Perseus and the head of Medusa

Without wading too deep into greek mythology........ here is a bronze statue, by Cellini (ca. 1550) of Perseus who cut the head off Medusa. Perseus was given winged sandals from the god Hermes, a sword from Zeus, a invisible cloak from Hades, a mirrored shield (to be able to look at the Medusa) from Athena, and finally and most practically a bag from Hesperides for Medusa's head. Thus fully outfitted he went to cut the head off Medusa. A gross detail to the sculpture is the bloody stump of Medusa's head. What looks like the shredded muscle of the cut off neck is upon closer inspection, writhing snakes. This refers to the fact that two creatures (Pegasus and Chrysaor) sprang from Medusa's severed neck.

Another cool detail to the sculpture: when looking at the back of Perseus's helmeted head you can see the image of the sculptor's face! The banding of the helmet forms the nose and eyebrows of the face, and Perseus's hair becomes the sculptor's beard. This type of hidden image is somewhat typical for renaissance art, and in painting the most extreme example of this trickery can be seen in the "fruit face" paintings from Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Firenze!!!!!

Sabine and I took a much overdue 'sans-kids' vacation to Florence (thanks Oma and Opa for watching the kids). What a city! Don't know where to begin. How about a picture of the main Doma (taken from inside the tower), and two pictures from our hotel/B&B. We stayed outside of the city center, a 10 minute bus ride away, another 10 minute walk up a hill. The hotel had a splendid view over the country side, with a perfectly situated pool! The hotel itself was a converted old smallish stone castle, with beautiful relaxing gardens all around it. We highly recommend it: I Parigi Corbinelli.

The walk up the hill to the hotel was hot at times, but let us soak in the country side. One evening after dark the whole way up the hill fire flies were floating about. We even caught one. They are really strange because they make no noise, fly slowly enough that you can catch them, and the only thing you ever see is their bright flashing glow - we never saw the actual bug! It's a little like catching pure light! Very magical, and it was the first time Sabine and I had ever seen fire flies. If it hadn't been for learning about fire flies from reading children's books, I think we would have been pretty spooked. Dancing specks of light as if from the spirit world.

Who's the Monkey?

Went to the Albertina today, to see works from the 'Der Blaue Reiter'. Link. Beautiful stuff from Kandinsky, and Franz Marc. Their work is almost 100 years old now, but it is still so fresh, and inventive. Kandinsky's abstractions are so wonderful - I have to try some myself!

Mr. Pascal ( pictured above) is playing the monkey in front of some permanent sculptures at the Albertina. I think he would gladly switch places with the monkeys instead tagging along through the museum!

Spring Rain. Bus Stop.

A light spring rain. Waiting for the bus. Bus was 12 minutes late, and Pascal had plenty of time to amuse himself, by watching the bubbles floating down the gutter, or the cars spraying the curb as they whizzed by.

Slacklining is Kool!

Got a slackline for Anika's birthday. Really it's for the whole family. But then Ani is the best so far - she's up to an unassisted mount and 4 steps. But Papa's close on her tail ;) The first day we took the slackline up to the park next to the Haus des Meeres. The next day we went to Prater Park.

Bunny and Cross

Here's the beaded wooden egg, mentioned below, with the bunny on the one side, and the cross on the other.

Wise Goat

Goats appear wise. It's the beard, the rectangular pupils, and the steady gaze. This one has been thinking inside his glass box for decades.

Vienna Marathon - Haile Gebrselassie

The marathon is here! They ran right past our apartment. They were handing out !Go Haile! placards. Early in the morning the race people were setting up a water station below our apartment. We went out before the first runner went by, so we were sure to catch Haile Gebrselassie. The first runners were running FAST! They mostly keep up this pace the whole length of the marathon - amazing!

