Summer Reading
But this is about biographies - a huge thank you! Since girlhood I seem to reach for biographical reading whenever I am "in a brown study" over things, wanting a job or project, grieving, sluggish for emotional or physical reasons, in flux and lost. Somehow Biographies do the trick, when I must be still, my heroes swashbuckle for me ... (more)
Update from last July -
This summer sizzles and scintillates and " ... easy, breezy..." is a keyword for me, so as not to get overheated!
A huge stall and hiatus in things has passed and progress in business and personal life abound! A few years ago, they said "wheelchair" and "end of things" and it's been exactly the opposite, with a bit of application. Praise for all who helped and have been patient and fun!
Summer reading this summer? White papers to support and update the work during the week, and almost-forgotten romances for weekends - especially those that respond to the growing number of later-in-life romances !
The largest-growing age group is those over 100 years old ! Creative? Dreaming of better than ever artwork keeps me in prayerful thank yous at the easel. And making my own stories of the new options and possibilities is fun for me this summer - making notes . I will be sure to include the biographies of others who are doing neat things for the world and for themselves later in life. Yes.
At "upper midlife" one gets out early and late and avoids the noonday sun when heat advisories go up , so that leaves time for books and notes and writings WHILE being senior-smart.
What are you reading this summer? Comment below and be confident that your ideas will be respected. The feedback is always a vitamin.
elle
Last year's Summer Reading ( July 13, 2017 ) entry follows here:
July and we may duck indoors to escape heat, it's plenty of outdoors time, at the pool, lake or beach or breezing about for business or pleasure! We are happy escapees from winter's confinements in America's Northeast Connecticut - two blizzards this year! More; a fix on both feet found me wildly bursting OUT OUT OUT, when the weather and the feets finally allowed.
Thanks to technology, wait times en route are never boring - audiobook and kindles on my ipad iphone let me engage with my summer reading choices: Some white papers, learning and technology for workdays/workhours; some religious , some women's things, and health and diet things, and stories - fact and fiction, they make the time fly and fill the spirit.
But this is about biographies - a huge thank you! Since girlhood I seem to reach for biographical reading whenever I am "in a brown study" over things, wanting a job or project, grieving, sluggish for emotional or physical reasons, in flux and lost. Somehow Biographies do the trick, when I must be still, my heroes swashbuckle for me - reading of the challenges and triumphs of the subject, I am entertained, informed and almost always inspired before long,...even empowered from within ... to get up and get at it once more, with new insights and inspirations.
As a girl, Lives of Women in Holiness, Red Cross, Nursing, Medicine and Arts of all sorts seemed to find the top of my list. Achievers of either gender in patriotism and science and wonderful inventions and business really lit me up, and still do!
This Summer?
- Woman Transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller - do not always approve, but am impressed. -- Innovators of the new Millennium - just finished one about Elon Musk and was just plain thrilled - did you know you can get a used Tesla for under 50 thousand USD? wow! I was hurt in the spine and thought I'd never drive again, so I sold the car to pay the medical bills a bit.....then of all things - I healed! instead of a wheelchair, it was the Manchester Road Race / Walkers. Instead of death, life and plenty of it back at my work including one that went to the White House.
- For the Fourth of July, "John Adams" and his famous lady Abigail
The list goes on Elizabeth Vigée LeBrun and her important portraiture and much more. Czeslaw Miłosc. the Polish poet, Elie Weisel, and last summer, Edna Gladney. Somehow reading biography really helps me because it focuses like other media do not and so the results are better. My Nancy Drew Collection, while not exactly biography to some folk , is very real to me and her immortal fans of her immortal , never changing , ever evolving self.
What are YOU reading this summer? I am not being silly, I am interested in your comments about it: where does summer reading take you???
Labor Day 1953
True Labor Day Story
Note: featuring the happy stories about Mother for the next few days - this is her week - she passed in her sleep before Monday morning12/11/17, at just shy of 92....she is free to be our angel always. I love you, Mother!
Life was very very good for the Smith Clan of Fairfield after WWII - all the sons who served, home and decorated for their heroism for Army Engineers in the Battle of the Bulge, Army Communications, Marines, Army Infantry, Army MPs, and our Dad Pioneer Army Air Corps "Smitty the Flight Mechanic" . All home and married to their sweethearts who served on the home front and all grateful and joyfully working at grand new jobs and raising families.
Photoshop needed here - but it's Father's fun with new camera day and all three of us with Mother at one time. Rare to get us all to stand still together that long.
Exuberant Gram and Gramps so proud and nearing their 50th wedding anniversary, and fit for it, joined the annual Labor Day Picnic - a patriotic work song celebration - and this year it was at Auntie Em's big homestead, to save Gram the work for a change at their "Little White House".
