a trip to Monticello

Maira Kalman writes - and draws - of her experience in visiting the home of a remarkable man, the second President of the United States. I've been to his home only once, on a trip to Washington with my parents and grandmother years ago. I remember the bed, though, that separated his dressing room and his study.

"A Scary Thing Happened"

The government wants to help you cope by offering you art therapy. Really bad art therapy.


You know, I'd probably be completely traumatized if I was (1) reading a book with drawings of a plane crashing into buildings, (2) looking out my window to see that what was shown in my book was happening right outside my home, and (3) watching it being broadcast on TV - ALL AT THE SAME TIME. I'd probably need hundreds of these books to help me recover.

February is slipping by - why isn't Brownie blogging?

Okay. So, I guess this February is turning into a month of very light blogging. I didn't really plan it that way, but that's how it turned out. Much like life, right? You plan to do something, and it doesn't turn out the way you expected. Or, you didn't plan to do something, but somehow you did it anyway.

Enough of philosophizing. Let's turn our attention to art from one of the greatest toys of the '80's - Rubik's Cube!

What will the Bush haters do after next Tuesday?

Poor Bush haters. They've had one main object of derision for the past eight years. They even have his portrait to hate. And now, he's about to pass into history. Who will their fire consume now?

O'Keefe on film

Georgia O'Keefe will become the latest addition to the long list of artists who have had a biopic. Joan Allen will play her.

Ed Begley Jr., Tyne Daly, Linda Emond and Henry Simmons have been cast opposite Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons in the Lifetime original biopic "Georgia O'Keeffe." "O'Keeffe," from Sony Pictures TV, will follow the 20-year love affair between the American artist (Allen) and photographer Alfred Stieglitz (Irons).

Jeremy Irons usually plays the villain in his films, but not always. I'm guessing his character isn't going to try to strangle or smother Allen's.


Have you seen an O'Keefe in person? I have.

Vending machine art

They have the coolest machine at the Eiteljorg Museum. It's called the Art-o-Mat, a retired cigarette machine that has been converted to dispense art. There are only two machines in Indiana, this one and one at Accents Design in Goshen.

You insert a $5 dollar bill into the machine. You make your selection, you wait a few seconds, you pull the handle, and out pops artwork. Nothing unhealthy. Beneficial for both body and soul.

I selected a collage print by Jordao. I had no idea what I would receive. I opened the box and beheld my artwork.

Pretty nifty, eh? Do you have one of these in your neighborhood, and if so, did you put $5 in the machine?

From the accompanying paper explaining the piece:

You have purchased a mini-print of an original collage. This piece is one of fifty one-of-a-kind collages in circulation as part of the Ubu Series, each signed and numbered by the artist. Each collage consists of intricate steps of tearing, assembling and gluing. The original pieces range in size from large to small. To keep all the artwork consistent, the original work has been scanned and reduced in size to 2" X 3" for this project. Please note there are only two prints of each original collage. One print the artist keeps on file and the other print you now own. Please be assured that the print you have purchased is an original art piece and will not be mass-produced. The original collages are available for sale; prices range form $50.00 - $250.00 each (unframed).

hope ain't the only thing needin' some audacity

One of my professors at Cedarville used to say, "If you're going to sin, sin big." I guess these thieves also heard him.

stopping time

I think most performance art is rather silly, but this is very cool.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

You've heard this saying before, correct? It appears someone - a woman, not a man - took it literally.

A painting stolen 20 years ago was found lying in trash along a street, and now it could fetch up to $1 million at auction.

Elizabeth Gibson didn't know anything about the brightly colored abstract work she spotted on her morning walk four years ago on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Sotheby's auction house will be selling the work next month for the now-widowed original owner.

"I would say it was an appointment with destiny," Gibson said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "I just knew it meant something. ... It was extremely powerful, and even though I didn't understand it. I knew it had power."

It turned out that it was a 1970 painting titled "Tres Personajes" (Three People) by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo, whose work has soared in value in recent years.

finding a Georgia

I walked through the Indianapolis Museum of Art last week, snapping pictures as I went:

I paused and thought, Is that a Georgia O'Keeffe? I drew closer and realized that indeed it is:

It's Jimson Weed, created between 1936 and 1937. The accompanying plaque reads:

This is O'Keeffe's largest and most amibitious floral work, with her signature emphasis on size and contour. In 1936 Elizabeth Arden commissioned O'Keeffe to paint Jimson Weed for the exercise room of her New York spa.