About half way through the race the water station - which had 1000's of water glasses set up -was empty. The workers could barely pour water fast enough to keep up with the demand. They resorted to pouring the water first into a tub, then dunking the individual plastic cups in the tub to fill them up. Also the street was covered in empty plastic cups, and with the runners stepping on them all it filled the street with a sound not unlike a running creek. Further up the street, the sound was just of the runner's feet striking the pavement. This sounded like a soft rain - mellow.

Here is Haile coming!

Here is Haile going (our apartment front door is just over his right shoulder).

Easter Shopping

Went to the Osternmarkt Saturday. Even had some warm sunny weather. There was A Huge display of painted eggs, and they even had plain eggs already hollowed out, ready for painting! Also got a small wooden egg, with a bead mosaic of a bunny on one side, and a cross on the other - very nicely done. But what exactly does it mean to have a cute bunny on one side and a bloody cross on the other? Weird opposition.

more eggs

Schloss Hof on a Spring Day

Welcome Spring!!!!

Went to Schloss Hof in the countryside about 45 minutes from Wien near the border with Slovakia. A beautiful day, sunny, warm, blue skies. The Schloss was built by Prince Eugen, a successful prince, and military leader. Some say he was gay, and judging from his flamboyant hairdo it's not difficult to imagine. Anyways the Schloss is beautiful, and amazingly understated (see the simplicity of the fountain). The Schloss was restored in the early 2000's so maybe that adds to the spanking new clean overall look to the place.

A little irony. The palace garden and fountains unfolds downhill along a long formal rectangle. The view is of the flat farmlands below and in the distance the mountains along the Donau, and the city of Bratislava in the former Czechoslovakia. We visited the city before, and it does have it's sections of old charm, but the place is dominated by super ugly, huge concrete communistic mass housing. These arrogant giant concrete buildings now dominate the distant view from Schloss Hof. Certainly a weird feeling to look at all that communistic arrogance from the princely arrogance of Schloss Hof. At least the Schloss is beautiful, can't say that at all about the communist people's palace in Bratislava.

Another Bratislava connection: storks nesting atop a chimney at Schloss Hof. There is a white stork sanctuary in Bratislava.

Spring into the Woods

The last week's weather was great, but the rain was to return this weekend. Not fair! So, to beat the rain, we went early Saturday into the woods, or really a marshland, near the Donau. Sabine works in the area, and takes her jogs through these woods - she wanted to show us the snowbells carpeting the forest floor (no exaggeration!!), and the fresh buds on every branch.

We got "lost" in the woods:

Anika has learned to love the flavor of "bear lauch" a wide edible leaf that has a remarkable garlic taste. She can eat enough to really, literally stnik up the entire car with her breathing. Anyways, we found Anika sitting in a patch of "bear lauch" munching away....

Pascal is always the soldier, or guard, or karate master. Give him a stick, and..... I got him to pose in front of a thickly barked old tree. I guess he is guarding the tree itself - someone should. He looks a little confused in the picture, but he quickly came back to his senses.

Mama and Papa also got to play in the trees. Watch out for the old rotten branches, crack, slip.... awwwww!!!

Brothers and Sisters

Brothers and sisters, sometimes they really do love each other - and I even have proof. No doubt Anika and Pascal love each other, but they sure know how to hide it most of the time. Between those two a fight can start at any moment for practically any reason. It makes you wonder sometimes how they will ever get along in any kind of civilized way, but then you see, they do actually love each other.

I recorded the proof, above on a short hike to a castle just outside of Wien. Really there are castles on every third hill top here. From the castle we had a nice view of flatlands stretching out to the snowy mountains. And, of course, on the next hill just across the little valley stood another castle. I'm pretty sure the two castles are so close across the valley that they could've traded cannon shots at each other's castle, back in the day.

Anika with her T.V. pal. See even Spongebob gets out and about the town once in a while!

Cool, Eh!

Pascal insisted on wearing his spiderman sunglasses last Sunday. Wasn't even a little bit sunny. I couldn't resist snapping a picture of him next to the graffited stairs near our apartment. He gave me the Cool, serious look.