Mother was tall and lovely and expecting her third child very soon and fidgeted that morning, wondering if it was wise to join seven Irish sons and a daughter and their respective families at the blowout event of the year. She had experienced a false labor, a trip to hospital to deliver, but home again, and NOT deflated enough - so it could be any time now. But the All-American Smith Family day found her doing her part with the women, setting up the table and presenting the feast, as the men talked over their game of horseshoes and the children helped with chores and played running and swinging games at the fine large place under the trees and in the field with the sheep and one good donkey.
NOT without caprice, Mother thought it might help things along to overdo the watermelon-eating and did. Sure enough ! The second trip the hospital soon followed, and blushing, back to face the crowd at the picnic in an hour, from a second false labor. Father and the others making jokes about my Mother's desire to "go have this baby" on Labor Day made for a LOT of extra fun that day, for everyone but our Mother and the baby!
But she was NOT wrong to feel like getting things going - when our sister Lori was born on September 18th, she was not fat, but a very long baby weighing in at 9 pounds 3 ounces! No wonder she felt it MIGHT be time! Third millennium medicine would have been able to image it out and let Mother deliver earlier, but back then, no. And...Since Lori soon developed normally in size, it WAS surely just a long pregnancy resulting in high birth weight. This one remains a family favorite LORISTORY , all these years later! Hope you enjoyed it!
And always a quick prayer and a wish that all who ARE in labor on this American Labor Day, enjoy a celebration of life of it all - today and always!
Art in America - a Timeline
ART IN AMERICA ~ HISTORICAL OUTLINE and a MYSTERY
I posted this timeline in 2003 at my first site. It made a good thing to share and handy reference for me. But in the loss of things from the old site hacking, is the loss of the SOURCE of this neat post. In trying to find it, I found ten newer ones but none so simple, elegant and easy to USE. Will continue the source search and will add a few links to other good sources. Thanksomuch - Elle
ART IN AMERICA - A TIMELINE
March 2, 2016 SketchcrawlHartfordConnecticut USA 8-15 esf
SketchcrawlHartfordConnecticut USA 8-15 esf
ART IN AMERICA ~ HISTORICAL OUTLINE and a MYSTERY
I posted this timeline in 2003 at my first site. It made a good thing to share and handy reference for me.
But in the loss of things from the old site hacking, is the loss of the SOURCE of this neat post.
In trying to find it, I found ten newer ones but none so simple, elegant and easy to USE.
Will continue the source search and will add a few links to other good sources. Thanksomuch - Elle
Art in America of course begins with Indigenous Art - long before the 1600s, the land now called America 1000 BCE or Early Ancient Period already shares pottery and leather crafed goods, and it goes on from there - I am sharing this resource for a great overview I found, for you and for my own updates and reference. http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/ancient-art/american-indian.htm
Colonial Period: 1607-1788
With survival uppermost in the minds of our earliest settlers, the arts were slow to take root, but there are always crafted items for practical use, made from materials in the New World - I think they sold well “back across the pond” immediately . The earliest painting, primarily portraiture, was accomplished by untrained artists called limners, whose main task was to record the likenesses of the stalwart colonials.
The first artwork was, naturally, derivative and found its inspiration primarily through imported prints that reflected styles then prevalent in England, Holland, and Spain. Many artist/artisans divided their time between attempts at fine art and designing utilitarian objects, such as signs and carriage decoration. Our first glimmerings of serious sculpture, for instance, were done by gravestone carvers.
The earliest trained painter to come to the colonies was John Smibert, whose hefty portrayals of landed gentry and merchants derive in style from the seventeenth-century Dutch realists. Our first native geniuses of the brush, Benjamin West of Philadelphia and John Singleton Copley of Boston, found it necessary to leave the colonies in order to fulfill their artistic visions, although Copley's highly illusionistic colonial work surely remains a monument to American ingenuity. West eventually became painter to King George III and opened his London studio to a continuous stream of emerging American artists.
Early Republic to 1812: 1789-1812
A new nation, the United States of America, continued its reliance on Old World artistic traditions, especially with few opportunities for training in this country. American artists John Vanderlyn, Washington Allston, John Trumbull, and others sought instruction in London (under our own Benjamin West) and in Paris but also sojourned in Italy, where they absorbed that country's rich classical style and subject matter.
