Salvador Dali "Persistence of Memory"

Hello my lovelies!

 

Happy August 28^th to you!  August 28^th is “Race your mouse” day.  This amuses me.  Since I don’t have a mouse, I shall have to attempt to race the rabbit when I get home.  He will probably not be particularly amused by this.  Einstein amuses me on a regular basis, but I rarely manage to amuse him. Saturday is “toasted marshmellow day” which I will be sure to celebrate with much more enthusiasm!

 

This morning when your uncle and I went for our walk,we saw a deer – which happen more often than not – but this deer was already turning gray.  In the spring, the deer start to turn a warm orange-y brown, but then in the fall they turn grayish brown.  I don’t like it.  Not because they’re not still beautiful animals, but because it’s a sure sign that cold weather is coming.  And this year it seems like winter will probably come early, and THAT is sad for sure.  Such lucky girls you are to live in Florida, where winter is wonderful and not full of bitter cold and snow.  Do you still remember Minnesota winters, or have you forgotten them already?

 

This week I’ve chosen a painter I love because he was a really interesting human being, but whose work has always been a little too strange for me.  Salvador Dali is his name.  He lived in the 1900s, and was alive when I was a girl (he passed away in 1989).  He was a brilliant painter, but sometimes people forget that because the work he was most famous for was “Surrealism”, which is strange, so you get so caught up in the oddness of the picture that you don’t notice how technically awesome his work really was. 

 

His most famous piece is “The Persistence of Memory” which shows melting pocketwatches.  I understand it’s a statement about time being more fluid than people think it is – we think of time in rigid, mathematical bits – seconds and minutes and hours, but when you get older and think back on your life, some long ago bits will be perfectly clear in your memory like they happened 5 minutes ago, and some recent bits will be so unimportant that they’re not even really there anymore (like I couldn’t tell you what I had for breakfast yesterday if my life depended on it, but I’m totally sure that I did have breakfast), so in the perspective of a lifetime, time is kind of squishy. 

 

So why was Dali an interesting human being?  He was a lot less afraid of being unusual than most people are – he didn’t worry about people thinking he was odd, he embraced it! Once he got asked to give a lecture at an art museum…he showed to give it up wearing a full diving suit with a helmet, carrying a pool stick and walking two Russian wolfhounds (Big, BIG dogs).  There is a singer right now, you might have heard of her, called “Lady GaGa”….a few years ago she got a lot of publicity for showing up at something or other wearing a dress made of raw meat.  (Which had to have been pretty gross to have on – ick).  Anyway, at the 1939 Worlds Fair – like 80 years before Lady GaGa did it - Salvador Dali had an exhibition piece which featured live models wearing outfits made of fresh seafood…and probably people had been doing things like that for hundreds of years before him, since in both cases it sure did stir up some controversy!

 

Anyway, my message for today is this:  “Always be a first rate version of yourself, rather than a second rate version of somebody else.”  Judy Garland said that.  She was right.  J

 

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

Xoxoxoxo

 

Georges-Pierre Seurat’s “The Circus”

Hello lovely ladies!

 

I find myself running short on time this week again (this whole "being a grownup" thing can be quite challenging at times!), but wanted to let you know that your first week of school pictures are totally adorable – you're both looking quite awesomely intellectual as you head off into the 2014-2015 school year!  How smart you must be getting!  Tell me about what you're learning these days!

 

Since I'm having a crazy week, I've chosen my artist based on a specific theme.  There is an old Polish proverb (which basically means "expression") that goes "Not my monkeys; not my circus."  This is one of my favorite expressions of all time.  Literally, it's saying something like "hey, I didn't show up with these monkeys, so you can't blame me for the chaos they're causing"… you can apply that to a lot of things in life – when things get crazy due to stuff that's completely beyond your control, rather than letting that make you nuts, you can just think, "hey, not my monkeys, not my circus" and decide to enjoy the show instead of stressing out about it.

So this is Georges-Pierre Seurat's "The Circus" – it was the very last painting he ever worked on.  He lived in the late 1800s (I might have already done a different painting of his...I need to start keeping a list so I don't repeat!) and believed that happiness could be painted by using lots of warm colors, and by the use of lines directed upward, and sadness by using dark and cold colors and lines that point down.  See how this painting is mostly reds and yellows (warm colors) and artsy people would say the lines point up because the circus people kind of make  a triangle that points to the top of the painting…I'm not so sure I agree on that, since a line that points up on one end is pretty much pointing down on the other, but hey, that's why I'm not an art historian.  J

That's all for now – know that I love you and think that you're awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

Random Houston Street Art

Hello beautiful princesses!

 

How are you today?

 

I am well!  I am in Houston, Texas this week.  I used to live here a long time ago (before either of you were born); my first and second grown-up jobs were in Houston, so it’s a city that holds a special place in my heart.  But this time I’m here to do an inventory…which is normally a lot of fun and I like it when I get to do them…but when you get older if you ever have a job and your boss tells you that he wants you to go do an inventory in Houston Texas in mid-August, the smart thing to do would be to quit right there.

 

It’s HOT here.  Like over 100 degrees hot.  And where I’m counting inventory is a giant metal warehouse with no air conditioning.  So inside it is EXTRA hot.  I have never been this sweaty in my life.  Way gross.

 

So anyway, rather than focus on a specific artist this week, on Sunday I drove around Houston and visited the art car museum, a bunch of abandoned statues, and a big metal chicken.  I don’t know who the artist is on any of them, but having this kind of stuff available to the public IS one of the things that made me love this city when I lived here.

 

I hope you’re having a fabulous week, and know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and Kisses,

Auntie Paula

Xoxoxoxoxoxo

 

Bob Chase

Hello my favorite small people!

 

I hope you're having fun in NY this week – from the pictures your mom posted on facebook, it looks like you're having a wonderful time getting to hang out with your cousins, and that's awesome.  Are you older or younger than them?  In my family, your dad and I were the oldest cousins on GrampEs side, but pretty close to the youngest cousins on GramEs side.  But we had fun every time we got to get together with some of them!

 

Today's artist is Bob Chase.  He's a pretty current artist; he started as a WWII photographer, but had a very long career – he lived to be 95 and was a painter, sculptor and other kinds of artist for pretty much all his life!

 

Bob was super cool because he went to the Ringling school (yep! Like the Circus!), and while he was there he met a very nice lady who donated the property that he created his studio and art school on…and the lady (who was pretty rich) also had a botanical garden named after her, and for years and years after she died, he went to the garden every Sunday and volunteered to work there, as his way of paying her back. 

 

Another thing that Bob is famous for was his 8-track collection.  You can see some of it in the background of this picture.  8 tracks were how music was played before cassette tapes, which were before CDs, which were before you could download music digitally.  An 8 track usually had 8 songs (or tracks!) on it, and if you had a machine that played them, you could put one in and it would just loop the songs – repeat them over and over again for as long as the machine was on – this was good for an artist even once there were other ways to play music, since once he got his hands all dirty he didn't want to have to stop & change CDs or hit buttons on a machine. 

 

His work is bright and beautiful and abstract and he sounds like he was just a really cool guy, so I like Bob a lot.

 

Hope all is well with you – know that I love you and think that you're awesome.

XOXOXO

Auntie Paula