Nine Years Old!

Anika had a really fun birthday party this Saturday. We had her party held at Schonbrunn Palace. They have a kid's museum about the royal family, more focused on how Maria Theresia and Joseph, and their children were as kids.

The party-kids dressed up in fancy gowns and cloaks (Pascal) then took a tour of the museum. Finally we went to the party room to have cake (Sacher Torte) and juice. A beautiful room looking out on the Palace gardens. Ani and her friends had a great time. They even sang songs from Udo Jurgens - a very smaltzy, sappy German singer, with lots of older women fans (Anika's teacher is teaching the class some of his songs - no one knows why).

The party was great!

Anika's 1st 'Nastics Meet

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Anika competed in her first gymnastics meet today. There were ten or more teams from around Vienna, more than 100 competitors. Anika was nervous, and half of her didn't want to go, but she went - and did very well!

Ani placed in the middle of 30 girls in her age group. Everyone is proud of her performance. Ani's team did well too, with one in Ani's age group winning first place. Anika placed seventh on the mini-trampoline - nice and high, legs straight, and stuck the landing - too bad the video is so poor. Her floor and beam routine looked pretty good, although she left out a couple of tricks on each. Aw well, it's her first meet.

Hurrah for Anika!

Proud, Tired Joseph

By Francesco di Christofano (1485-1525) painted around 1515. I love this picture. I especially love the depiction of Joseph, especially because he usually gets second billing when it come to pictures of the holy family. Joseph looks tired here (see his messed up hair) but proud of his family. That's the baby Jesus to the right, playing with his hair while sitting on Mary's lap. My finger painting here isn't the whole painting - it cuts out most of Jesus and all of Mary. But then this is the part of the painting that I like. I spent almost 4 hours doing this painting.

In the same room with me was a guy painting (oil painting) a copy of Rapheal's famous triangular composed painting of Mary, the baby Jesus, and the baby John the Baptist. It's a really, really, really great painting, and in every art history textbook. The painting is like maybe one of the top ten paintings in human history!!

Below is an image of the painting I copied, and then a movie of the finger painting.

More Finger Painting!!

Another finger painting made from a painting by Guido Reni done around 1635 (at the Kunsthistorische Museum). This one took almost 3 hours to complete. While I was sitting there painting the painting at least a dozen people sat down to rest on the gallery couch next to me. Each one of them would grown a sigh of relaxation as they sat. It's hard work touring a museum!

An angel visits St. Jerome who has dedicated himself to translating the bible. The angel gives him inspiration, and probably encouragement. After all he is living in a cave, eating godknowswhat roots and berries. A very lovely angel, I'm sure St. Jerome was absolutely shocked and delighted by her presence.

I didn't do the whole painting, so the body to the right is poor old St. Jerome's. He's awful skinny, but the painter couldn't help but define his shape by painting the musculature. So Jerome is actually kind of fit for an old long bearded ascetic living in a cave. The red cape set against the blue sky, green hills and white angel, all in a dark green/grey cave makes a beautiful color composition. Those italians sure knew how to use color. Below is the video-drawing.

Spring on a Really Nice Table

I went to the Liechtenstein Museum in Wien today. It is Prince von Liechtenstein's old palace, which is now open to the public to show off his collection of paintings, sculpture and furniture. Actually the princely family lives on.... there was a black and white photo of the prince and his wife (looks like a 1980's photo) together on a sign rambling on about the palace and the collection and how the prince and his wife were so pleased to give their old palace over to the city of Wien as a museum. Very nice palace, very nice art collection - all old stuff, like Rubens, 18th century art mostly, lots of baroque.

I did a drawing on my iTouch (electronic finger painting) of a girl with flowers from a beautiful wood veneer inlaid table. I thought this girl would be the right thing for the season.

Below is a 'video' of the drawing being drawn.

Another iTouch drawing/video of a real Tulip, not found in any museum but instead at home.

SPRING SPRUNG SPRANG

Yahoooo! Spring is here. It was in the mid sixties today (~17C), and the sun was out. What a difference the warmth (relative) and sun make. I really like the milder weather.

Sabine went running on her lunch break yesterday. Her work is close to the Donau river far away from civilization in amoungst the woods, fields and wetlands. She saw whole fields covered entirely with sprouting little "Schneeglockchen". Today we bought one at the Naschmarkt. I drew the little bunch sitting on our kitchen window sill.

