Sunny Sunday Afternoon Walkabout

Don Mangus, Child's Chalk Drawing I, i-Phone photo, 2016

Don Mangus, Child's Chalk Drawing II, i-Phone photo, 2016

Recognizing Workplace Bullies For What They Are Is the First Step --

Workplace Bullying is toxic, and all too common...

Remember, the truth is in most cases the targets are:

Giorgio Morandi: Master of Quiet Landscapes

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Giorgio Morandi

Devotional and tranquil, the art of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) celebrates the virtues of patience, serenity, and modesty. Many of Morandi's still lifes, landscapes, and flowers are based on earlier compositions that he continually revisited, often across media (painting, watercolor, and etching). The artist had a repertoire of favorite themes that were reprised across the course of his career. His work is housed in some of Europe's most prestigious institutions, museums and private collections. The artist's heroic questing for purity have won him many fans -- in film, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Aldrich, and Luca Guadagnino -- in literature, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and Siri Hustvedt -- and in contemporary art, Lawrence Carroll, Tacita Dean, and Luc Tuymans.

Saudade

souˈdädə/

noun

1. a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament.

Frank R. Paul: Science Fiction Master

Frank R. Paul

Frank R. Paul

Frank R. Paul

Frank R. Paul

Frank R. Paul

Frank R. Paul

Frank R. Paul

Frank R. Paul

"One glance at a Paul illustration can change your life forever. I was eight years old when I laid eyes on an illustration he did for A. Hyatt Verrill story about a world of giant ants. It made me want to be a part of a world of imagination and within a few years I fell completely in love with science fiction -- all from this one illustration." -- Ray Bradbury

Truths

Currently Reading: Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Antifragile - Things That Gain From Disorder"

Aside from businessmen and investors, anyone who is uneasy with uncertainty, like anxiety disorder and OCD sufferers, can benefit from the profound insights of this book. You can learn to face uncertainty, It follows Nassim Nicholas Taleb's other great books, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. I highly recommend it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don't understand. 

The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. 

Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls "antifragile" is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. 

In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile,  Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call "efficient" not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the "Titanic" save lives? 

The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. 

Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. 

Praise for Antifragile:

"Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining."-- The Economist. "A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives."--Newsweek.  "Revelatory . . . Taleb pulls the reader along with the logic of a Socrates."--Chicago Tribune. "Startling . . . richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides . . . I will have to read it again. And again." -- Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal. "Trenchant and persuasive . . . Taleb's insatiable polymathic curiosity knows no bounds. . .  You finish the book feeling braver and uplifted."--New Statesman. "Antifragility isn't just sound economic and political doctrine. It's also the key to a good life."-- Fortune. "At once thought-provoking and brilliant."-- Los Angeles Times.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Changed my view of how the world works." -- Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate "[This] is the lesson of Taleb . . . and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable." -- Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point "[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne."--- The Wall Street Journal "The most prophetic voice of all . . . [Taleb is] a genuinely significant philosopher . . . someone who is able to change the way we view the structure of the world through the strength, originality and veracity of his ideas alone." --GQ.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures and Drawings

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti is, both because of the nature of his work and because of his close friendship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the artist most closely identified with the Existentialist movement. Part of his art-historical importance springs from his defence of figuration at a time when the advantage was with abstract art. He was born in October 1901 in Italian-speaking Switzerland and came from an artistic background -- his father, Giovanni, was a well known Post-Impressionist painter. Alberto was the eldest of four children and was always especially close to the brother nearest to him in age, Diego. From the beginning, he was interested in art:

As a child, what I most wanted to do was illustrate stories. The first drawing I remember was an illustration to a fairy-tale: Snow White in a tiny coffin, and the dwarfs.

He remembered his youth as being very happy; he also recalled his own arrogant self-confidence: 'I thought I could copy absolutely anything, and that I understood it better than anybody else.' This self-confidence began to waver in 1919:

Once in my father's studio, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I was drawing some pears which were on a table - at the usual still-life distance. But they kept getting smaller and smaller. I'd begin again, and they'd always go back to exactly the same size. My father got irritated and said: 'Now start doing them as they are, as you see them. And he corrected them to life-size. I tried to do them like that, but I couldn't help rubbing out; so I rubbed them out, and half an hour later my pears were exactly as small to the millimetre as the first ones.

His father allowed him a break from school in order to find himself, but instead of returning to school afterwards, Giacometti went to the School of Arts and Crafts in Geneva, where he studied with a member of Archipenko's circle. 

In May 1920 he went to Venice for the Biennale, where his father was an exhibitor, and discovered Tintoretto, who inspired him with a kind of euphoria. But on the way back he visited Padua, where he discovered Giotto in the Arena Chapel: 'The frescoes of Giotto gave me a crushing blow in the chest. I was suddenly aimless and lost, I felt deep pain and great sorrow."

He made two more visits to Italy in quick succession. During the second one, an old Dutchman whom he had agreed to accompany, and whom he in fact scarcely knew, was suddenly taken ill and died. His death made a great impression on the young Giacometti  -- he later said it was the reason why he had always lived provisionally, with as few possessions as possible:

Establishing yourself, furnishing a house, building up a comfortable existence, and having that menace hanging over your head all the time -- no, I prefer to live in hotels, cafés, just passing through.

In 1922 Giacometti went to Paris, to study under the sculptor Bourdelle at the Ecole de la Grande Chaumiére, and in 1925 he and his brother Diego set up an atelier together. In 1927 he had his first one-man exhibition, at a gallery in Zurich, and in the same year the brothers moved to the cramped studios in the rue Hippolyte-Maindron which they were to use for the rest of Alberto's life. 

