le-weekend

le-weekend-IMG_7075, originally uploaded by Rob Dunlavey.

Everyone is heading out of the city for the cool breezes that are always …someplace else! Good luck!
More pictures here

Art Criticism

Another view of the dam this morning. I sat right up close so the rushing water drowned out any other sounds. After a while, this flotilla of geese camped out on the top and had a busy little salon al fresco.

I drew this in green Prismacolor in my sketchbook. The paper is soft and shows the impressed lines from the previous pages:

So, I offer you this: a useless job of figuring out the connection between my doodles and an observation of the water and the geese. Art critics and historians do this all the time and assume they've had the final word. It's infuriating. If there is a connection, it should be obvious. If it's not obvious, then it's obvious that someone is riding on the back of the person who took the initial risk of actually making the art.
Ooooh! Ouch! Take that you art-challenged critics/historians/reviewers! Put down your pens and pick up a paintbrush!

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Getting Focused

There's a theme here, no?

Yes, here we are back at the dam on the Charles River a few minutes walk from my home. Two months ago, it was a raging torrent and me and my dear sketchbook would have been rudely swept out to Boston Harbor and the icy gray Atlantic Ocean beyond. But this day the water was well-behaved and it sparkled in the early morning sun.

Fisherman wade up and down here and catch things. Fathers and sons practice the ancient art. I used to fish with my daughter here and other nearby places. She was quite eager and ardent about it. Of course, I had the unenviable job of "preparing" the worms, impaling them on the hook and, if we got lucky, removing the hapless fish from the hook and tossing it back in (where it often jumped back on the hook!).

What I fish for is less problematic and messy:

Here are a few other pages from this sketchbook:

The thing with the bottle caps is my mbira. It was made by Newton Gwara in Zimbabwe and was given to me by my friend Solomon Murungu who is a very good mbira player. It makes beautiful music that seems to go with the rushing rippling river. Maybe I have an example somewhere for you: "Walk On By" [mp3 file]. This is my own lame little song; listen to Solomon's cd if you desire the real thing (and you should!)

I blogged about this heron previously. I like his style of fishing: slow and graceful, highly evolved and a bit comical. I've never  seen an overweight heron; have you? I guess they eat pretty well.

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The end of Philosophy

Philosophy 101: It's obvious that…

from this, you get this…

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Easter musings

The Easter bichon guarding his turf! © 2010 Rob Dunlavey

Easter! What's it all about?

Some people like this Christian holy day because of the symbolic enshrinement of Hope and Redemption in the resurrection of Christ. I can get on board with this basic attitude: we all need hope and the knowledge that we are not damned by even our most serious transgressions in life. But, for me, the truth is that I do not worry too much about this. Perhaps one day I'll figure it out.

And I do like Easter. However, unlike Christmas, it's kind of a grownup's holiday. Christmas is magical: like staying up past your bedtime and then the early morning tip-toeing and the almost impossible anticipation of the gifts. Easter, on the other hand, is sober and clean-washed. For a kid it's about the morning but no middle-of-the-night wondering about sugarplums (what are they?) and hooves clattering and, just how does that fat man get down the chimney. Easter is an adult mystery and so much of being an adult is mysterious and boring to children. Easter doesn't have the legs that Christmas does (and you don't get out of school for any appreciable length of time so that clinches it's second-fiddle status!)

But, let's give credit to the older wisdom that girds Easter. These are the ancient and obvious traditions that make Easter palatable and fun for children (old and young alike).  It's a Northern hemisphere thing okay? We've just had winter for months and now spring has sprung and new life burgeons around us in the mud and rocky crevices of the place we've outlasted winter. It's amazing that despite those images of the Earth spinning, rising and setting (like clockwork) and university libraries filled with calculations on the predictability of it all, we long for that first crocus. We thrill at the sound of frogs and birds chorusing. We pin all our hope on an imaginative tale of an empty tomb. Martyrs will come and go but Nature abides and perhaps wiser heads have prevailed after all: they've created sap from sacrificial blood.