My work is going pretty good. They like my messed up deutsch, and whatever negative things the Europeans might say about Americans, they are pretty curious about me and more than willing to give me a fair chance. In fact, at work, they listen too me more here they ever did in America. I think they are waiting to learn something new from me. I might even be able to deliver on that.

Parkour Pascal (again)

I really don't know where he's getting this from, except for showing him a couple of youtube videos, Pascal has barely seen Parkour. I threw in a couple clips showing the typical Parkour moves Pascal is imitating. Maybe Parkour is just a natural movement kids are inclined to do?

Winter Progress

I started working again beginning February 1. Up until this time I've kept up on my gymnastics with plenty of rest during the day. I gotta keep it going even if I'm tired from work. Here is a small sample of where my parallel bar skills are at. Could definately get crisper (stick the handstands will you!), and I need a dismount (which I'm afraid of).... but it's slowly getting there.

Melk: whoa, now that's a Catholic church!

I'm not a religious person at all, and I don't pretend to know much about the Catholic church, but here in Austria you see a whole lot from Catholic culture. We drove to Melk, a Benedict monestary. The church was in a word: stupendous. So much gold, so many serpent tailed figures painted on the ceiling, so many pictures of Jesus getting pummeled on his way to the cross, and strangest of all the reliquaries: splinters of the cross, a jaw bone (with one tooth still in it!) of a saint, a skeleton (real of not?) half clothed resting in a glass vitrene in a church apse. All of it displayed in the most ornate golden frame. The opposition of jewels, gold, fine design and beautifully colored paintings, with the basic guts and gore of a finger bone, or the macabre details of Jesus's torture just leave me kind of dumb founded. I have a hard time holding the two together in my head without either laughing at the frivolity of all the golden snorchels compared to the frightening immediacy of a jaw bone, or despising that dirty little half rotten finger bone resting in such a finely crafted ornate golden box. A weird opposition. I know the way I feel about is not at all how the monks or artists felt about it. So how exactly did they experience/feel these objects? Beats me.

Bubbles right in front of our door!

A Car! A Car! A Car!

We got a new car today. Whoopie! A Renault Kangoo, funny name. I think we'll name it "Bubbles" because the seat upholstery sports a circle design. It's parked right in front of our house today - I can see it from our front window. There are two garage doors in front of our building but only one is used for cars, so most people think they can't park in front of the second garage door, but they can. Let's keep that a secret, o.k.?

For now we'll have to do with a stock photo of the Renault Kangoo. Pictures of our actual Kangoo, Bubbles will surely show up soon.

Goethe's Poem

So I came across this poem from Goethe - he's like the German's Shakespeare but he is more philosophical and less flowery maybe than Bill. The poem is about teachers and students, and more generally the futility of certainty, and the persistence of change. I guess the poem was especially relevant after talking to Tessa about her English teacher, and how he wants the students to "get" his ideas about the story they are reading, and if the student's move the idea off his line of thinking he cuts them off, and steers the discussion back onto his line of thinking.

Here is Goethe's poem in german:

"Was Gutes zu denken, waere gut,

faend sich nur immer das gleiche Blut;

Dein Gutgedachtes in fremden Adern,

Wird so gleich mit dir selber hadern.

Ich waere noch gern ein taetig Mann,

Will aber ruhn;

Denn ich soll ja noch immer tun,

Was immer ungern ich getan.

Truege gern noch laenger des Lehrers Buerden,

Wenn Schueler nur nicht gleich Lehrer wuerden."

The first stanza says, "It is good to think of something Good, if only it was taken or understood by someone like you - of the same Blood. Because, when your Good thoughts are in someone else's Blood, they (your Good thought, or the other's interpretation of that Good thought) are likely to turn on you to quarrel."

The second stanza: "I'd gladly be a committed, active Man, but instead I only want Quiet. Because I will always have to do, all those things that I always hate to do." The last line is pretty funny the way it is written in German, "Was immer ungern ich getan" or "What always unhappily I did."

Last stanza: "I'd gladly carry the Teacher's burden (of communicating/teaching those Good thoughts), if only the Students wouldn't so quickly grow-up and become the Teachers of a new batch of Students."

