School Days

So I was just about to get off the computer when a tweet came up in my Twitter timeline. It was posted by the New York Academy of Art, a superb art school where I am honored to work as a model and have mentioned many times on this blog. They’ve shared a terrific video by Life + Times which takes you into the school on a behind the scenes tour led by President David Kratz. It’s really excellent. Thought I’d pass it along here on Museworthy.

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend! I am on babysitting duty tonight with my niece Olivia. I don’t know exactly what she has planned for us but I’m fairly certain that mayhem will ensue

Goin’ to the Printshop

Guess what everyone? I registered for a printmaking class at the Lower East Side Printshop, and it starts today. Yay! I’m excited! We will meet once a week for eight weeks. Excellent

This is an Intro class for beginners like me who know next to nothing about how to make prints. Emphasis will be on inatglio techniques like drypoint and etching, blocks, plates, and all that other cool stuff. Now I am fully aware that I’m a neophyte and therefore have no unrealistic expectations. So because I have no illusions about my ability, I’ve set very modest goals for myself. I’m thinking that after eight classes, I’ll be able to produce something of merely this quality:

Um, yeah, that was joke, in case you couldn’t tell

The above image is a drypoint titled Holy Family with Saint John, the Magdalene, and Nicodemus, circa 1512, by master printer Albrecht Durer. One of the greatest printmakers of all time, if not the greatest. Although Rembrandt’s prints are pretty amazing. The Met Museum has an informative essay, “The Printed Image in the West: Drypoint”.

Besides getting my creative juices flowing and hopefully having fun, I’ve also been thinking about how long it’s been since I actually learned something new. Gosh, it’s really been a while. I don’t mean learning in terms of acquiring knowledge. That’s something I try to do every day by reading, asking questions, searching on the Internet, etc. I mean learn how to DO something – a skill or a technique. Wish me luck!

Before I go I want to give a quick shoutout to my friend Janet Cook who is having a solo exhibition, “Power and Beauty”, at Dacia Gallery. Way to go Janet!! And I’ve been informed that one of Janet’s paintings of me will be among the exhibited works. That makes me happy Unfortunately I have to miss the reception Thursday night because I’m working. But I will definitely be seeing Janet’s show before it closes on May 11th.

Birth of a Symbolist

Hello friends. I’m posting late on Friday night after a day of house chores, tidying up, organizing, and the first stages of a massive spring cleaning. And I do mean massive. I have tons more to do but am actually off to a pretty good start. Saturday is kitchen floor cleaning day. I’ve got my mop and bucket ready. Woooo hooooo!!

Thanks to Twitter and the abundance of information bits it showers upon its users, I learned that April 20th, my day of tedious housekeeping, was also a notable birthday date. Among the famous figures born on April 20th are the American sculptor Daniel Chester French, screen actor of the silent film era Harold Lloyd, Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miro, Star Trek actor George Takei, Latin jazz giant Tito Puente, and former Yankee first baseman Don Mattingly. Unfortunately, that marvelous diverse group also shares a birthday with Adolf Hitler. Ew. Doesn’t that just taint the whole thing? It would bother the hell out of me if I shared a birthday with Hitler.

Another April 20th birthday belongs to French symbolist Odilon Redon, whose work I absolutely love. He easily holds a spot in my top ten list of favorite artists. So in honor of Redon’s birthday, here’s a video montage of his work. Watch and enjoy the magical, fanciful beauty, inventiveness, and moody imagery of Redon’s work.

A Great Ship and its Musicians

Hey everyone! I know this story has been barely covered in the media lately, but have you heard that Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster?  <— just kidding. sorry.

Truthfully I’ve been enjoying all the Titanic commemorations, articles, programming, etc. Not “enjoying” that such a terrible tragedy occurred, but enjoying the history. I am a tremendous history buff, and the period around the turn-of-the-century and the early 20th is one of my favorite historical eras. The Titanic, as you know, went down in 1912.

So it was sometime early last week that I thought I might use the musicians of the Titanic as this week’s Music Monday topic. And lo and behold, New York’s classical music station WQXR, presented a superb program on that very subject, hosted by the esteemed Elliot Forest. It’s really outstanding, so I will just direct you to the show page, “Echoes of the Titanic”, where you can either listen or read.

