An Oyster's Autobiography

"All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography." ~Federico Fellini

Like A Flower

"Be like the flower, turn your faces to the sun." Kahlil Gibran

Our Surroundings

"We live in a sea of light."

-Henry Plummer, The Poetics of Light

"What you are always looking for is the perfect sunrise or sunset, one that catches you by the throat, leaves you wide-eyed and breathless, tosses you up in the clouds and down again, wraps you all up in wonder and elemental grace, if only for a moment.

One loses count of the mornings and evenings spent in wild places, always looking for that perfect Helios moment and trying to capture it on film or her memory card. Whatever else she forgets (and she forgets so much these days), sunrises and sunsets have a lovely way of lingering, and thus they can be revisited over and over again. One looks back and remembers the light, how it filtered through the clouds and made the sand sparkle on an early winter morning, how it lovingly touched a weathered and forgotten Adirondack chair on the beach, painted a fey and shining highway across the water from here to there. At such times, one is a toddler on the beach again, and the distance between now and then, between these earthly shores and those beyond the fields we know seems like just a few steps.Fluttering through one's photo archive is something else again, and it gives rise to other feelings - all these years of wandering around with a camera looking for the light and nary an adequate visual representation for all one's impassioned ramblings. The sunrises and sunsets are perfect within themselves. The artist has a lot of work to do on herself and her technique - perhaps one of these lifetimes she will get it right."-
-  Catherine Kerr (c) 2005 - 2012 http://www.beyondthefieldsweknow.org

Summer Fun

"Let us dance in the sun,

wearing wild flowers in our hair..." ~Susan Polis Shutz

Something That Bothers Me

Some Quiet Time

Ah To Dream

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning." -Gloria Steinem

Robert Rauschenberg

"Cy Twombly & Relics, Rome no. 5", 1952  by Robert Rauschenberg*
Archival inkjet print, printed 1995
 Sold for $16,250 at the Photographs sale, 4 April 2012, New York.

via Phillips de Pury & Company  

The following biography taken from : http://rogallery.com/Rauschenberg_Robert/robert_rauschenberg-biography.htm

* Robert Rauschenberg, American (1925-2008)

Process, object, environment and artist intertwine in Robert Rauschenberg's work. He embodies most of the ideas of this century's modern art, yet his powerful, idiosyncratic works are like those of no other artist.

Born Milton Rauschenberg in Texas in 1925, he received a sound art education. He attended Kansas City Art Institute in 1947, and then the renowned Academie Julien in Paris in 1948.

He returned to the United States to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1949. There he studied under abstract painter Josef Albers, one of the emigres who, seeking refuge in the United States from Europe's devastation, had galvanized American art. There, too, he formed professional relationships with avant-garde composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Rauschenberg continued on to New York City, where he studied at the Art Students League until 1952. From then until 1953, he traveled in Northern Africa and Italy.

His first works included collage, and he was involved in the production of perhaps the first impromptu theatrical "happening," a performance of John Cage's Theater Piece #1 (1952). His "combine paintings" of the 1950s combined, at first, paint and objects from his own past, but later included more "found" materials like photographs that had no personal connection with the artist. He turned to planning and costuming stage performances, particularly dance, in the 1960s, and in the 1970s he produced constructions of fragile and ephemeral materials.

From the beginning, Rauschenberg's work contained nontraditional materials, was exhibited in a nontraditional setting, and refused categorization. Although he rejected the serious, self-important, personal emotionality of the abstract expressionist painters, his brushwork is expressive and emotive. His incorporation of mundane objects-such as bed linens, license plates, or tires-into his assemblages heavily influenced the growth of pop art and neo-dadaism in the 1960s, but the effect is neither banal and cynical like pop, nor deliberately chaotic and negative like dada.

 Overdrive. Medium, oil and silkscreen ink on 1962  Robert Rauschenberg

Points of View

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.-- William Blake

Basics in Black and White

"You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need." Howard

If All Else Fails

"if something does go wrong, here is my advice... KEEP CALM and CARRY ON." - Maira Kalman (The Principles of Uncertainty)

In Good Company

"Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion" - Hunt

Beatrice Wood

"I who wanted danger, adventure, and love." 

-Beatrice Wood

"Beatrice Wood was an important contemporary artist, craftperson and writer. Her life ran the course of the 20th century and included many of the figures that shaped it. Ultimately, her genius was in the marriage of wide-ranging influences in her work. The spirit of Dadaism, impact of Modernism, embrace of Eastern philosophy, influence of folk art and even the ornament of ethnic jewelry were all combined in her ceramics. Her work reveals a mastery of form, combined with a preference for the naïveté of folk art. Ultimately, it is impossible to separate her life experiences from the work she created, as she truly mastered the art of a life."
 - www.beatricewood.com

