Still, Life

Giovanni Stanchi, 17thC, Still Life With Fruit


The still life genre of painting is seldom compelling, or so I thought.  Stanchi's still life shown here, painted sometime between 1645-1672, provides an invaluable depiction of watermelon as it was known in the 17th century.  Vox ran a piece about this in July, and then updated it in August when some reddit users claimed that it was simply an under-ripe melon and not some old world 'proto-melon'.  It seems that the black, ripe seeds within the flesh of the melon indicate that it is indeed a fully ripened watermelon.
Stanchi's subject matter, and attention to detail, serve art, history, and the evolution of the watermelon well.  It's so much more than just a footnote in the annals of the still life.

LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier, MacArthur Fellowship Recipient, 2015


Growing up just outside of Pittsburgh in Braddock, Pa, that former steel town in seemingly perpetual decline, served to form and inform Frazier's photography.  A 2015 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship recipient, Frazier's work is unerringly clear and powerful in its representation of both people and place.  Namely, her family and Braddock.  As a photographer myself, but not of this caliber, I can attest to the difficulty in mastering clarity in meaning.
Frazier is young, just 33 years old, and I look forward to seeing where she takes her vision next.

Spring Fling In Autumn

Artist:  Nicole Eisenman, 'Spring Fling', 1996


Congratulations to one of my favorite artists, Nicole Eisenman, on being awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.  Commonly referred to as a 'genius grant', the foundation awards $625,000 to each recipient over the course of 5 years.
I can hardly wait to see what she comes up with next.

I, Witness

Artist: CM, Zelienople, PA, 2015


A few days ago I was in Dollar Tree picking up the early edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Sunday newspaper, when I remembered that I needed rubber gloves for a particularly nasty cleaning project.  As I walked back the aisle toward the cleaning supplies I observed a man, seemingly around my age (middle-aged), putting food stuffs (spaghetti, spaghetti sauce) into his backpack.  He eyed me nervously, but I just continued on.
Later, when I was relating the  incident to my wife, I asked her if she thought I should've done something.  What?  She asked. 
Should I have offered to buy the man food.  This is what's been needling me since that morning.  The trials of Jean Valjean,   harshly imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, resonates too strongly for me to even think of turning the man in to store staff.  My only two alternatives were to ignore him, which is what I did, or to offer my assistance, which I did not.  I don't feel a responsibility to the store, to any chain store, to guard against shoplifting, or to ensure that they throttle every single penny of profit from their inventory.  I'm not an employee.
But I am a human being, and I feel sure that this was a fellow human being in need, and instead of reaching out to him, I brushed passed him and continued on.
Why?  Partly because I felt uncomfortable even acknowledging what he was doing, and that I had seen him, because he seemed ashamed - or was he not ashamed, and I was merely  projecting this onto him?  Am I so mired in conventionalism that whatever societal norms I prescribe to, the whole of  the world must as well?   I might be over-thinking this event because I'm ashamed that I didn't offer to buy his food.  I'm foisting my shame on him, because I can't and don't know what he was feeling/thinking.
Now I only wonder what I would do if confronted by the same scenario again. 

Vergiss Mein Nicht

Forget-Me-Not, The Summer Is Gone, Pittsburgh, 2015




There were some forget-me-nots growing in a patch of lemon balm.  I wanted to get some photos of the flowers, but nothing turned out that didn't seem trite - or worse yet, just plain hacky.  So, I dug up the plant and attempted to do a botanical study of it.  The results of that were pedestrian at best.  I tossed the plant then in a bucket of rain water and stared at it for a long time.  After awhile I took some shots of the flower moving through the water.  This is a shot with the color inverted.  I have to say that I'm pleased for a change.

A 57 Year Window Into Cause of Death

Eleanora Duse's Death Certificate


An odd little genealogical tidbit I found while yet again toiling on my family tree, Pennsylvania has available online death certificates for anyone who died in the state between 1906 and 1963.  Why they offer that 57 year window I have no clue.  You have to be a resident of PA to utilize this, but I think that if you simply type in a valid zip code in the prompt box (for instance, 15213, which is a Pittsburgh zip), you should be able to access the archives.
Here I've posted Eleanora Duse's death certificate, God bless her.  What a talent, and how tragic that she died in this then smoky city.  I've blogged about Duse before, which you can read here.

Barbie And The Butterfly

Barbie and Great Spangled Fritillary, with Milkweed, 2015


I am playing about with the digital equivalent of a double exposure:  Printing one image atop another.  This turned out better than most, and overall I'd say that usually the result is a hot mess of overlapping imagery.