The story of the Titanic’s musicians, their composure in the midst of chaos and how they valiantly continued to play as the ship’s passengers frantically sought lifeboats on the fast sinking vessel, is one of the most poignant of all the Titanic lore. One can hope that the soothing hymns provided  even a bit of comfort for the frightened passengers. Regardless, the band felt it their duty to keep playing. All eight of those musicians, including the bandmaster Wallace Hartley, perished in the Atlantic that night. It is believed that not one of them wore a lifejacket. Hartley’s body was recovered two weeks later, his music box still strapped to his chest.

It was infuriating to learn that the White Star Line inflicted more pain onto the musicians’ already grieving families. They cut off the band members’ pay at precisely 2:20 AM when the ship sank, sent a bill for the brass buttons on the uniforms, and charged regular cargo rates to have the recovered bodies sent home. What dicks! Also, the musicians were hired from an agency as what we would call “independent contractors”, which means they were not “crew members” and thus not on the White Star Line’s payroll. Hence they were not insured and the White Star Line could claim that they were not technically responsible for the musicians, who rode the Titanic as regular second-class passengers. The employment situation was clearly a mess. No wonder musicians hate cruise ship work.

I found this image scan from the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union journal on this blog of British historical archives:

In November of 1912, a plaque was installed at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall to honor the heroic musicians of the Titanic. The inscription reads:

This Tablet is Dedicated to the Memory of
W. Hartley of Dewsbury
-Bandmaster-
W.T. Brailey of London
R. Bricoux of Lille, France
J.F. Clarke of Liverpool
J.L. Hume of Dumfries
G. Krins of Liege, Belgium
P.C. Tailor of London
J.W. Woodward of Headington

Members of the band on board the Titanic; they bravely continued playing to soothe the anguish of their fellow passengers until the ship sank in the deep April 14th, 1912. Courage and compassion joined make the hero and the man complete.

Wallace Hartley and his men – true symbols of the phrase “And the band played on . . . “

No Ordinary Day

Is there such a thing as an “ordinary day”? People use that expression all the time, myself included. But as I grow fonder and fonder of the life I’ve made for myself, of the city that’s been my home for all my 43 years, and of the friends, colleagues, and acquaintances I’ve made along the way, I realize that “ordinary” is a term rarely applicable. Rather, it minimizes and cheapens, and deprives the much-maligned “daily life” of its subtle, unique soul.

Tuesday morning I modeled for a small life drawing class at the New York Film Academy. Never thought my art modeling career would bring me there but, alas, it did. And it was fun. Nothing ordinary about doing nude poses in the “Billy Wilder” room, which, by the way, is next door to the “Jonathan Demme” room. Sure, I did come within an inch of getting accidentally clocked in the head with a tripod on a mad dash for the ladies’ room. But hey, it’s always something, right? An easel in art school, a tripod in film school. In any case, concussion averted.

When that job ended at 12:00, I walked out of the film academy building, crossed the street, inhaled a deep breath of fresh air, and enjoyed a leisurely stroll through Union Square Park. It was a bright, sunny, buzzing New York afternoon. At the northwest corner of the park, I noticed the sitting area resplendent with bright green garden chairs and blue umbrellas. I found the crisp, clean colors and their chromatic effect quite pleasing. So I took a few pictures. This one is not an ordinary scene if you consider the colors, the perspective, the curving flowerbed border edging in the bottom right and the tilted birdhouse in the tree in the upper left:

So I made my way to my 2:00 job, but stopped first for a quick lunch at Loving Hut on Seventh Avenue. There, I had the best veggie burger ever, anywhere, in the annals of veggie burgerdom! It was perfect and delicious. So NOT ordinary. Yum

Less than hour later, I was posing for the students in Vincent Arcilesi‘s class on the 6th floor at FIT. During the fast pose warm ups, Vincent sat down to sketch the model along with the rest of the class, which he often does. I took an active standing pose and Vincent did what all good artists should do in that instance – captured the gesture. I was standing still of course, but the forward stepping movement and arm/leg extension is strong in Vincent’s quick sketch. Loose, spontaneous, a one-of-a-kind Arcilesi. Not ordinary at all.

Things are only ordinary if we, through own our jaded disinterest, choose to dismiss them as such. But for some of us, a life as a professional artist’s model, working in a big, lively city, where shapes, colors, sounds, encounters and experiences can be found literally everywhere around us, nothing should be regarded as “ordinary”. Every day is unique. Every day is a blessing to be valued and appreciated. Thank you for allowing me to share my “extraordinary” day with you

The Yellow Christ

Hello, helloooo dearest friends! Hope this blog post finds you well. Holy days are upon us: Passover on Friday and Easter on Sunday, in a rare occurrence of those two holidays coinciding on the same weekend. Cool!

