beginning the 57th year

Let him eat cake!  Some to the fun things we did for my birthday week celebration...

57th Birthday portrait prior to eating the amazing chocolate sunflower cake. Clearly a winner in my book!  

This week after a fun day with Keith at the Bread Line for lunch and a visit to the excellent 40 Under 40 show (link to slide show of the artworks) of young crafts artists at the Renwick Smithsonian American Crafts Museum we had a quiet evening at home we ate birthday cake and watched the funny & sad movie Beginners which tells the story of a 75 year old man coming out and his son's romance with a lovely French actress. It was funny and had a great role for the little Jack Russell Terrier. Christopher Plummer (82 years old) won his first Oscar for the role of the gay father this year which is one reason I wanted to see this film.

I received, just what I wanted, from my guy, a beautiful copy of the exhibition catalog from Vincent Van Gogh The Drawings, at the Metropolitan Museum of art up in NYC that I saw a number of years ago. It's a great collection of his works on paper and a few paintings to show how he sketched his finished works in letters to show his supporter Theo, other artists and his family what he was creating. It also has some great reproductions of his formal reed pen and ink drawings which are very detailed and very accomplished works on paper. I used to draw with a reed pen but we don't have any bamboo growing in our pots in the garden any longer to cut flexible green reeds from. I need to go scouting to see if I can find some near by that I can cut and use to draw again.

Rose star quilt top over the curtain rod 

Light pouring through the quilt top looks like stained glass windows

 The next day we arrived in Manassas to celebrate with my Mom late in the afternoon. I wanted to photograph my Rose Star quilt top hanging over her bay window before it got too late and did that then we had to go eat lunch right away. I had seen other quilters paper pieced tops hanging in the sunlight and wanted a few of mine to show how much they look like stained glass windows. We later went to a Vietnamese restaurant for dinner. She had never had Vietnamese and we always liked the dishes at a restaurant that was closed up in Clarendon, Va. a few years back to make way for condos by the metro station. Closing of Cafe Dalat was a real loss to our list of restaurants we love. Pho in Manassas was OK but nothing to write home about the way Cafe Dalat once was.

Thursday we took off to Warrenton to find a bakery that made a delicious Lemon cake my sister Jenny sent mom for Valentines earlier this year. We enjoyed the ride through the country side and were also looking for lunch and some thrifty shopping at a number of shops Keith found on his google maps. Red Truck bakery was sold out of sandwiches at 2 PM when we arrived and wouldn't have any more until they opened the next day. They sent us to a little nature shop that was a complete time warp back to 1970's that served us up some delicious sandwiches way upstairs in an old house turned vitamin, herbs, books, massage and incense, etc. store. It happened to be right across the street from Salvation Army shop. I went back later for some red truck shaped and iced short bread cookies too attractive to pass up after going to the bakery so far from home.

Keith escorts Phyllis across the street to Salvation Army store in Warrenton

We didn't find anything thrifty to buy but we had a good time looking and seeing the old town of Warrenton before we headed home. Friday we went to Lowe's hardware for a bucket and found that they had several plants Keith and I wanted. Mom treated Keith to a red December blooming camellia called Yule Tide. We also found several big white clematis on the discount racks for $2.50 each a super bargain at exactly the right time of year to plant them for next year's flowering. Remember: first year sleeps, second year creeps, third year leaps is the rule for perennial vines.

Keith's red camellia is already planted as I am writing this post , that was fast.

white clematis x two 

New York Asters

 I spent some birthday money at Joann's Fabrics again to select gifts from Mom myself since she can't get out and buy them alone. I picked out a rotary cutter and blades and a few blue and white fabrics to go with the old sheets I found at thrift stores recently. I am dreaming of a Dresden plate design to mimic the antique one that she has which was made by her grand mother. I borrowed it and plan to make some adjustments to the design but I wanted it handy to guide my work in the coming weeks. I also got my backing & batting washed and shrunk up in the dryer at home because we don't have laundry in our apartment building.

Great grand mother's Dresden plate quilt 

These are some new & old blue and white fabrics for a new quilt project were a gift from Mom this year in addition to the bumpy off white bedspread I found at Salvation Army store Manassas. It reminds me of being a kid and napping on my parents bedspread just like this one.

I have to say it was a great week from beginning to end. Thanks too all my friends and family who sent best wishes on Facebook.

Vincent at NGA

 Today I went and looked at the National Gallery of Art's excellent web site and found some of the Vincent Van Gogh paintings and drawings in their collection. They have a free download of thousands of works in their collection to be shared and used by everyone. I thought it would be fun to post some of my favorites here.

Yesterday I posted one of Vincent's self portraits that I photographed a few years ago but it was out of focus. Now you can see what it really looks like here. Or go to the NGA website to see where these are in the collection and many other wonders of our national treasures. 