Pascal, just couldn't keep his cool together and had to smile. Thank goodness! Don't worry you're still the coolest guy in our family, Pascal!

Pelican, my favorite bird

61x46cm, oil on board

Finished my Pelican. It was hard to make up the pose..... the stuffed bird had a weird pose I couldn't use for the painting. I tried to make the pose as realistic as possible and payed attention to the bird's anatomy - there happened to be a pelican skeleton, where I could much better see how the wings work. Wings are kind of weird because they are arms and hands, although you don't see that because of the feathers. So a bird has a shoulder blade - kind of like us - and an elbow - which I think bends backwards in comparison to use - and a hand with fingers, or more like just fingers and no real hand, as in a palm. The "fingers" are the tips of the wings and birds use them much like we would point with a long stick attached to our finger. You can actually see this "pointing" action in pictures of eagles or hawks in flight. The tip feathers look like fingers, because the bird can point them like fingers, but really the feathers are just feathers and the pointing finger is the "leading edge" part of the wing.

Anyways something bad is happening in the background of my Pelican picture. Where he is standing things don't look so bad. There is a coin at the Pelican's feet, and in the context of the Pelican it is just another thing, like a rock or shell, but to us it has meaning ($$$$) and often leads to the bad things in the background.

Why is the Pelican my favorite bird? Back in California when I went surfing I would often see these guys flying about. They are amazingly graceful in the air. They like to skim the water really low maybe 10 inches above the surface. And they just glide, across the water, between the swell lines, hardly a wing flapped - beautiful, astonishing!

Walton Ford

Here in Vienna, there was a Walton Ford exhibit at the Albertina museum last year. He paints animals in an Auduban style, so watercolor, but really big! Some are more than 8 feet across. I got my kids to see the exhibit, and although there are some gruesome details in his paintings, my kids learned to really enjoy Walton Ford's paintings. He starts his paintings, he says, by reading something written down by a 19th century naturalist. So each painting has a story of sorts: a polar bear sifting about the human detrius (cards, candlestick, glass and pot) of a polar ship wreak, shown in distant background.

Or a panther escaped from a zoo and roaming the swiss alps, or a "domesticated" monkey, choking to death a pet parrot, while looking over his shoulder (at you the viewer) with a guilty, "who me?" look on his face.

The panther painting was exhibited in the royal palace rooms of the Albertina. It fit in perfectly as the story almost comes from the same era as the room (18th century). You could imaging the stuffy nobility milling about the room taking in the highly idealized pictures of a cavalry charge, or a nude nymph at a pool, and then coming across this lurking panther!

There is a really good story about the eagle painting above: a friend of James Auduban gave him an eagle, which Mr. Auduban painted from life for a couple of days. Then he needed to kill the bird and have it stuffed. He tried to suffocate the bird by putting it's cage in a closet and set a smoking fire below. A day later the bird was still alive, and just stared at Mr. Auduban. Mr. Auduban then put sulphur in the fire to make the smoke more noxious, he closed the closet door, but the sulphur smell filled the whole house, a tortuous day later he checked the cage again, and there was the eagle, still alive, staring out of the smoky, devilish fumes, as if to accuse Mr. Auduban. He then took a thin, stiff wire and poked it through the eagle's heart. It died. Mr. Ford choose to rewrite the story by showing the eagle flying free with broken shackles still on his claws, and smoke billowing from his nostrils. It's a super great image and a super great re-invention (or revenge) of the original story.

Sometimes Walton Ford's paintings verge into the extreme and bizarre, like: a huge writhing mountain of tasmanian tigers attacking sheep (the tasmanian tiger is more like a dog or wolf then a tiger). This painting has a local twist as the tasmanian tiger was long since hunted to extinction, but at the Naturhistorischemuseum they have a stuffed "tiger". Walton Ford came to the museum to make sketches from the figure. Cool, eh!

