names in the the early 1800’s when Lowly Lola lived or if there is any cultural significance in  the name but I know I feel almost profound sadness whenever I come across that name.

So, I’ll continue to stroll through time, perusing names and wondering about how their owners carried them through their lives.  Did their titles fit?

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Update: Name That Painting Contest!

Posted in Neat Stuff, Recent Paintings, tagged on April 22, 2010| 6 Comments »

Yesterday kicked off this year’s Name That Painting Contest and the first day brought many great entries, several via e-mail,  and even a short poem.  Gotta love the creativity out there.  Keep up the good work!

I was remiss in mentioning a couple of things yesterday when I first listed the contest. 

First, how the winning entry is selected: I make the final decision.  I go through the entries and look for a title that has an interesting interpretation of the painting, hopefully adding a dimension that I hadn’t seen myself.  I had considered putting selected titles up for a vote but I’m not quite ready to give up that much control over a part of my work. 

I also failed to mention that all entries will be listed on the back of the painting and will therefore be a part of this piece for so long as it lasts on this earth. 

So, hopefully, that clears up the last of the details.  So, give it a shot and send in your titles. The contest ends Midnight EST on May 16, 2010.

For the rest of the details, check out yesterday’s post.

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NEW! Name That Painting Contest!

Posted in Neat Stuff, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on April 21, 2010| 38 Comments »

It’s time for the annual (yes, I’m calling it an annual event) Name That Painting Contest!

The rules are simple.  Take a gander at the painting shown here, come up with a title that you feel fits it, and either submit your title through the comment section or e-mail it to info@gcmyers.com  no later than Midnight EST  on Sunday, May 16, 2010.  Feel free to enter as many titles as you wish.

The prize for submitting the winning title is…

A set of 2 extremely limited edition prints.  These are very high quality giclee artist proofs from a project that I tentatively started a few years back.  Very eye-catching, they are signed and numbered.  Plus, I will be including a signed copy of my book, In Quiet Places.

The painting is a fairly large 30″ by 40″ canvas and is a central piece for my upcoming solo show at the Principle Gallery in June.  I’m going to let the viewers choose their title without any prompting from me so I’ll leave it at that. 

 So break out your thinking beanies and give it a shot.  What do you have to lose?

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Sarah’s World

Posted in Neat Stuff, Video, tagged , , , on April 20, 2010| 1 Comment »

I don’t know much about dance, modern or otherwise.  Can’t tell a Tharp from an Ailey.

And I can’t dance.  The mere thought of moving around in front of a group of people makes me freeze, as though a T-Rex were after me and my only hope of survival was to remain still so he couldn’t see me, a la Jurassic Park.  Perhaps it’s a result of painfully stumbling through mandatory dance lessons in my 6th grade gym class.  A sweaty twelve year-old doing a clumsy cha-cha in the gymnasium with someone who randomly chosen is not the best basis for a healthy life with dance.

But I have a link to the world of dance through my niece, Sarah Foster.  She has danced and choreographed for years, primarily in the Boston area.  As I said, I know little if anything  about dance but Sarah’s work has always had its own signature idiosyncracy of movement and feel that I immediately recognize.  She often uses humor and her own unique view of the world in her work, often evoking chuckles from the crowds who have seen her work.  And while I may be ignorant of the history of dance, I can appreciate the inherent beauty of the rhythm and flow of the movement of dance and the visual impact of the moving form, often taking from it  inspiration for my own work.

When I was selecting a video of her work to show here, I was torn between two pieces, one more humorous and the other,  a lovely bit of movement that has great visual impact.  I opted for the more serious piece, Respiration, but highly recommend the other, Reverse Spontaneous Combustion (AKA Mad Science), as well.  Anyway, here’s a glimpse into Sarah’s world…

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