Upon their return, these artists and enlightened American citizens recognized the need for creating institutions where artists could be trained and where art could be exhibited. Trumbull was instrumental in the running of the New York Academy of the Fine Arts (founded 1802), with its imported casts of antique sculpture, which offered a definite teaching tool to eager students. Boston followed suit with a cast collection located at the Athenaeum (founded 1804) and exhibitions that began in 1827. Charles Willson Peale was a pioneer in creating Philadelphia's art circle, establishing the first art gallery in 1782 and the first American museum in 1786.
An awareness of our history inspired the nation's leaders to recognize the need to capture images of leaders in significant portraits by Peale, Gilbert Stuart, Samuel F.B. Morse, and others, but history painting itself made little headway until later in the 1800s. When sculpture was needed for the neoclassically-inspired government buildings in Washington, D.C., Italian sculptors were hired to embellish them. Home grown sculpture, however, always flourished due to its ties to functional objects such as gravestones, ship's mastheads, and practical decorations.
The first glimmerings of landscape painting surfaced at this time, thanks to trained artists who came from abroad (for example, Robert Salmon), who concentrated mostly on recording the emerging cities, harbors, picturesque places, and native inhabitants of a new world. The unique talents of John James Audubon elevated the recording of America's flora and fauna to unprecedented artistic levels.
Jacksonian Era through Civil War: 1812-1865
With the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, an era of democratization and equality swept America and with it a period of vast expansion of creativity in the arts. Landscape artists Thomas Doughty, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Church, and George Inness strove to document the untouched look of the "new Eden," blending their individual styles with the Old World romantic traditions of the sublime and the beautiful. It was the American landscapists who first captured the symbolic features of the new nation. Instead of ancient ruins, these painters found history in spectacular land and water formations and, especially, in the inclusion of Native Americans within their scenes. Unleashed waterfalls, soaring eagles, and other emblems of liberty came to represent the country's image.
A narrative or genre tradition of depicting everyday experiences began in the Jacksonian era when artists like John Quidor matched imagery to Washington Irving's History of New York or when William Sidney Mount committed the rural life of Long Island to canvas or when Lilly Martin Spencer explored images of her own household. An expanded audience for landscape, genre, and another relatively new Jacksonian subject, the still life, came with the mid-century explosion of magazines, newspapers, and journals, and with prints produced from original artwork, distributed through organizations like the American Art Union. Lush beautiful still life paintings by Severin Roesen, John Francis, and others celebrated the American harvest, offering little indication of a major civil war on the horizon.
The 1820s and 1830s saw the first cluster of American sculptors working in Italy, where marble was readily available and trained artisans could carry their designs to fruition. By mid-century the colony, which also included painters, was larger than ever and included Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers, and Thomas Crawford.
Civil War to End of the 19th Century: 1866-1899
The 1860s brought to American landscape painting several options. Artists could concentrate on the tiny details of nature in close-up studies recommended by the American followers of Ruskin such as Aaron Draper Shattuck or William Trost Richards. They could expand their subjects to include highly dramatic views of the West, such as those portrayed by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, or scenes of the arctic by William Bradford and others. Or they could concentrate on quieter views that explored the full potential of light, a style known as luminism. Gradually the extreme detail of Ruskin's adherents and the dramatic subjects of late Hudson River landscape painters turned inward, capturing the spirit rather that the topography of America's natural views. Inness's conversion to Swedenborgianism, William Morris Hunt's adherence to Barbizon influences, Albert Pinkham Ryder's and Ralph Albert Blakelock's choice of dream-like subjects--all reflected the nation's somber mood at the end of a devastating internal war.
Beginning of 20th Century to World War II: 1900-1940<br><br>
The twentieth century has been one of continued emulation of European styles, exploitation of those styles into unique American trends, and, beginning in the 1950s, leadership in the contemporary art world. A group of Philadelphia journalist/artists later known as the Ash Can painters--Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn--began the century with a new brand of realism, their subjects drawn from the street life of New York, where they ultimately settled. The first decade also saw the initial glimmerings of European modernism in American art in the work of Alfred Maurer, Max Weber, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley-all members of the New York circle around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. A groundbreaking event was New York's 1913 Armory Show, where Americans saw in huge numbers the work of Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, and Duchamp.
Between the world wars, however, American art took a more conservative bent, echoing the nation's isolationist posture. Pride in our industrial architecture-skyscrapers, grain elevators, barns, machines-found a visual counterpart in the work of the American Precisionists Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler. Other realist movements between the wars were Studio Realism in the work of Kenneth Hayes Miller, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Eugene Speicher, Leon Kroll, and the Soyer brothers. American Scene painters Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper explored the sometimes lonely existence of town and rural living. Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood celebrated agrarian life and culture as no one had done before them. Social Realism flowered in the Depression era in the scenes of heavy labor, shopgirls, and the unemployed as shown in the work of William Gropper, Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, and, later, Jacob Lawrence, who, like many American artists, received his first incentive as an artist through the Federal government's Works Progress Administration (WPA), organized in 1935 for artists on relief.