Paradisevogel

61x46cm, oil on board

Finished my paradise bird. Not completely what I wanted, but it never is.... I learned a lot with this painting and it's my first kind of "old masterish" painting, using thin layers of paint to slowly build up the shapes, shades and colors, and careful pencil studies done in preparation of the painting. Next painting I'm going to use oil in the underlayers to add some more depth to the painting. I like my composition, the bird's pose which was made (I hope convincingly) from a couple different drawings of the real stuffed bird, and the landscape which I made up completely. I'm a little unsatisfied with the coloring of the sandstone or whatever it is. I do however like the darker cliff like part to the sandstone at the bottom of the picture. I think my bird is pretty enough, and proudly posed, and I like my pile of rocks. I especially like the rock with the squiggly white stripe which reminds me of a snake adding a little biblical quality to the picture, i.e. beautiful assumes ugly, good assumes evil, paradise assumes the imperfection of right now. The snake-in-rock wasn't planned but was a happy accident, which accidents always happen in a painting if you keep going for a certain feeling. I think the desert landscape also fits the sense of the picture, as its harsh plain beauty contrasts well with the rich luxuriant beauty of the paradise bird. Above is the full painting and closeup photographs, because although a painting is always it's whole self it is also, when you are looking at it, a collection of details (at least that is the way I look at paintings).

BTW that's a pearl next to the rock pile. I though I'd put something beautiful AND valuable in there to highlight the disconnection between beauty in it's non-tradable form (a sunset, a wild animal, a cool rock) and beauty that we can put a price on like a pearl, or a diamond, etc.

New Years Eve (a little late)

A little late o.k. We had a wonderful new years night, all five of us walked down to Marie Theresa Platz outside the Kunsthistorische museum and viewed the fireworks. A pretty good view actually, and not at all crowded. We decorated masks and wore them for our walk. Felt a little like Halloween. We almost didn't go because the kids were whining about the cold, etc. But everyone was glad they went in the end!! That's the five of us in the lower right hand corner with our signatures below. Happy new year!

Stuffed Animals (paradisevogel)

various views of the stuffed bird

painting almost finished

side view of the bird, later flipped around for the painting

early stage of the painting

I made some detailed pencil studies of the stuffed animals in the Natural History Museum in Vienna (a wonderful museum in full on 19th century style). Somehow the birds attracted me, maybe because there is such a range or birds really - there must be almost one thousand different birds in the museum. I picked the paradise vogel, because it is really a most remarkable bird. I knew about the bird because I read to my children the Dr. Suess book about the vain bird who wants to have the longest, most pretty tail. She gets one, but then she can no longer fly. Well.... Dr. Suess apparently knew something about birds, because when you see the range of paradise birds out there, the length, elaboration, and raw ornamental quality of their feathers it makes you pause to think. As in... aren't birds meant to fly, and with this amount of superfluous feathering certainly not meant for getting into the air, is it anymore possible to fly? Isn't the point of the bird to fly? And that brought my thoughts to another point.... does everything really have to have a functional purpose? Can't a bird have elaborate feathers just to be beautiful? Doesn't beauty have a value, or does everything always come down to function, utility, survival? And then, what if we suppose beauty has a value, in and of itself, with no relation to function, just in itself, alone - beauty is beautiful because it is beautiful (not because it serves some other biological function). Well that is how I think about the paradise vogel! And she/he should be a standard to which we could aspire, no?

The painting mixes my interest in early renaissance paintings, specifically the way they depict a landscape, which is hardly visually accurate, but a kind of mixture between observation and idealization. My pretty paradise vogel is perched on a collection of real stones I've collected and for some reason unknown to me keep holding my interest. The painting technique is more old fashioned, done with thin layers of paint built up slowly (I am beginning to really like this technique!)

The pictures show a pencil sketch of the stuffed paradise vogel drawn in the museum, and an early stage, and a near finished stage of the painting. The finished painting will be posted soon.