Medium: Pencils 2B, B, HB and 3H

Medium: Pencils B, 2B and 3H

Medium: Pencils HB and B

Medium: 2B Pencil

Sorry, had to do something with that single stroke "2-2-2 drawing" below...

Medium: Pencils 2B and B

The Van Gogh Mystery

Go here to read about what most likely really happened to bring about Vincent Van Gogh's death by gunshot.

It makes sense to me. I don't think he would have shot himself. It never did strike me as true.

Medium: 2B Pencil

Hey! This is this blog's two hundredth and twenty second drawing post!

That's 2-2-2!

And what does that mean?





The next celebration is 333! And if I make it to the number of the beast there will be no celebration and I'll make sure to have two drawings ready to bump it over!

Max Monday

Max Beckmann, Still Life with Candles

"Here again, black is the dominant color and sets the tragic mood. In contrast to the Cubists who would transform a woman with a guitar into a still life, Beckmann endows his still lifes with human qualities. The table here has become a stage and no shadows are allowed to obscure the austere integrity of the mysterious event. This simple still life, like Cezanne's Black Clock, is a memento mori: the two largest candles are fallen heroes, while the other two stand in mourning, guarding against the "dark black hole" of space and infinity behind them. Indeed, a year later he painted a similar composition on a larger scale and introduced a book - a script as it were - with the word "Eternity" on its title page." --Peter Selz

Max Beckmann, Still Life with Candles and Mirror

Medium: Soft oil base black pencil and 2B pencil

What's Wrong with Canada - in short sum

I remember one man in a group conversation who admitted that he voted for Pierre Trudeau back in the day simply because he thought he was cool. Heh.

Basically the same reason why many voted for that Kenyan-born liar down south.

I Don't Know

Since the satellite hasn't been getting used much at all, and it's typically dvds that get played here, it was cancelled; but one of the last things I caught while flipping channels was a double Richard Dreyfuss feature of Stand By Me and Jaws. I caught the latter half of Stand By Me while watching all of Jaws. While Stand By Me wasn't my favourite growing up, I liked it back then; I found it fascinating; it seemed to express something I couldn't articulate, while the ending sort of depressed me. And I still like the film, more than I did before.





It's intriguing, isn't it, how many popular films in the 80's were about father/son issues.

The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi, Field of Dreams, The Karate Kid, Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Stand By Me...(my mind is at a blank right now, so feel free to add any others in combox)

Even The Princess Bride is quite literally book-ended by the relationship of the grandfather and his grandson.

In all of them the father/son theme is quite different from the other, exploring different aspects, and different in the ways they go about it; some archetypal and dramatic, like the two latter Star Wars films, intimate and underplayed like in Field of Dreams. In The Karate Kid it's very subtle, almost invisible, but ultimately the film's unspoken backbone. In Ferris Bueller's Day Off it's more of an appendage near the end, but the film's most serious note. In Back to the Future the theme actually runs quite deep. The way the comedy suddenly lands one in the heart of the familial and its universal consequences is moving. When George McFly decks Biff, it has all the cathartic import of Darth Vader giving the Emperor the heave-ho.

And I think Stand By Me is about father/son issues sort of the way the ocean is about the water: there's a lot of other things in it, but don't overlook the water.

Oh, there's E.T. and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade...

But then there's also a kind of subset of films to this; films not necessarily about father/son issues but extensions of, and therefore connected to, them. Movies about men - this is going to sound lame - finding the man inside them, like Innerspace: about a daring man literally inside of an unadventurous man who makes him brave and courageous. Top Gun and Iron Eagle (which one is worse? LOL) I know there's others here too, but I can't think of them now...

It just seems to me this was the general current of popular (and maybe not so popular) 80's movies. Was the 80's taking revenge on the 70's and 60's?

Two Things

You may notice this caption on the sidebar:



I got it from Dymphna's Road. Thanks Dymphna's Road!

I recently watched the film The Tree of Wooden Clogs. It was made in the seventies, and I watched it in two parts on youtube. The film is around three hours - a decent length for a film. It could have been longer; I wouldn't have noticed.

I'm hesitant to say the film is "hypnotic" or "mesmerizing", for the superficial connotations of those words. But the film channels that aspect of cinema which is one of its most potent - that of rhythm.

It works on you like a solid wooden high-backed chair, putting your back straight; not luxuriously comfortable, but not discomforting either. The nimble quickness with which the labour of the land is carried out, the efforts that go into keeping a home sanitary (and warm), the proper way of slaughtering a pig, the poetics that go into growing early tomatoes: peasant life is by no means sentimentalized, not because the film has the ambition of realism, but because the film itself is speaking in the rhythms it chronicles.

And by the end, the film can also be said to be a protest. I don't know many films that can be called protests against injustice; I'm sure there are lots. But the "protest", the cry at the end of this film has absolutely no whiff of propaganda.

I really recommend watching it. (Again, it's in two parts.)

Update: third thing. I wrote a lame post several days back about using the word, "Catholicism". I didn't think of those who use the word as the very header of their blogs. My apologies to them. I wasn't thinking. I deleted the post, though I still think that when it's possible to use the words "Catholic Church", one shouldn't substitute "Catholicism" instead. And of course there are times when one can only use "Catholicism" and not anything else. I guess it doesn't matter.

Oh, and if anyone writes a blog and wants to delete a blog post, but doesn't like the fact that the post still remains on google reader after you delete it, the solution is simple: before deleting your post, go into your post to edit. Then delete all the words of the post in the box. Then publish your post again. It will now publish in google reader as a blank. Then you can delete it from your blog.