Beatrice Wood 1908



"Beatrice Wood was born in 1893 in San Francisco to wealthy, socially conscious parents. Five years later, the family moved to New York City, where her mother concerned herself with preparing her daughter for her eventual “coming out” into New York society. This included a year in a convent in Paris, enrollment in a fashionable finishing school and summer trips to Europe, where she was exposed to art galleries, museums and the theatre.Ultimately, it was this exposure to the arts that ruined her mother’s plans for her. In 1912, Beatrice rejected plans for a coming-out party and announced that she wanted to be a painter. Her mother decided that, if this were the case, it would be accomplished properly. Supervised by a chaperone, Beatrice moved to France to study painting at the Academy Julian in Paris, but found it tediously academic. She moved to Giverny, the hometown of Monet, which had become a fashionable draw for aspiring artists, where the rebellious young Beatrice had a fight with her chaperone. She moved into an attic room, which could only be accessed by a ladder and lined the walls with her painted canvasses." *

Beatrice Wood with Marcel Duchamp June 21, 1917

While working as an actress in New York City, a friend told Beatrice about a Frenchman who was in the hospital with a broken leg, who was very lonely and had no one to talk to. It turned out to be the composer Edgard Varèse, who introduced her to Marcel Duchamp on her next visit.

“…We immediately fell for each other,” Beatrice recalled of her meeting with Duchamp. “Which doesn't mean a thing because I think anybody who met Marcel fell for him. He was an enchanting person.” -www.beatricewood.com

Photo: William Gray Harris

Bud pot Beatrice Wood 1960


Beatrice Wood a fascinating woman who led a rich and diverse life filled with adventure, creativity and independence.  To learn more read "I Shock Myself" the autobiography of Beatrice Wood.

Beatrice Wood passed away in 1998, at the age of 105 years of age, with the last 25 years of her life her most productive, creating work to satisfy a growing market for her ceramics, writing books and visiting with the hundreds of people who showed up on her doorstep. When asked the secret of her longevity, she would simply offer “art books, chocolates and young men”.*

*All text taken from www.beatricewood.com

Hot Fun in the Summertime

My ABC's

To Dream The Impossible Dream

“Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.”
-Claire Goldberg Moses

Loving Others

“Have a heart that never hardens,
 a temper that never tires,
 a touch that never hurts.”

― Charles Dickens

Myriads of Millenniums

"I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born." 
—Jack London, The Star Rover

Just a Moment in Time

"Exhaust the little moment.

Soon it dies.

And be it gash or gold

it will not come

again in this identical 

disguise." -Gwendolyn Brooks

Like the Sea

"Love is like the sea.

It's a moving thing, but still and all,

it takes its shape." Zora Neale

Wonderful YOU

Let's Give A Dinner Party!

WooHooo It's Summer!

Happy sand dollars ablaze in color...

Whisper of the Gods

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the Gods
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Starry Starry Night

Some Summer Fun Advice

and PARTY til the cows come home!

That's Our Story and We're Sticking To It

Gathering of the clan 2010 for Athena's College graduation party.

Happy July 4th

Enjoy yourselves today!  
Happy 4th of July!

Something Poignant by Nora Ephron

Oscar-nominated screenwriter Nora Ephron, known for romantic comedies When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle .   (May 19, 1941 – June 26, 2012) was an American filmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, journalist, author and blogger.  

Nora Ephron: What I'll miss, what I won't miss

In an extract from her latest book published in the Guardian earlier this year, writer and film-maker Nora Ephron, who has died, listed some of the things she liked and disliked about life …

What I won't miss

Dry skin
Bad dinners like the one we went to last night
E-mail
Technology in general
My closet
Washing my hair
Bras
Funerals
Illness everywhere
Polls that show that 32 percent of the American people believe in creationism
Polls
Fox TV
The collapse of the dollar
Bar mitzvahs
Mammograms
Dead flowers
The sound of the vacuum cleaner
Bills
E-mail. I know I already said it, but I want to emphasize it.
Small print
Panels on Women in Film
Taking off makeup every night

What I will miss

My kids
Nick
Spring
Fall
Waffles
The concept of waffles
Bacon
A walk in the park
The idea of a walk in the park
The park
Shakespeare in the Park
The bed
Reading in bed
Fireworks
Laughs
The view out the window
Twinkle lights
Butter
Dinner at home just the two of us
Dinner with friends
Dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives
Paris
Next year in Istanbul
Pride and Prejudice
The Christmas tree
Thanksgiving dinner
One for the table
The dogwood
Taking a bath
Coming over the bridge to Manhattan
Pie


Ephron urged aging friends and readers to make the most of their lives. “You should eat delicious things while you can still eat them, go to wonderful places while you still can and not have evenings where you say to yourself, ‘What am I doing here? Why am I here? I am bored witless!’.”

Lighten Up

"I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right. - author Anne Lamott, in a recent interview. (Source: The Washington Times)"

Happy July

Soul Food...

"A beach is good for my soul."
-Sandi at http://whistlestopcooking.blogspot.com

"The cure for anything is salt water - 
sweat,
 tears, 
or the sea"
Isak Dinesen