Might As Well --- Day 9/294

Walk: No, No interest

Distance: n/a, Yoga

Little of interest to do or say. Yoga done. Might as well rest.  

Ridiculously Great --- Day 9/293

Walk: Presidio Pickleball

Distance: 2.6 miles, 1 hour pickleball

Tom Brady, Tampa Bay Buccaneer, Age 43

What could Ciwt possibly say about the 43 year old man who is playing in his 10th Super Bowl today, this time in his first season with a brand new team?

Nothing of course. But leave it to the WSJ's Jason Gay to put a delightfully original spin on this phenonenon: 

Brady is the greatest quarterback to ever play football, and he wants to keep playing the game that he loves. If you play football long enough, the road eventually leads to the Raiders. 

And then, at age 80, Tom Brady joins the Knicks.

Winter and Spring Eye Test --- Day 292

Walk: Presidio Pickleball

Distance: 4.5 miles, 2 hours pickle

So if you look to the upper right of this photo, you will (maybe) find a wintering Palm Warbler* pecking at some budding spring cherry blossoms.  It's that time of year out here; part winter/part spring.  

Mini Contest --- Day 9/291

Walk: Presidio Pickleball

Distance: 2.5 miles, 90 minutes pickle

So most of Ciwt's days begin on line with the NYT Mini Crossword Puzzle.  When she finishes it, she texts her score to a friend back East who co-ordinates a daily Mini contest among players she's put together.  9 times out of 10 Ciwt loses to her friend's son.  Everybody does!  We refer to him as The Pro.

BUT yesterday morning Ciwt scored her all time low.  35 seconds! as you can see from the screen shot. No hitting the wrong keys and wasting time correcting or stopping to scratch her head over a clue.  It was far and away the winning time of the day.  

(Oh, The Pro happens to be on a Mini hiatus.  But surely Ciwt would have bested him.. ...)

Considering Dessert --- Day 9/290

Walk: Errands

Distance: 5 miles, Yoga

So the pandemic seems to be having an effect on Ciwt's taste buds.  Never one for desserts (unless it is ice cream or pecan pie), she finds herself eying the local bakery shelves much more carefully these days.  And thinking of some lucious looking art.  Like these galettes Claude Monet has captured with golden perfection. 

Claude Monet, Les Galettes, 1882, 25.5" x 31.8", o/c

Most people know Monet was a painting genius as well as a master gardener, but they might not know that his third great obsession was food.  He was also an Anglophile who loved fast cars, tweeds, tea and certain English recipes from fine restaurants.  He brought those last back to Giverny where he worked with his private cook until the taste was exactly the same he remembered.  He also carried vegetable seeds home in his pockets from locales where they had tasted especially delicious and was the first to plant zucchini in Normandy - which until then grew none.

Monet in his yellow Giverny dining room with some of his extensive collection of Japanese prints on the walls

If she's feeling a bit too pensive for pretty galette, perhaps she will dim the lights, pour herself a glass of sherry and settle in with some grapes and cake.  Like the dessert Raphaelle Peale painted so exquisitely below.

Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Cake, 1818, o/c, 10.7" x 15.2"  (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The first really distinguished still life specialist to emerge in this country, Peale struggled with lifelong melancholy.  Even his tightly grouped, spare, softly lit paintings are delicately permeated with it. Like his siblings (almost all of whom were named after famous artists or scientists), Raphaelle was trained as an artist by his artist/inventor/scientist/naturalist/and more father, Charles Willson Peale. By his early 30's he had begun suffering from the effects of arsenic and mercury poisoning brought on by working as a taxidermist in his father's museum.  In deterioriating health and frequently hospitalized after that, he died in his early 50's.  The paintings he left behind are exquisite.  Of all the many masterpieces in his exceptional collection,  the painting John D. Rockefeller, 3rd. kept close at his desk was Raphaelle Peale's Blackberries.

