They also keep a horned cow
as proud as any queen;
But music turns her head like ale,
And makes her wave her tufted tail
and dance upon the green.
J. R. Tolkien
Still Life with Brushes, Shell and Star Fish, 1972
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was one of the leading painters of the Pop Art movement. During the 1960s he translated banal advertisements and adventure comic strips into large-scale paintings, using bright, flat colors and hard-edge, precise drawing. Benday dots, integral to the photo-mechanical printing process, are exaggerated to the point of becoming design elements in the art.
Still Life with Brushes, Shell and Star Fish belongs to a series of paintings by Lichtenstein that investigates the styles and subjects of art history. In this painting, Lichtenstein defies our expectations for the still life by rendering it in the visual language of the comic strip. He reminds us that the process of mechanical reproduction reduces all works of art to simple arrangements of dots. …
"What interests me is to paint the kind of anti-sensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward — neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself."
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them,
and pretty soon you have a dozen.” — John Steinbeck
"But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness. The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head ... The harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart from the intense midsummer relationship that brought it on." - Robert Finch
Hatteras Calling
by Conrad Aiken
Southeast, and storm, and every weathervane
shivers and moans upon its dripping in,
ragged on chimneys the cloud whips, the rain
howls at the flues and windows to get in,
the golden rooster claps his golden wings
and from the Baptist Chapel shrieks on more,
the golden arrow into the southeast sings
and hears on the roof the Atlantic Ocean roar.
Waves among wires, sea scudding over poles,
down every alley the magnificence of rain,
dead gutters live once more, the deep manholes
hollo in triumph a passage to the main.
Umbrellas, and in the Gardens one old man
hurries away along a dancing path,
listens to music on a watering-can
observes among the tulips the sudden wrath,
pale willows thrashing to the needled lake,
and dinghies filled with water; while the sky
smashes the lilacs, swoops to shake and break,
till shattered branches shriek and railings cry.
Speak, Hatteras, your language of the sea:
scour with kelp and spindrift the stale street:
that man in terror may learn once more to be
child of that hour when rock and ocean meet.
“How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason,
Reason none,
If what parts, can so remain.”
― William Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle
“Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.”
— Wayne Thiebaud
Still Life with Open Book, 1990 – Janet Fish
“Accept what life offers you and try to drink from every cup.
All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped,
but with others, drink the whole bottle.” ―Paulo Coelho
“Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.” — Jalal al-Din Rumi
Maverick Mist 