Accidental Activist

 An election year note: Accidental Activist or not, that's how it was.  I found myself doing much more than I ever thought I would - in brave ways - and am fine for it - and maybe finer than some for having done what I could, for seeing it as a human responsibility and acting on that consciousness. My Godmother made the room collapse in laughter the day she said I was a "female Forrest Gump" in that I just happened to be on the spot when some interesting things took place and I was compelled to help.  Great - but they left out the Apple Stock for me and emptied me, financially, in the Recession instead. Hmmmmm...

 It is clear that many say, with reason, that we have we lost sight of it all and been "do nothing"!       My team may be aging, and many think it is right to do nothing.  Sometimes it IS right to do nothing and let others lead.

But most of the time, we can do a thing - the right thing.

• All I had to do was nothing, and my late husband would have lost his health , college and his life twenty years sooner than he did.
• All I had to do was nothing, and our son would have died before he was quite one day old.  
• All I had to do was nothing, and our daughter would not have been born.  
• All I had to do was nothing,  and in civic response work,  and others would not be here, or failed the need to get going on a fine new path.
• All I had to do was nothing, and assorted groups and clubs for books , children and sports and design home and cuisine and health would not have happened at all.  
• All I had to do was nothing and I might have been killed.
• All I had to do was nothing, recently,  and there would have been no  SilverSneakers supports from our HMO , when mobility IS life always and truly, as we age.

Making this list helped me to act today.  Send me YOUR list - smile , because you may not have realized that you acted - and helped.

For my children:  it's not your fault - you didn't do it:   when I opted for all the good things, I was surrounded by good people, good schools , SAFE schools - 'dope' was a name for a buddy acting dumb - and there was plenty of prosperity to support me in the grand new things opening up in those days.   I skipped and sang down the street in safety and peace. When I was challenged, help was there, never an issue and soon happy days restored and the good things.

My poor children!  They knew the good things in early days and even much better.  But just as they reached adulthood, personal worldclass issues:  they have had to deal with every form of poverty , setbacks in the entire economy and violence - not only far away in a war- but on their streets and in their classrooms every day.  

And then, as if we were not dopey enough, they want to legalize narcotics?  Suicide for an entire nation is possible.   

Worse: our very happiness and prosperity and success CAUSED some of the issues we howl thru today from true abscence of malice and innocence.  Growing up in times of prosperity and love and freedom and plenty, our grownup children feel rudely awakened that things are not simply "automatically super"  -  and this happens every several generations, till things degenerate so badly that"wailing cries shake the very heavens" .  And then , compared to the suffering , taking up the tasks to recover the good days,  seems fairly easy.

There was a "Do Nothing Congress" , during Harry Truman's Administration, and others were called so, before and since .  And they were right.  They are saying so now.  But why blame congress, when it is we - the people they represent - who need to ACT. Our leaders are not feeling our support and our support is their life blood.

On the sunny side of serious recession, and there is plenty to cope with - Brexit, Terrorism and more - no safe place beyond our home and some do not even enjoy that much.   And all these issues won thru to us when we were financially impaired, and so, guilty of caving in to the pressures and going silent.

At the moment, all the other national leaders get to taunt us about our Failures.   

• Failure to use our amazing resources as we should
• Failure to get our money in order.
• Failure to law and order in order - to legislate at the federal level,  to disarm in the populated areas , arm our police with cams for evidence , and kevlar to save their lives and nonguns, so as not to KILL someone every time there is a "moment".   Shame to those who say it is not do-able. It MUST be do-able.  
• Failure to get public safety in order: for example, thousands die each year because no one will take up true updates to Occupant Safety and Escape Technology, for tall buildings and planes.  Architecture and Aeronautics are seriously remiss - they have cost lives in their failure act on this one issue. As is media for helping them suppress even commentary and calls for action.
• Failure to better define the Presidency and the rules for candidacy and election proceedings to reflext the times and needs. Right now, we idly watch how they can break every good rule and win, anyway.   

Yikes!

But, GOOD NEWS:  Americans are reeallly bad about Failure of any kind.

We think ourselves a winning entity.  Winning through does not just happen.  All we have to do is NOTHING. 

We have been oppressed by national misfortunes but that is over and we can restore the good. 

Act.

The Angels and the Bloomsday Soliloquy 2016

Page 7 of the hard cover original of this book , now in its 60th Commemorative Edition, where I found the best of Bloomsday! in 1963. Thanksomuch school chum!

What do they call it when you see the most beautiful thing!  It is a glimpse, out of context, perhaps, but you feel redeemed, renewed and more alive than before you met.   But the high turns to  horrified, when the entire image reveals itself!   OH!  And then, just as passionately  one is  "RE-redeemed", when insight and the angels come to help?  There must be a word for it.  Let me explain, and  ask me for clarity where it gets obscure:

Tomorrow is a literary holiday - more popular each year:  "Bloomsday" - honoring James Joyce and his hero, Mr. Bloom - June 16th , the Day after my parent's wedding anniversary.    So many beautiful things go unnoticed, but  Bloomsday is celebrated worldwide.    

