So I'm teaching Modern art again and in doing so I'm revisiting and remembering all the book learning I did years ago. I'm reading and researching and thinking again about how these worlds connected. It's amazing to me how what I loved about the dada impulse for the ridiculous, the collaborative, and the humorous and what I was mesmerized about Bauhaus (new directions in education, Feininger, Kandinsky and Klee as teachers, and the opportunity to be in the middle of the triadic ballet) are even more interesting as I am a more mature reader/thinker. Honestly, as the manager of an art school I have a new found and immense respect for Walter Gropius and even though Lionel Feininger will always be among my favorite painters, it may be true that he wasn't the greatest teacher.

Among the best Bauhaus things online are:

Extra Ordinary Every Day

The portfolio for Gropius at the Bauhaus Archive

Some great pictures here
And I'm reading Martin Duberman's book on Black Mountain and all of the non-traditional schooling stuff is so stikingly and amazingly familiar...
see ya,
Rachael

Some friends from work (they are between the ages 4 and 6 and in a class taught by ms heather) made me the most divine valentine's day card which I share with you here.



and then I got my first glazed porcelain pieces back such as this splattered pinch bowl


and last night's painting class helped me solve two recent paintings (both untitled unless you have any great ideas), photographed on the floor of my office on this slowest of snow days


and


my office wall, the prettiest part is here...



That's all for now but my best as you shovel out.
love,
Rachael

The museum I work at closed our Georgia O'Keeffe show a month ago and everyone is working at a different pace now. A collective phew in terms of workload! But during the months the show was up, it energized our place. I walked through the exhibit many times and talked to lots of people about Georgia's paintings, her process, her path to abstraction, even the question of where she was in Lake George. Since this city has such a history of photography, it usually feels like there is more Stieglitz in the air than G O'K but then, the other day, a month after the show closed, I stumbled upon the Shell and old Shingle series.

One of these was in the show, one of these I looked at carefully, but it's remarkable how that painting (#4) changes when you see the other paintings...


Georgia O'Keeffe, Shell and Old Shingle, No 1, 1926 Oil on Canvas, Boston.



Georgia O'Keeffe, Shell and Old Shingle, No 2, 1926 Oil on Canvas, Boston.


Shell and Old Shingle, No 3, 1926 Oil on Canvas, Boston.



Shell and Old Shingle, No 4, 1926 Oil on Canvas, Boston.


"We were shingling the barn and the old shingles, taken off, were free to fly around. Absentmindedly I picked up a loose one and carried it into the house and up to the table in my room. On the table was a white clam shell brought from Maine in the spring. I had been painting it and it still lay there. The white shape of the shell and the grey shape of the weathered shingle were beautiful against the pale grey leaf on the faintly pink-lined pattern of the wallpaper. Adding the shingle got me painting again.
After the first realistic paintings I painted just a piece of the shingle and a piece of the shell. To a couple were added two quite large green leaves that were in a glass on the table. Finally I went back to the shingle and shell – large again – the shingle just a dark space that floated off the top of the painting, the shell just a simple white shape under it. They fascinated me so that I forgot what they were except that they were shapes together – singing shapes."

Georgia O’Keeffe, p. 51, Georgia O’Keeffe from Hart News



So many saw so much in the singing shapes and even when they are shingles and shells again they are still about painting...

take care,
Rachael

It's working, slowly but certainly and a small space heater with some small space to heat is producing some paintings and a great deal of calm.
Here's hoping you have that too...
Rachael

Inspired.

Things (good things!) and people keep coming into my sphere and inspiring the beejeezus out of me.

Julie Johnson was just around for a workshop where she showed a lot of her honestly charming cups and bowls, boxes and plates. Nothing is as effortless as it looks of course, but somehow it truly does make me feel more graceful to sip tea from a little JJ cup...

Willie Cole and his irons, shoes, chickens, and all the ideas embedded in the work...

Edouard Vuillard's quietly brilliant paintings

and prickly smart Gertrude Stein's essay about Pablo Picasso which is so thoroughly steeped in myth-making (Braque who?) and modernity that it amazes and excites me... This mix of her poem is a treat.



So, then, more making and thinking and keeping warm and gathering treats to be mailed...
see ya,
Rachael