In 1928 he exhibited two sculptures at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher. These not only sold immediately, but brought Giacometti into contact with the Paris avant-garde: in particular, he met Masson and the circle surrounding him. In 1929 he signed a contract with Pierre Loeb, then the Surrealists' preferred dealer, and this was followed by an invitation to join the Surrealist Group. His first one-man show took place in 1932, and set a fashion for Surrealist objects with symbolic or erotic overtones. Much of Giacometti's art at this time was influenced by primitive sculpture seen at the Musée de l'Homme -- an influence which was to persist even after he changed direction as an artist.

Like many avant-garde artists of the time, Giacometti found himself in a dilemma. His clientele was a fashionable one, and in addition he supplemented his income by making decorative objects, in collaboration with his brother Diego, for the leading decorator Jean-Michel Frank; but he was keenly aware of the class struggle in France and sympathized with the underdogs. Louis Aragon, the member of the Surrealist Group with whom he felt the closest bond of sympathy, reacted to the same tensions by becoming a committed Communist. Giacometti moved in a different direction: he gradually separated himself from the Surrealists and returned (a great heresy) to working from the model -- he began with a series of portrait busts of Diego. Breton did not like this development and Giacometti was tricked into attending what turned out to be a Surrealist tribunal. Before the proceedings could be fully started, he said, 'Don't bother. I'm going,' and turned his back and walked out. There was no public excommunication, but his friends in the movement deserted him.

In the late 1930s his career was repeatedly interrupted -- first by an accident when a car ran over his foot, then by the outbreak of war. In 1941, in wartime Paris, he made very important new friendships, with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. But as the Occupation tightened its grip, he moved to Switzerland, arriving in Geneva on the last day of 1941. He lived and worked in a small hotel room and supported himself by making furniture and doing interior decoration work passed on to him by his brother Bruno, who was an architect. While living in Geneva, he met Annette Arm, whom he later married.

An important development in Giacometti's work took place during the war years. In the period 1935-40 he had worked from the model, and had also made some paintings; he then began to make heads and standing figures from memory, but had an experience which paralleled his attempt in his late teens to draw the still life of pears in his father's studio:

To my terror the sculptures became smaller and smaller. Only when small were they like, and all the same these dimensions revolted me, and tirelessly I began again, only to end up, a few months later, at the same point.

When he packed up to leave Geneva, his total output while he was there fitted into half-a-dozen matchboxes. it was only when he returned to Paris after the war that he found himself able to make sculptures of more normal dimensions, but now they were tall and thin. He reoccupied his studio, which was still intact, and shortly afterwards he was rejoined by Annette. In January 1948 Giacometti's new work was exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York. The catalogue preface, written by Sartre, did much to propagate the idea that Giacometti's art was now one 'of existential reality'. 

From this point his post-war reputation as a sculptor (the paintings were neglected until the late 1950s) grew rapidly. He held his first European one-man show of the new work at the Kunsthalle in Basle in 1950, and his first Paris exhibition since the war at the Galerie Maeght in 1951. The year 1956 saw a further development in his work -- he was now seized with a desire to produce paintings which were recognizable likenesses. Each portrait required many sittings -- the business of sitting for Giacometti has been described in a lively book by James Lord, who stresses the artist's half-humorous despair at his continual inability to catch precisely what he wanted. 

Giacometti himself once said:

If I could make a sculpture or a painting (but I'm not sure I want to) in just the way I'd like to, they would have been made long since (but I am incapable of saying what I want). Oh, I see a marvellous and brilliant painting, but I didn't do it, nobody did it. I don't see my sculpture, I see blackness.

He was awarded the major prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale of 1962, and the award brought with it worldwide celebrity. He was philosophical about the penalties of fame:

I refused the intrusion of success and recognition as long as I could. But maybe the best way to obtain success is to run away from it. Anyway, since the Biennale it's been much harder to resist. I've refused a lot of exhibitions, but one can't go on refusing forever. That wouldn't make any sense.

Paul Cezanne: Watercolor Collection Books

Paul Cezanne

Cézanne’s watercolors exhibit not only kaleidoscopic arrays of translucent color but also very light graphite pencil lines that contrast strikingly with the soft watery touches of color. These drawn lines have been largely overlooked in previous studies of Cézanne’s watercolors.

 

In this ravishing book, Matthew Simms argues that it was the dialogue between drawing and painting—the movement between the pencil and the paintbrush—that attracted Cézanne to watercolor. Watercolor allowed Cézanne to express what he termed his “sensations” in two distinct modes that become a record of his shifting and spontaneous responses to his subject. Combining close visual analysis and examination of historical context, Simms focuses on the counterpoint of drawing and color in Cézanne’s watercolors over the course of his career and as viewed in relation to his oil paintings. More than a tool for sketching or preparing for oil paintings, Simms contends, watercolor was a unique means of expression in its own right that allowed Cézanne to combine in one place the two otherwise opposed mediums of drawing and painting.

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

In the last years of his life Paul Cézanne produced a stunning series of watercolors, many of them still lifes. Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these late masterpieces that is now in the collection of the Getty Museum. 

In Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong places this great painting within the context of Cézanne’s artistic and psychological development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still life—like the medium of watercolor—was traditionally considered to be “low” in the hierarchy of French academic paintings. Cézanne chose to ignore this hierarchy, creating monumental still-life watercolors that contained echoes of grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin—the “highest” of classical art forms. In so doing he charged his still lifes with new meanings, both in terms of his own notoriously difficult personality and in the way he used the genre to explore the very process of looking at, and creating, art. 

Carol Armstrong’s study is a fascinating exploration of the brilliant watercolor paintings that brought Cézanne’s career to a complex, and triumphant, conclusion. The book includes new photographic studies of the Getty’s painting that allow the reader to encounter this great watercolor as never before, in all of its richness and detail.

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne