Tag Archives: Art

You Can Tickle His Creatures

Posted on by Bill Chance

Proverbs for Paranoids:

  • You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
  • The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
  • If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
  • You hide, they seek.
  • Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Memorial Figure Papua New Guinea Dallas Museum of Art

Memorial Figure
Papua New Guinea
Dallas Museum of Art

insideout3

insideout2

insideout4

She Watches Over Us As We Run For Our Train

Posted on by Bill Chance

Sculpture outside Plaza of the Americas
Dallas, Texas

Plaza of the Americas Pearl Street Dallas, Texas

Plaza of the Americas
Pearl Street
Dallas, Texas

“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Conspicuous Consumption

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

Northpark
Dallas, Texas

consumption

“Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.”
― Lao Tzu

Another Metal Fly

Posted on by Bill Chance

A while back, I posted a photo of a bronze fly on one of the sculptures in Pioneer Plaza – a little detail that has always held an odd fascination for me.

Today, waiting for a train at the downtown Plano DART station I took a look at a cool little horse sculpture – sort of a steampunk steed. I was impressed to find that it too was being harassed by flies – two of them, as a matter of fact.

The sculpture, by Tom Askman, is named Iron Horse, in honor of the historical trains that have plied the spot. So I guess these two are Iron Flies.

Well, except that the sculpture, although it is called “Iron Horse” – is actually made of cast bronze. So I guess there are still bronze flies.

Iron Horse, by Tom Askman Plano, Texas

Iron Horse, by Tom Askman
Plano, Texas

Iron Horse, by Tom Askman Plano, Texas

Iron Horse, by Tom Askman
Plano, Texas

Iron Horse, by Tom Askman Plano, Texas

Iron Horse, by Tom Askman
Plano, Texas

Iron Horse, by Tom Askman Plano, Texas

Iron Horse, by Tom Askman
Plano, Texas

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk

Posted on by Bill Chance

“They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Pioneer Plaza
Dallas, Texas

Dallas, Texas

Dallas, Texas

Contemplation

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas, Texas

Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas Museum of Art

“Muddy water, let stand, becomes clear.”
― Lao Tzu

Sun God (Helios)

Posted on by Bill Chance

Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas, Texas

I never get tired of walking around in an art museum, especially one that I am very familiar with, looking for beauty in odd corners and hidden spots.

Sun God (Helios), Donald DeLue Dallas Museum of Art Dallas, Texas

Sun God (Helios), Donald DeLue
Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas, Texas

From the Label Text:

Donald DeLue
American, 1897-1988

Sun God (Helios), 1937
Patinated plaster
Gift of the Estate of Donald DeLue, 1997.20

A radiant crown of bright sunbeams draws our eyes toward the fierce gaze of the handsome, beardless Sun God, Helios. The ancient poet Homer described how the mighty titan Helios “shines upon men and deathless gods, and piercingly he gazes with his eyes from his goldne helmet. Bright rays beam dazzingly from him, and his bright locks streaming from the temples of his head gracefully enclose his far-seen face.”

Donald DeLue translated Homer’s verse into sculptural form using a theme that appealed to his lifelong fascination with ancient Greek and Roman mythology. This figure is one of the artist’s most beautiful early sculptures. It marks a turning point in DeLue’s working method, as it is the last one that he modeled in French clay and cast in plaster himself. The final bronze version of Sun God (Helios) was DeLue’s first publicly exhibited sculpture.

Weee! on Pillar 4N

Posted on by Bill Chance

Trinity River Bottoms, Dallas, Texas

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

JFK

Posted on by Bill Chance

The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of the nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose – and it is the test of the quality of a nation’s civilization
—-John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Mural on a liquor store, Lamar Street south of downtown, Dallas, Texas.

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

I saw this from the window of a train travelling south through the city and returned a week later to get a closer look. And a photograph or two.