Spinning Wheel 2

The mosaic belongs to the splendid old arcade of the Palais Royal, where Cocteau complained of bells ringing and where Louis XVI played with his toy cannons as a boy.

Spinning Wheel

Spinning wheel, got to go round--a Laura Nyro lyric, I believe.

Each spring we stop at Renault's flagship showroom on the Champs Elysées and sit in the driver's seat of the latest concept car. Since boyhood I have loved the futuristic élan of concept cars, knowing of course how rarely, if ever, a Sistine Chapel roadster ever makes it onto the real road. 

Here is one rim.

And another spinning wheel. I attended a small Christian school, so we didn't throw the discus in the nude as they did, undoubtedly, at the outré and irreligious high school in town. I did, however, throw the discus quite well, winning Ontario-wide in my senior year. It seems even then I had a penchant for obscure accomplishment (like writing a design blog). 

 This is a particularly refined article of Etruscan black-figure pottery, so-called though the ground here, rather than the figure, is black. It dates to the Persian occupation of Etruria in the 5th century, when occupiers imposed the pronounced stamp of Greek aesthetics on local handiwork. Just as possible, this plate may have been made by a Greek master who had emigrated to central Italy, bringing his world-beating, god-figured, discus-hurling Hellenism with him.

 

Michael Kenna

Two more pictures by Michael Kenna. (See previous entry for more discussion.)

The bridge is the Pont des Arts in Paris, an iron cobweb spanning the Seine and offering early in the morning or just as the sun is going down a perfect observatory from which to watch the slow swim of the river and feel the narcotic languor of a city so unearthly in its loveliness that you spit to reassure yourself that you're real.

Of Memory and Place

British photographer Michael Kenna creates these psalmic images of intense solitude early in the morning or late in the evening using long exposures that in turn exploit the dreamy DeChirico-like stillness at which great black and white photography so vividly and elegaicly excels. Within the tranquility of nature, some decaying vestige of man's presence may be found, quotidien relics of our existence, frayed clauses of a story lost long ago. Another feature of many of Kenna's images is the serial constitution of that relic, either planks of an old dock or the fingers of old piles driven into the sea--a numerology of decay. 

We tend to associate serialism with the mathematical clarities of Minimalism. Fine. I love a Carl André sculpture. I hope that you do too. But the pictures of Michael Kenna suggest just as potent a numerology for the uneven and mysterious integers of memory and place.

Do Stars Create Clouds?

Two do. If American architect Frank Gehry had never designed a building in his life, his eminence as this country's most imaginative furniture designer would assure his renown. His cumulus-like lantern, Cloud, made of paper modules clipped together, would be called that even if he had named it Porcupine or Margaret Thatcher.  

The second hanging lantern is by French eminence Patrick Jouin, also called Cloud, and is made up of suspended globes of hand-blown Murano glass.   

Alive and Ever Changing

This poetic image is from Bob Ivers, in response to "Puzzling Over Pattern."

"I saw two newly born fawns today in our woods.

They were patterned with white, gold and tan spots.

The leaves of tall trees moved in a slight and soft wind patterning 

white sunlight across the woods floor and the fawns.

Two patterns merged - both alive and ever changing."

Infinite Heights & White Horizons

Let's make up a movement; let's call it Purism, at least for the duration of this paragraph. It is white and it is serial--just like Meier's poem or Brancusi's plaster column. Nothing against color; nothing against single, unrepetitive shapes. It's just that these two elements have, by general agreement, become aesthetic touchstones, keys to the kingdom of modern aesthetics; our own versions of the pale plaster walls and plain stone arches of a Michelozzo monastery. Where life calls forth, as it always has, simplicity shaped by pallor and immaculate proportion, the answer over centuries has remained remarkably the same. It's a though each new generation must conserve, in its own way, some reductive and essential grail handed down by its predecessors. The redux of purity; Modernism does it particularly well.