So I was perusing art images of crucifixion and resurrection, the majority of which are faithful, reverent depictions of Biblical events. All brilliant, painstaking works of art that are masterpieces of traditional painting. But I decided to post a more unconventional work by an appropriately unconventional man – French Post-Impressionist/Symbolist painter Paul Gauguin. I always find it interesting when an artist gives a traditional, religious subject an unorthodox treatment. Not degradingly unorthodox, but something unique and unusual in how it employs artistic elements.

Gauguin’s 1889 work, The Yellow Christ, is an example of an artwork that boldly deviates from a realistic, “documentary” style recounting of an event, in this case Christ’s crucifixion. Instead, Gauguin depicts the scene using simplified shapes, bold lines, flat forms, and colors that are not naturalistic. He bathes the Christ figure, and much of the background, in yellow, a pigment one normally associates with cheerfulness and warmth. However, contrary to its reputation, yellow can also have an agitating effect when viewed with focus and intensity, which makes Gauguin’s choice even more intriguing.

Also, look closely at the face of Christ in this painting. It is the face of Gauguin himself. Now Gauguin was certainly not the only painter to insert his own likeness onto a figure. But this is no ordinary figure. This is Christ. Would it be unfair of us then to infer that Gauguin had something of a martyr complex? Probably not.

The Yellow Christ was painted in Pont-Aven in the Brittany region of France. Indeed, the women in the scene are portrayed by Gauguin as Breton women, not the Biblical Marys we expect to see in this narrative. And the landscape appears more like the French countryside than the rocks of Calvary. But accuracy was not Gauguin’s concern, nor should it be a concern of any artist. Gauguin’s sensibilities famously gravitated toward the primitive, the unrefined, the unspoiled. His version of the crucifixion here is both odd and striking. The Christ is disturbingly gaunt but he is also dominant in the setting. Some, not all, of the old masterworks of the crucifixion scene are cluttered and busy, whereas Gauguin’s is stark, direct, and vivid. Simplified.

You can examine, compare and contrast other art crucifixion paintings at this gallery. In the meantime, have a joyous weekend my Museworthy friends. Peace and blessings to each and every one of you. See you next week

Music Business Definitions

A family friend sent out a funny email that I thought I’d share for Music Monday. The guy, Jack, knew my father his whole life, since their high school days in Queens. Like my father, Jack became a professional trumpet player who worked for decades in the NYC club date scene. Having grown up around all that, I became well-acquainted with musicians’ special brand humor which pokes fun at the characters and craziness of their business. I’ve selected some of the funniest ones from Jack’s list. A couple of them might be too “inside” for non-musicians to understand, but you’ll get the gist. The subject memo in Jack’s email read “Music Business Definitions”, so here we go:

AGENT – a character who resents performers getting 90% of his salary

ARRANGER – a guy who writes to support a drinking habit

BANDSTAND – the area furthest away from an electrical outlet

BIG BAND – nowadays, an aggregation consisting of two musicians

BROADWAY PIT JOB – a prison sentence disguised as a gig

CABARET – a venue where singers do songs from shows that closed out of town

CATERER – a man whose hatred for musicians is unrivaled

CHANTEUSE – a singer with an accent and no sense of time

CLUB DATE LEADER – someone who changes his name from Kaminsky to Kaye

CONTRACTOR –  a man whose funeral nobody goes to

DJ – the guy your son would rather have play at his Bar Mitzvah

DOUBLEBASS – the instrument the folks footing the bill feel is unnecessary

DOWNBEAT – the magazine that would have you believe that all jazz musicians are working

ELECTRIC PIANO – the instrument that enables its player to pay for the hernia he sustained lifting it

HOTEL PIANIST – a guy who looks good in a tux

METRONOME – the archenemy of chanteuses and cantors

NEW YEAR’S EVE – night of the year when contractors are forced to hire musicians they despise

ORCHESTRATOR – musician who enhances a composer’s music only to be chastised for it

PERCUSSIONIST – a drummer who can’t swing

PIANIST – an archaic term for a keyboard player

SIDEMAN – the appellation that guarantees a musician will never be rich

UNION REP – a guy who thinks big bands are coming back