I am not a terrible critic and I am very Irish, but James Joyce's most famous book is on my hate list.  I hide from it.  Then feel worthier for having won through it.  There is a story that explains:  

I first read the romantic  Molly Bloom's Soliloquy, the final passage of the book, as an excerpt in the iconic, "The Family of Man"   ( The show and book were the famous 1955 MOMA NY Photo installation )  used as a caption, to clarify a famous romantic  photo.  

Taken out of context it is brief and breathtaking in its strong , profound simple Beauty! 

"...and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes...." 

What more could there be?!! 

I swooned. I was just seventeen and it was just a bit before meeting my late husband, a fine Irish Prince, then and always.  English major or no, finding the thought/words for that upcoming "moment" needed help and this excerpt did it!    Soon, I would be able to finally say YES and I prayed to say it even half as right as the words in the caption:  I was in class, but  The passage made me want run and read the rest of "Ulysses" , immediately! 

Ever kind, loving and watchful, the good Sister saw that I wanted to read the whole book, and she gave me one of those looks:  super discrete , nun's eyes down, and catching mine sideways, wordless but definite, " you don't WANT the whole book yet...not just yet", nodding ever so sharp/subtly - no. 

So I skipped it!  

Thrilled to read the excerpt again and again;  I would swoon and soar and, soon after, as I prayed, the right words were there on the right day when I met the man of my dreams,  at the dance,  the one I'd seen in my mind's eye four years before.   It was HE!  ...looking back at me with the same expression!      He said , "Hi , let's dance! "  heaven!  But   afterward, when he said "let's go neck" , my holy romantic reply was NOT quite the one , but the quick stall,  "We need to talk."  :-)And   Inspired?  Sighhhh..no.  But we'd known one another five minutes...really!  He won thru it and liked me better for it and the talk was the Good Talk and full of promise and more.

I realized that my rejection at first,  only made the excerpt truer - since,  it wasn't SO long after, at my cue , he "asked again"  and  we were okay to say yes and the rest is no one's concern but "ourrown".

...and then we were busy and I FORGOT to READ THE BOOK.... and got away without reading it for thirty years!     

Till my husband's sudden early death.

Irish angels must have helped 'back then ' but now it was "Dies Irae"  - "Day of Wrath" and , no grace and no skipping things.    Uncanny and cruel, now,  Such things FOUND ME, like  bills of a sort to pay, that I'd skipped out on, merrily,  so long ago. 

And, sadly yes - one of the things was the entire book "Ulysses" by James Joyce .   It just fell into my lap one day to read. 

I remembered the excerpt and cried , and then I sighed and then I started the book and reminded the angels that I was still grieving, because  "Ulysses" was NOT pretty...but I hung in and finished it....sad duty. 

I did not cry at the end...the in-context reading of the famous Molly Bloom's soliloquy ends the book.....and it was SICKENING - my blood stopped!   James Joyce's telling was an extreme contradiction of the nearly holy, lovely excerpt that I found in "The Family of Man" book in 1963.

Since the lovely words were so powerful to me, this "update" in their meaning was powerful, too.  I was numb and sullen and sluggish and sickened and  angry -  with my husband dead, one more and one more thing to deliver sorrow. Unfair. 

I struggled and in time I felt redeemed - because I could see the beauty in the soliloquoy - no matter the context and I was grateful,  and I understood sister's recommendation, long ago - thank you Sister!   A good thing was done in that.

But I ask YOU and  YE GODS!   Why  MUST the artist aim at the worst interpretation of the way of life,  to twist beauty into deliberate ugliness!   How degenerated !     WHY??  With so many stunning paths to find and make and follow and actualize  - so many good things - why choose the other???  So many true reports of it all, told in ways that inspire and give life!  Why the evil?

MISTER JOYCE!  Your gift, your destiny to be Dream weaver and empowerer for the grandest things our human limitations allow.  Was it his desire to help us to find our own redemption in spite of the writings?  Or his conceit? Or .....

 If the artist is of the Irish persuasion,  it is not merely an option but a mandate to empower for the best.  And they feel their approach does DO it!   Sometimes, in the taking up of this path, the lights are found, and then it proves worth!   Sometimes.  Not so cheery a prognosis. But we do it and that too is value!

I am quiet and grateful that my truth is its OWN redemption.  And most of all, grateful that I did not need to read the entire story too soon - that I found the beauty in an excerpt, in a heartbeat, and the glimpse lasted for thirty years, ready to glow again if called up.:-D

Thanks Angels!!!! 

elle smith fagan Bloomsday 2016 vigil note.

Molly Bloom

EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

Art in America - a Timeline

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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