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"The cinema image, then, is basically observation of life's facts within time, organised according to the pattern of life itself, and observing its time laws. Observations are selective: we leave on film only what is justified as integral to the image. Not that the cinematic image can be divided and segmented against its time-nature, current time cannot be removed from it. The image becomes authentically cinematic when (amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time lives within it, even within each separate frame.

No 'dead' object - table, chair, glass - taken in a frame in isolation from everything else, can be presented as it were outside passing time, as if from the point of view of an absence of time.

You only have to by-pass this condition to make it possible to take over any number of properties from one of the neighbour arts. And with their help you can indeed make very effective films; only from the point of view of cinematic form these will be incompatible with the true development of the nature, essence and potential of cinema.

No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time. I therefore find particularly irritating the pretensions of modern 'poetic cinema', which involves breaking off contact with fact and with time realism, and makes for preciousness and affectation."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Max Monday

Max Beckmann, Riviera-Landschaft

Max Beckmann, Blick auf Vorstädte am Meer bei Marseille

Max Beckmann, Seascape with Agaves and Old Castle

Bloody Hell

I think we should excise all those passages from The Divine Comedy in which Dante violently condemns various bishops and clergy by name who were living and/or dead during his lifetime, because people are converted by beauty and those who are newly looking into the Faith will read such vitriolic ugliness and decide that they want nothing to do with the Catholic Church. After we excise those passages, we should then put Michael Voris in some kind of penitentiary - maybe headed by authors from the Patheos Club.

Medium: Pencils 2B and H

Garden Sprawl Friday

Appaloosa beans (dry beans). Bought one small pack from a seed company at a Vancouver seed sale. Will plant these ones that were shelled next year. It's about half of the harvest. The others weren't dried enough yet, so left them on the pants for now. Should probably pull up the plants. The outsides of the shells look terrible, but they're perfectly clean on the insides.





They filled up that bowl when they were all shelled.





They're on the oven trays for convenience, not because I put them in the oven. Obviously they dry faster when they're spread out and not on top of each other.

Next maybe I'll show chickpeas.

Art

Fr. Longenecker from Standing on my Head touches on some aspects of art in this poem, which I liked:

A Secret Language
By Fr. Dwight Longenecker


We wrestle with the mystery of words,
hammering from the vast inchoate
universe, the pointed spears and sharp swords
with which we marshal the inarticulate
chaos of the soul. With precision
we discuss, dissect and delineate;
then define and decide. Each decision
is set in stone—not open to debate.

But beneath the dogma something rebels.
We sense lost treasure buried in a field,
or secret meanings glimmering like jewels
in the dark caverns of the soul. They yield
their bright reward only to those who mine
with the pick and spade of symbol and sign.
In this underground struggle we soon learn:
only the work and liturgy of art
can unlock the secret language of the heart.

Section 13

Whiny Lawyerville

Lawyers of Fortune

Shakedown artists

Hucksters

Professional Complaining Class

Highly paid grievance-mongers

Complaining Left

Self-serving lawyers and ethnocrats

Tarkovsky Tuesday

"Who has not written about Raphael and his Sistine Madonna? The idea of man, who had attained at last his own personality in flesh and blood, who had discovered the world and God in himself and around him after centuries of worshipping the medieval Lord, on whom his gaze had been fixed so steadily as to sap his moral strength -- all of this is said to have found its perfect, coherent and ultimate embodiment in that canvas by the genius of Urbino. In a way, perhaps, it has. For the Virgin Mary, in the artist's representation is an ordinary citizen, whose psychological state as reflected in the canvas has its foundation in real life: she is fearful of the fate of her son, given for people in sacrifice. Even though it is in the name of their salvation, he himself is being surrendered in the fight against the temptation to defend him from them.

All of this is indeed vividly written into the picture -- from my point of view, too vividly, for the artist's thought is there for the reading: all too unambiguous and well-defined. One is irritated by the painter's sickly allegorical tendentiousness hanging over the form and overshadowing all the purely painterly qualities of the picture. The artist has concentrated his will on clarity of thought, on the intellectual concept of his work, and paid the price: the painting is flabby and insipid."

--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Medium: 2B Pencil and maybe another

Max Monday

View of Genoa - Max Beckmann

NachtGarten - Max Beckmann

Priests in the Pulpit

What's the grand global total of times in the last 43 years that a priest said in the homily, without preceding his words with any qualifier, something to the effect of: "The use of artificial contraception is a mortal sin. Mortal sin is an offense of grave matter committed with full knowledge and consent, and if a soul dies in it, that soul goes directly to hell after going to God." And then, of course, speaking of God's mercy and the creation of every soul for Heaven.

What, maybe a thousand? Maybe that's being generous?

You have to think, Padre, something like ninety whatever percent of the parish's couples are contracepting, and you spend your priesthood's homilies on the most profound articulations, and then you die - and oh, I didn't mention anything about artificial contraception being a mortal sin, not once; whoops.

Maybe you think it will be taken as stating the obvious in order to be controversial, or something. But the real reason is that you want your parishioners to like you.

And yeah, there's a ton of hypocritical hand-wringers on the web who would read the above words that run, "...and if a soul dies in it, that soul goes directly to hell after going to God." and say, "But that's not for us to decide! Who knows if a soul that practiced artificial contraception went to hell or not; we're not to be that soul's judge and blah blah blah..."

Yes, pantheist, yes; and that means that Pastors shouldn't pastor their flocks. Sin is not sin just because it makes a person miserable.