“Don’t blame you,” said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again a second later.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Tag Archives: Art
I Live My Life In Growing Orbits
“I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Lee Bontecou
American, Born 1931
Untitled
1962
Welded steel, epoxy, canvas, fabric, saw blade, wire
Museum of Fine Arts
Houston, Texas
The Sun the Color Of Pressed Grapes
“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Painted parking meter and Brooks saddle, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Hatched From A Swan’s Egg
“His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a duck’s nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan’s egg.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling
David Smith
American 1906-1965
Leda
1938
Painted Steel
Museum of Fine Arts
Houston, Texas
From the label text:
David Smith learned the technique of welding steel from working in a car factory, and he applied this skill to the art of sculpture. Leda is based on the Greco-Roman myth about a god who takes the form of a swan and then seduces a woman. Here, Smith offers a witty interpretation of the unlikely act of lovemaking between a bird and a woman.
The Labours Of A Spasmodic Hercules
“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope
Paul Manship
American, 1885-1966
Hercules Upholding the Heavens
1918
Bronze
The Museum Of Fine Arts
Houston, Texas
The Power Of the Machine
“The power of the machine imposes itself upon us and we can scarcely conceive living bodies without it.”
—-Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Large Horse by Raymond Duchamp-Villon
My favorite sculpture – one I have gazed upon many times in the Nasher Sculpture Center, here in Dallas, is Large Horse by Raymond Duchamp-Villon. I wrote about it more than three years ago.
At the time I said:
I like to stare at it, walk around it. I’ve taken some pictures of it. I would like to take some more.
To me, it’s clear that it is a statue of a horse – but that horse has been morphed into a complex machine, full of pushrods, pistons, and gears. It has an impressive, solid bulk, but feels like it is about to propel itself out through the glass and speed down the street in a blur, smelling of ozone and oil.
It is cast in very dark bronze – almost black. It swallows a lot of the light, but what does escape is subdued by the power and mass of the horse. It shines with dark energy.
The sculptor was a cavalry doctor in World War I and must have had a close relationship, knowledge, and a deep connection with his horses. He chose this animal to convert into a cubist bronze. He was able to preserve the essential horseness of the shape while implying the obsolescence of the animal – overtaken by the more powerful, rugged, and easily controlled energy of machines.
Duchamp-Villon died too young. He contracted typhoid fever during the war. He died before he finished this sculpture. All he left was the finished small scale model. After his death, his famous brother, Marcel Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase) finished the job and had the sculpture cast in full-sized bronze.
Thanks.
Large Horse, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Over the holidays, I was in Houston to visit my mother and my sister and her family and was pleased to discover another Duchamp-Villon’s Large Horse in the Cullen Sculpture Garden at the Houston Museum of Fine Art.
It was like running into an old friend unexpectedly.
Large Horse, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon, in the Cullen Sculpture Garden, Houston, Texas
Amount of Hammered Stone
“Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.”
― Henry David Thoreau
The Founders’ Statue, Texas State Fair Grounds, Dallas, Texas
The Founders’ Statue, Texas State Fair Grounds, Dallas, Texas
The Founders’ Statue, Texas State Fair Grounds, Dallas, Texas
From The Historic Heart Tour – Founders’ Statue & Frank P. Holland Court
At the statue’s base is an iron crypt. Made of ore mined in Cherokee County, Texas, it once contained the front pages of three-hundred Texas newspapers for October 8, 1938, the date of the dedication. At the ceremonies, attended by some three-hundred descendants of the founders, the statue was unveiled by the Fair’s 1912 president, Mr. J. J. Eckford. Senator Tom Connally was the guest speaker. The key to the crypt was handed over to the Texas Press Association for safe-keeping until the crypt’s scheduled re-opening, fifty years from the date it was sealed. Unfortunately, when officials took a “sneak peek” inside the crypt, just before the 1988 State Fair, it was discovered that the vault had not been well-sealed and had leaked. When the bundle of deteriorating newspapers was touched, they crumbled into dust. As a result, ceremonies for the opening of the crypt were cancelled.
The Restless Urge Of Autumn
“…as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.”
― Daphne du Maurier, The Birds and Other Stories
Mural, Exposition Park, Dallas, Texas
Bomb-Makers And Gunmen Have Taken That Territory
“I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.”
― Don DeLillo, Mao II
Drain Pipe
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
Always Silent And Alone
“In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Painted Parking Meter
Deep Ellum
Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 