friday - Rijksmuseum

Winterlandschap, Willem Witsen, 1885-1922

Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, by Avercamp 1608

This is artwork from the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch National Art museum in Amsterdam. (The museum encourages people to download images & use them as desired...a slightly different take from other online museums.)

Winteravond, Ede by Willem Witson, 1870-1923

Winterlandschap met melkmeisjies, Anton Mauve, 1848-1888

Winterlandschap met schaaters, Adam van Breen, 1615-1620 

De Newa bij Sint Petersburg in de winter, Theodor Hildebrandt, 1844

 (The images here were all found under a search for "winter".)

friday

just some pictures on a friday. mis flores.  next year I'll plant even more. 

friday

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

–Willa Cather's New Mexican sky, Death Comes for the Archbishop,1927

friday

enjoying photos on the National Geographic Found tumblr page. This is a collection of photos from the archives, 125 years worth. And it is a little mesmerizing.

(top to bottom)

-a young woman admires flowers in a Baden garden in Germany, June 1928

-people sunbathe and boat on reservoir water in Red Rock Canyon in Kansas, April 1952

-an informal group portrait of Amish children in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1937

-a trainer controls a flock of flamingos for photo opportunities in Nassau, Bahama Islands, 1957

-a herd of 2,400 buffalo roam free near Gillette, Wyoming, December 1979

friday

Published in 1954, Maurice Sendak & Ruth Krauss collaborated on this little book about friendship.  More illustrations and history of the book can be found here at BrainPickings.

The two pages I thought made for a happy start on this Friday.

friday

Lange portrait by Paul Taylor

Dorothea Lange took pictures of the people that needed to be seen.

She was born in May, 1895 in New Jersey.

In 1918, she moved to San Francisco & started working as a commercial photographer, but eventually began to record the people of the Japanese Internment camps, the poor of the South and migrant works in exodus from the Dust Bowl.

When she died in 1965, she left a collection of 25,000 negatives, which can be seen here at the Online Archive of California.

Destitute Pea Pickers. 32-yr old mother of seven. 1936.

Traveling Light. 1936. 

Country Store. 1939. 

The Road West, New Mexico. 1938. 

She even spent some time in New Mexico.

friday

Danish artist Anna Ancher, a 19th century painter who painted the every day lives of the people around her.

Despite conventions, she continued to paint even after she married.

friday

Self-Portrait, Mendocino, 1965

Imogen Cunningham was born in Oregon, April 12, in 1883.
She bought her first camera at age 18, and majored in Chemistry after being advised it was the best degree for a future photographer. Her first job in a studio was to assist Edward Curtis. Later, at the invitation of Ansel Adams, she worked as a faculty member at the California School of Arts.

Amaryllis, 1933

Three Vegetables, 1946

Papaver Orientale, 1965

The Unmade Bed, 1957

The first photo of hers I'd ever seen was the Unmade Bed. As a teenager, I bought it as a postcard and kept it on my wall like a piece of art. 

friday

angelou

Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.

I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours--your Passages have been paid.

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,

Take it into the palms of your hands.

Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,

Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.

No less to Midas than the mendicant.

No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

-excerpt from, On the Pulse of the Morning, by Maya Angelou, 1993

(poet, author, survivor, activist, playwright & teacher, Dr. Maya Angelou was born April 4, 1928)

friday

Chairs in Rain, Paris, 1931

Ilse Bing, a German/Jewish self-taught photographer who was born March 23, 1889, and lived to be 98. She lived in Paris until WWII, then leaving for New York City.

Self-Portrait with Leica, 1931

A part of the Avant-Garde movement, she was referred to as the "Queen of the Leica" because of her talent with the then new 35mm camera.

Greta Garbo Poster, Paris, 1932

Boats with Windmill, Veere, 1931

In the early 1950s she quit photography. She didn't think it suited her any longer. So she began writing poetry instead, which she said was creating, "snapshots without a camera".

friday

crocus, 1874

botanical illustrations by Mary Vaux Walcott, an American Artist who was known for her watercolor paintings of American wildflowers.

grape hyacinth, 1920 

butterfly violet, 1923

blueflag iris, 1919

images were found at the Smithsonian
(click on image for link) 

friday

convent of tepotzotlan, 1924

Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer born in 1896.
She moved to Mexico City for love, only to arrive two days after her love  died of smallpox.

costume from tehuantepec

She stayed in Mexico. She met and began working with Edward Weston . She documented Diego Rivera and the Muralist movement. He painted her into his murals. And she then hosted the wedding party for Rivera & Frida Kahlo.

man with box of plants on his head,

staircase, 1924

She joined the Communist Party, quit photography & moved to Russia for political work, which she considered more important.

She died in 1942 in Mexico City, and Pablo Neruda wrote her epitaph.
He wrote that she was made of, "bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam"

woman with flag, 1928

She took beautiful photographs and she knew many of the finest artists that I can only read about.