Who was Elizabeth Arden? Most women should know.

death comes to all

Vanitas Still Life, by Dutch artist J. Falk. From the collection at the Indianapois Museum of Art.

From the accompanying plaque describing the work:

Popular among the Dutch, vanitas still life painting is based on the theme of death's inevitability. The symbolic meaning of the skull is obvious, while the rose and the oil lamp both serve as metaphors of life's brevity and fragility. The meaning is underscored by the Latin inscription: "All that is human is smoke, shadow, vanity and the picture of a stage."

James 4:14 - "Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."

Satan

The sculpture Satan by Jean-Jacque Feuchère, from the collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Feuchère wanted to depict how Satan looked following his fall.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

More artwork from the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Or, perhaps you could spare $200,000:

Love

This is Love -the original Love by Robert Indiana. You've seen it on stamps and on postcards, and it has been installed in various other incarnations around the country. This, however, is work located in Indiana's home state, Indiana. It sits on the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, just north of downtown Indianapolis.

Here is the view of the back:

I thought that the space between the "L" and the "V" was most intriguing. Is it shaped like an arrow? If so, perhaps Indiana is suggesting that love can only bring you down. Maybe he's saying that we try to love as best we can, but it's imperfect because we are only human. Is it shaped like the head of a spear? Ah... Indiana is saying that love can pierce us, maybe even destroy us. The interpretive possibilities are endless.

Why is it rust-colored, you ask? There is an explanation:

topsy turvy

Does it ever feel like your house is turning upside down?

brilliance

Chihuly glass at the Children's Museum of Indiana

brilliance
Originally uploaded by Good Brownie.

Banana doodling

Here.

tattoos and death

Ann Althouse thinks this post is the best she's ever written. If you are so inclined to acquiesce to my request (and why aren't you?), you should go to her site and decide for yourself whether she's right. My relatives with tattoos should especially consider this.

Professor Althouse has an impressive Wikipedia entry.

the true and the beautiful

Frank Turk has an article about the tendency of the Christian to disdain "the true and beautiful," especially in the artistic realm; reading it is worthy of your time. Here's a sample:

Listen: if there's anything on Earth (or in the Heavens) which we Christians ought to know something about, it's Love and Death. In fact, we should be the ones who are exclaiming the fact of Love in Death. We shouldn't be establishing a suicide cult but extolling the fantastic fact that Christ died for our sins because God Loved, and Christ was resurrected in order that death would be destroyed.

There's more art to be made in that one sentence than all the movies Hollywod has ever turned out, and more than either NYC or LA could turn out in music and TV in 10,000 years. Why? Because there is Truth and Beauty in that statement, and it doesn't force us to make false moral choices or reduce our expressions to some gloomy, dismal, atonal text.

The great topic of art belongs to us. The great purpose of art is not, as someone once said, to frame a lie which seems pleasant, but to frame truth by analogy -- and the greatest truth-by-analogy of all time is the Bible.

Inevitably, the discussion in the meta turns to music and someone brings up U2.

More on this topic by: Jan, Mark Daniels, DrKnoxPJ, Jerry Solomon & Jimmy Williams

"I am the Mona Lisa. My true identity is shrouded in mystery."

Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting speaks!

Dr Matsumi Suzuki, who generally uses his skills to help with criminal investigations, measured the face and hands of Leonardo da Vinci's famous 16th century portrait to estimate her height at 168 centimeters (5 feet, 6 inches) and create a model of her skull.

"Once we have that, we can create a voice very similar to that of the person concerned," Suzuki told Reuters in an interview at his Tokyo office last week.

"We have recreated the voices of a lot of famous people that were very close to the real thing and have been used in film dubbing."

The chart of any individual's voice, known as a voice print, is unique to that person and Suzuki says he believes he has achieved 90 percent accuracy in recreating the quality of the enigmatic woman's speaking tone.

Speaking of M.L., I've always enjoyed this song, sung by the incomparable Nat King Cole.

In the comments: I've been asked to explain my love for NKC's "Mona Lisa." I guess it's because of the haunting melody and the line "do you smile to tempt a lover, or is this your way to hide a broken heart." I've done that - smile when my heart hurt, that is. I've only had my heart broken by a woman one time, and that was in college (and, no, it wasn't by The Wife).