Abstract art was kept alive in this country during the 1930s through groups like the American Abstract Artists association. A huge explosion within the American art world came in the 1940s and 1950s with Abstract Expressionism, a New York movement concerned with the process of painting itself. Painters Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, and sculptor David Smith were all pioneers in this new instinctual method of working.
A reaction to abstraction came with the precise geometric imagery of Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Richard Anuszkiewicz in painting and Donald Judd in sculpture. The 1960s brought Pop Art, suggesting in its title a celebration of the commercial world; practitioners were Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, George Segal, Roy Lichtenstein, among others. Sol LeWitt's conceptual art and Robert Smithson's earthworks also evolved in the 1960s, focusing on the idea and less so on the product, if one were produced at all.
The Post Modernist era has capitalized on the art movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Abstract Expressionism in all its manifestations, pure geometric styles, the art of the absurd--have all opened up a new artistic exploration of our world. The human body, long the basis for representation, has now been fragmented and super-analyzed from both within and without. Our gender roles in society have become grist for the artists' mill; private worlds have been exposed for all to see and imagine. Democratization is key to the understanding of the new art, whether created by the professional, the untutored, or other "outsider" artists. It is important today to understand how the viewer thinks and how people learn in order to form a more engaging dialogue among the artist, the onlooker, and the art itself. A healthy questioning of the past, quoting from it with skepticism at times, has also created an atmosphere out of which new art can develop for the future
In Art, writing, patriotic, American Art, ConnecticutTags Elle Smith Fagan, Patriotic Art, Patriot, Writing, Connecticut
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Charles Ethan Porter - Hartford Artist of the Black Elite
Charles Ethan Porter (c. 1847 – March 6, 1923) was born near Hartford, and, among other things, was a protege of Mark Twain, who raised the money to send Mr. Porter to Paris to refine the training of the talented Rockville, Connecticut , Black American native.
He is said to have painted in the Florentine style and always elegantly. His works are found in the leading collections of the world and spotlighted - top honors- in Black American Culture venues.
"Apples", by Charles Ethan Porter.
References to the work of a former neighbor in time and space.
Wikipedia's fine Biography of Charles Ethan Porter at this link - click, please.
Charles Ethan Porter (c. 1847 – March 6, 1923) was born near Hartford, and, among other things, was a protege of Mark Twain, who raised the money to send Mr. Porter to Paris to refine the training of the talented Rockville, Connecticut , Black American native.
He is said to have painted in the Florentine style and always elegantly. His works are found in the leading collections of the world and spotlighted - top honors- in Black American Culture venues.
At one time, his artwork was so much in demand he kept a studio on Fox Hill in Vernon, Connecticut AND one in Hartford.
All sources agree his work was later suppressed by racial discrimination, only to triumphantly re-emerge in these more correct times.
But many of his paintings remain hidden, from those old days, and then rediscovered by descendants.
The new day we enjoy today is making it possible for all to enjoy his fine work once more...... elle
Vernon Historical Society in Connecticut, USA keeps a veritable shrine to his work. The town is very proud of his beginnings there.
The State Historical Society and the Hartford Public Library and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford are also fine resources, online and off.
Links to Charles Ethan Porter art online...
much of it from our Connecticut Historical or the the Amazing Mr. Driskell of Black American Arts Elite. This one from the Arts Center named for the famed David C. Driskell, http://www.driskellcenter.umd.edu/index.php
Thomas Colville Fine Art, LLC http://www.thomascolville.com/index.cfm?pg=2&pgtitle=Inventory&m=a&k=281
Citizens of Color, 1863-1890: The Black Elite: The 'Talented ... Citizens of Color, 1863-1890: The "Talented Tenth". Charles Ethan Porter. Mounting racism certainly was a barrier that narrowed the ... http://www.hartford-hwp.com/HBHP/exhibit/05/3.html
More about the Elite and the Talented Tenth
I hope you will wish to Link to a Top Source for all things "Charles Ethan Porter" at the Vernon Connecticut Historical Society, located northeast of Hartford; we are apples and ice cream and once a Megapolis for Textiles.
Vernon's Fox Hill with its three-state view was Mr. Porter's home for part of his life.
Mr. Porter's archived writings include recommendation from Mark Twain, courtesy letters of introduction, and the Historical Society here has reverently Archived and shared his work and history.
Mr. Porter's work and life are favorite local school display projects.
Whatever your source, do look up his work - it is truly elegant and top-notch!
Charles Ethan Porter, noted Black American Painter