Blackberries, ca.1813, o/c,  7 1/4" x 10 1/4" (De Young Museum, San Francisco)

Or, Maybe one of these days Ciwt will decide to really dive in to those desserts she keeps walking by.  And maybe that day she'll be tempted to buy all the cakes because they will all look as sumptuous as Wayne Thiebaud's astonishing artistic odes to dessert.  Hopefully she'll remember they are as loaded with calories as Thiebaud's works are loaded with historic references to past techniques and artists like Morandi, Matisse (💗), Ingres (from yesterday's CIWT), Bonnard, Albers.  After 60 years of daily painting (he turned 100 this year) those artists and his own "American drive' have inspired him to keep exploring the perfect formal recipe for painting a dessert in a way that it has never been painted before.

Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes, 1963, o/c, 5' x 6'

Let's Get Real --- Day 9/289

Walk: No, doesn't call

Distance: n/a, Yoga

Ivan Kramskoi (Russian, 1837-87), Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1883, o/c

So, here again is a work by Ivan Kramskoi, the Russian painter featured in yesterday's CIWT.  The woman he depicts against a St. Petersburg palace has sensuous lips, hazy eyes, thick curved eyebrows.  If you look closely she also has skin imperfections, freckles, maybe a pimple on her nose.  She's not so much beautiful as impressive and 'chic,' dressed in the latest fashion of the time.  Demi-monde fashion to be exact.  Not without reason critics at the time called her "the courtesan in a carriage," and "an offspring of big cities." And these assessments must have pleased Kramskoi because it was his full intention to bring a real life prostitute, as she really looked, onto the canvas.

Does she in any way remind you of this woman, another, ah hem, odalisque?

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867), La Grande Olalisque, 1814, o/c

The artist here has made his courtesan or prostitute acceptable by portraying her as an exotic from the Far East.  He has also turned her into a statue of sorts with flawlessly unrealistic skin, and a body that is too long and lacks all signs of joints. Essentially, he has purified her and brought her out of private male salons into the public.  

The 'he' in this case is Dominque Ingres, a French neo-classical painter who was so influential in Paris, Rome and later Russia, that he could do whatever he wanted. The St.Petersburg Academy of Arts embraced him whole-heartedly sending some of its most notable painters abroad to France and Italy to learn his "statuesque" style.  Those who didn't go abroad were taught their art by studying and copying the Academy's sizeable collection of neo-classical artworks.

This until Kramskoi and some of his young fellow students challenged the Academy, asserting their freedom to paint realistically.  Unable to effect Academic changes and led by Kramskoi, they publically  broke with (and/or were expelled from) the Academy and began their own movement which became known as peredvizhniki or itinerants. Classically trained but now dedicated to portraying real life and bringing art to the people, they organized their own exhibitions, traveling from town to town across Russia.  

In the process, men went from looking like this: (Ingres, Male Torso, 1800)

to looking more like this 1867 Self-Portrait by Ivan Kramskoi.

Gradually Kramskoi's aspirations to portray the true expressiveness and real circumstances his images took hold with folowing generations of Russian artists. By the end of the 1800's portrait subjects were being painted with personalities and complex human emotions, and our 'unknown woman' and her ilk were out of their carriages and seen on the walls of Russian galleries, museums, dachas and some of those St. Petersburg palaces.

TBR (ie, To Be Read) --- Day 9/288

Walk: Presidio Pickleball

Distance: 2.3 miles, 1 hour pickle, yoga

Ivan Kramskoi, Woman Reading/Portrait of Sofia Kramskaya, ca. 1886, 

                Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

How are You doing with that pile of books somewhere near your bed?  Ciwt thinks she's making a dent, then sees or hears of another title, and.....you know.

Lights, Water, Man --- Day 287

Walk: Day of Rest and Reading

Distance: n/a, Yoga

Carl Svantje Hallbeck (Swedish 1826-97), Waterfall Harspanget, 1856, chromolithograph printed by Julius Hellesen, 7.7" x 10.7"

So, mindful that the East Coast is in the midst of a blizzard today, Ciwt is back to winter and early artistic accomplishments. She has never seen the aurora borealis (northern lights)* but can't imagine it could be much more spectacular than this 1856 print.  What a fine, almost chilling, image!  

If Ciwt had been sitting on a rock cliff with eerie lights flashing and dancing above her and waterfalls and white rapids thundering around her, she doubts she would have been chatting with friends around a campfire.  Guess people were much more courageous back then....Or - and probably - the print is an artistic statement about man's relationship with nature.  What do you think Hallbeck is saying about that?

*Great video of what the artist (and these men) saw