So, to me, the Teacher wishes his Good ideas could find their way into the Student's brain, without any change, without any re-interpretation, without resistance. But his Good ideas are rejected by his Students, they don't praise the Teacher's hard fought wisdom, they instead quarrel with him, tell him his Good ideas are not so perfect after all.

To the Teacher this is naturally disappointing, all that effort to achieve those Good ideas, and the Students reject them. The Teacher would, however, continue to fight for his Good thoughts, to explain again, to find a way to get his Students to Understand, if it weren't for the completely unsettling fact that not only will his Students always quarrel with him, but that those Students will become Teachers themselves and teach not his Good idea's but the transformed idea they won from the Teacher. The final nail in this coffin is then that these new Teachers with their transformed ideas find the same resistance again in their new batch of Students.

The wheel turns.... nothing stays the same... no idea is 'The' idea, no matter how hard fought and 'right' that idea might be. Funny actually.

Blue Matisse

Finished a copy of a Matisse still-life/landscape (~3x4.5 ft). It was fun, and I would have never had the guts to use that much blue! I replaced his objects with mine. So, the moroccan figure hidden in the wall far left becomes Pascal's favorite stuffed dragon (I love how the composition includes the figure in the same plane as the other objects, yet at the same time the figure is 'excluded' by being embedded in the plane of the wall - is the figure there or not?), the flowers become my flowers from another painting, the African head becomes my sculpture of Ani, the Lamp becomes a jar of paint brushes together with a sand dollar, and Matisse's plate becomes a plate with my shells, which I have painted before. My version could have been painted a little bit looser, but then it's kind of hard to paint that way when you are copying. Anyways now we have a pseudo-Matisse in our living room, and I learned a lot about his painting style.

BTW although 'blue' is usually associated with a down mood, in this case blue seems to work more like the sky or ocean, giving a calm reflective feeling.

iPad aus Papier

Ya Richtig. I had one before they made one! It's about 5 euros, fits in your pocket, the pages are touch sensitive (you rub the page with a iPen or iPencil or iMydirtyfinger). It needs absolutely no battery. It accepts text inputs. You can flip through the 'pages' by swiping your finger from left to right, or from right to left. Totally intuitive interface.

An ink drawing of the Marie Theresa statue in front of the Kunsthistorische Museum, and a figure from a painting in the Kunsthistorische Museum (loved the hand pointing upwards to God, and how the shadow casts over the upper arm and torso).

Actually I'd love to have an iTouch and make electronic finger paintings (or even an iPad for the sake of its larger screen). See here for drawing examples. But for the meantime, my paper iPad does pretty good.

Piraten

Arrrrgh..... giants of the mighty sea!!!

Anika and Pascal got their costumes for Fasching (this Friday). They decided on pirates. Pascal wore his costume for two days straight.

Winter

A view out our window. It's cold and snowing here and there. I had the guy walking without a dog, but it looked too down. Adding the dog cheers it up a little - they really do walk their dogs all over and all the time. There's even a special icon on the U-bahn ticket machine for dogs (yes dogs pay, but they're half price).

My Children Should be in a Museum - They're Priceless!!

Around Town

Pictures from around town. It snowed again. The kids played in the snow in front of the Kunsthistorische Museum. They 'skated' on a puddle of ice. Ani tried on my glasses. We found a walrus and a sun bear in the Naturhistorische Museum. I light my hand on fire. Isn't vacation nice?

Baroque Family

Tessa and Grandma were here for Christmas. We all had loads of fun. At the Belvedere we found some statues representing the different months of the year. So.... it was natural to pose before your birth month. In age descending order: Grandma tending the harvest, me praying (What??), Sabine loading her rifle (Jeez), Tessa having a merry time playing the flute, Anika loading her rifle (I'm scared now), and Pascal having a merry time with her month-mate Tessa.

Boys and their Toys

Pascal got a pirate ship for Christmas. It was something he really, really wanted for a long time: "Ich habe so lange darauf gewartet" sagt Pascal. The pirate ship is pretty neat, and is lots of fun to play with, even for bigger boys like me. We went to the old Bibliotech Saturday, and there above us on the ceiling mural was a picture of a man with a model ship. It reminded me of Pascal's ship. Boys and their toys, right? Many things never change.