 Vincent loved drawing and painting people but he was so antisocial that he always had to pay his sitters for the privilege of doing his work. In this one of the "orphan old man" the guy lived in a home for old folks who had no family. This guy was deaf and mute I believe and did the modeling for Vincent in the Hague in Netherlands when he was trying to learn to draw figures.

His pen and landscape ink drawings are remarkable for all the tiny little spots and dots and dashes he drew with hours of repetition to indicate slight changes in texture, they were normally large drawings. The show I attended in NYC at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an amazing experience to see so many of them together. I would love to see that show again and again. It is still vivid memory seven years later. I may have have been influenced to use more brown ink after seeing that show in my daily sketches. Maybe I should go look for their great catalog they printed and buy it to study.

Finished Vincent!

I am so happy to say that I finished reading a big book today.  Vincent Van Gogh The Life. It was s an journey to experience all 850 pages, plus notes and appendix and some online stuff too. This book was a scholarly work with dozens of them working to make it happen and has really filled in all sorts of details about him and his life that we didn't know from his childhood to the miserable end. It was difficult at times because it held a mirror on to my own artistic and emotional disappointments and failures. So some evenings it was hard to keep reading because it was making me feel depressed but I was driven to find out what happened to him. All the way through each new phase was interesting because the story teller keeps pulling one along from one chapter to the next. In this the complete story the only thing missing was a cataloge raisonné of all his art works to illustrate his biography. They do have a good number of illustrations in black and white as well as full color. Now that the work is owned by so many different museums and collectors his work it's impossible due to copyrights but it would enhance the reading to see everything together with the stories. The one thing that is online and was used at the late stages of the writing is a complete collection and new translations of his & brother Theo letters which does have many images in the notes with the texts right there to click and reveal. I hope that is the future of writing to be able to do comprehensive illustration and illumination of all histories.

I watched Lust For Life  the Academy award winning movie from 1955 with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn based on a novel written by Irving Stone in the 1934. First time I saw it was when I was a kid in the 1960's on black and white TV. Back then I wished we had a color set then to see the full color of these exciting scenes and paintings. Recently I saw it again on TCM in full color and was a little disappointed in the story and the acting but the color and costumes and scenes were great. The second viewing was while I was waiting to get my hands on the book that was published late in 2011 after I saw the Authors of the new book on 60 Minutes describing their new theory about his death. It is really moving the whole story is really quite amazing. My view of Paul Gauguin is greatly diminished by the stories of his egotism and antics to get Theo to support him and sell his paintings while using Vincent as a pawn and hurting him emotionally a great deal. But to be fair to Gauguin, Vincent was hoping to use him to further his career too, it just happens Gauguin was the stronger more powerful and successful of the two at that time.

Paul Gauguin's portrait of Vincent in the Arles Yellow House where he mocked the size of his manhood with that little thumb in the palette and discredited his love of "copying" nature...

In the end, it was all a good read and cleared up some mysteries in my mind about Vincent Vangogh, his skills, mental problems and challenges. He was a pitiful tormented man living in a time that didn't know what to do about his eccentric behavior  except reject and mock him. Eventually he got treatment for his underlying disorder psychomotor epilepsy and syphilis which are both treatable today. Vincent remains the ultimate outsider, he is a hero in so many ways but his over judgmental times family and cultures made him so doubtful of his visions and accomplishments. This so much undermined his self image in the last months of his life he couldn't really believe the critics finally found him to be a genius and a leader of the post impressionist movement. He sold one painting right near the end and got a number of very influential  reviews and articles on his work published. He was on the verge of getting the financial rewards he hoped for his entire life when the accident with the gun ended it all. One thing I would like to know more about is the story from there to here. Who besides his brother picked up the torch and brought him to the top of the art collector's market? Theo only lived a six months beyond Vincent and died raving mad in an asylum crazy with syphilis but he was determined to see Vincent remembered and his work survive. His nephew named for his uncle Vincent Van Gogh helped but I wish the book told us more about how these paintings became so influential in the modern art era. 

self portrait in the NGA collection

 my morning sketch of sunflowers and calla lily 

my sketch of sunflowers in ceramic vase 

I was inspired by Vincent's fearless manic work ethic that he kept trying over and over to get the images he wanted in spite of his poor skills and he defended his mission to keep practicing until he reached his goals. He was very stubborn, he created a huge volume of work in spite of all sorts of hardships. His depressions often ended in manic recoveries where he worked so fast other painters mocked him for the aggressive way he used the brush to put paint on the canvas. I do not have as many problems as Vincent but health and income are always worries but he is a beacon of inspiration to get busy no matter what; proving showing up at the blank page is always a good idea often rewarded with nothing more than knowing you accomplished something of your own today.