Shop Windows

 Torrington, Connecticut, 3/12/21

Signs of the Times—Three

Woodbury, Connecticut

On US Route 6, Wednesday morning, 4/29/20.

Watertown, Connecticut

Along Main Street, a professionally produced sign from the United Public Service Employees Union.

Watertown, Connecticut

Home made signs in a jewelry store window.

Watertown, Connecticut

The auto salvage business appears to have commissioned an impressive custom made thank you sign.

Torrington, Connecticut

A Subway franchise went belly up here and the storefront adjacent to the main Five Corners intersection has been empty for months. I guess the landlord put up the big thank you heart.

Torrington, Connecticut

The Five Corners Gallery, part of extensive urban renewal that's been going on in this town over the past five or six years.

Torrington, Connecticut

Torrington, Connecticut

In front of the main municipal building.

An Opening Tonight

Torrington, Connecticut

At Five Points Gallery.

Gallery Opening

Washington Depot, Connecticut

Kim Keever opening at KMR Arts gallery this afternoon. Kim is talking with photographer Mio Akashi. Reflection selfie, no extra charge.

Installation

Hyde Park, New York

Sculpture by Seward Johnson installed at the Vanderbuilt Mansion National Historic Site.

Presidents Day Exhibit

Hudson, New York

From behind the shop window at the Carrie Haddad Gallery.

Shop Window

Princeton, West Virginia

Eclectic merchandise and décor.

Next Door to Hermann's Automotive

Torrington, Connecticut

The other evening I read the text by Keith Davis in the Todd Webb monograph that was part of the TOP photo book offer a few months back. It’s an excellent essay. Davis seems to have a real handle on writing about photographers and their work. However, what struck me was his mention of the inaugural show at the Hallmark Gallery in New York, back in 1964. Well over a hundred prints by Harry Callahan.

I saw that show, and it made an immense impression on me. I was a high school kid wandering around New York with my Pentax H3, looking for stuff to take pictures of. I’d never heard of Callahan. He wasn’t the sort of photographer who got profiled in Popular Photography magazine. The pictures bowled me over. I looked at everything, left the building and walked around a bit, then came back and looked at everything all over again. Slowly.

The first thing that struck me was how ordinary the subject matter was. Unspectacular, undramatic. Then I had the grok. These things weren’t pictures of stuff at all. They were, themselves, stuff. Objects in their own right. They didn't exist to record a building, or a person, or some blades of grass. They took that subject matter and transformed it into a new thing, a photograph. I even think I got an inkling of a notion that later became pivotal for me—that every bit of the picture is important, every bit of it has to work. There is no subject vs background, there’s just everything.

The titles also struck me. Every picture was titled with the name of a city. A radiator, a window, a nude woman, all might be titled, “Rochester, New York.” To this day I follow that convention for the pictures I post here on the blog.

New England Impressionists, "Hollyhocking," and Runaway Squash

New London, Connecticut

Today we went on a mini-expedition to the LymanAllyn Art Museum and the Florence Griswold House and Museum. Tina was particularly interested to get to the show "A Good Summer's Work," which ends this week. It's essentially a small but wonderful collection of work by the circle of J. Alden Weir, and the paintings and sculpture they made around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries with subject matter in eastern Connecticut. There's also a room of Weir's portraits of family members including the dog, Bush.

One of his paintings was accompanied by an informative placard explaining his use of the term "hollyhocking." I'll quote it here in a picture. It's important to understand that to make this picture, Weir substantially moved the location of the mountain in the background to make the scene more harmonious.

Key sentence, "As art historian Hildegard Cummings explains: 'If, to be good, a picture needed the introduction of a hollyhock or some new bit...then holyhocking was in order.'" The current term is, I think, "Photoshopping."

From there we were off to Old Lyme for the Florence Griswold Museum, "Home of American Impressionism." Tina was curious about the current show here because she'd seen something about in on the web and thought it was a bit of an odd topic, something about American Impressionists and gardens, but she was curious because several of the pictures were credited as on loan from her old school, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Old Lyme, Connecticut

It turned out, the show was organized by the Academy. "Paintings and stained glass from the Pennsylvania Academy are blended with paintings, sculpture, prints, books, and photographs from the Florence Griswold Museum's permanent collection, as well as selected private loans." This was a wonderful surprise. At school, to escape from the student classrooms and studios in the depths of the building, she would head upstairs to the galleries to study the work on the walls for hours on end. Suddenly she was seeing the same paintings 45 years later. With very different, vastly more experienced eyes. A real treat.

There are also beautiful gardens on the grounds and while exploring those, moving from the large flower gardens to the smaller vegetable garden, we encountered this overambitious squash.

Pumpkin, maybe? It seems bent on commandeering the contemplation bench.

At the Gallery

New Haven, Connecticut

One up side of having to drive to New Haven every so often for a doctor's appointment is that it's a short walk to the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Yale Center for British Art. The British was closed for renovations on Wednesday, but across the street, the recently renovated University Gallery was open. It's the first time Tina and I have been down there since the exhibition space was greatly expanded. The rooms are beautifully finished and the displays make excellent use of the space with a luxurious, uncrowded feeling throughout. The collection is of course superb.

CUSTOM FRAMING

New York, New York

Security.

Sculpture, Prints, Paintings, and Cell Phone

Torrington, Connecticut

Opening at Five Points Gallery Friday evening.

Autumn Gallery Opening: Christopher Magadini

New Milford, Connecticut

We went to New Milford yesterday evening to see a gallery opening.

This is the view in the parking lot when we got there.

The artist is extraordinarily versatile, showing work that is wildly divergent, but all done in the last eight months.

The view from the parking lot also kept being cool.

Then there is the show. Which is fascinating. Bettina has liked Chris's work since she first encountered it, but this show, all from the past eight months, is kind of radical. He decided to do whatever he wanted, at the moment. His background is commercial illustration, so he can do anything he wants (commercial artists are, ahem, in general, more skilled than MFA graduates) and I found myself delighted to find pictures that I loved, others that I admired, and others where I thought, well, OK, if you want to do that. Every one of them was engaging though.

From the opening:

Conceptual Art

New Paltz, New York (SUNY campus)

Click on the picture for a larger and clearer view.

Silenus and the Infant Bacchus Take a Selfie

Williamstown, Massachusetts

With thanks to Christophe Veyrier and The Clark.

We drove up to see the hugely enlarged Clark museum today for my birthday. What a lovely present.

The Van Gogh show is fantastic, if you are able to go to far Northwestern MA in the next weeks while these shows are up, don't miss it. As you move through the galleries you are first amazed at the raw talent of the young Van Gogh. Then you watch him explore, seeming almost to invent individual painting styles for specific subjects painted the same year. Then you watch him go mad. Suddenly the hospital pictures, and later, come into focus as the work of a consummate artist who suddenly finds himself permanently on LSD.

The other special show is the actual Whistler's Mother, along with two rooms of Whistler's drawings and prints. Seeing Whistler's Mother in person is a trip. The painting is mesmerizing, but you get to notice little things like the framed print on the wall above her, which is a tour de force—not only does it read like an etching, but you can tell that it is framed under glass...

Count the Animals

Hinton, West Virginia

LOVE DOING NOTHING

New York, New York

Admiral Farragut has been here in Madison Square Park for quite a while, but now he seems to stare intently at the recent sculptures seen in the 11/13-14 posts here.

More Art in the Park

New York, New York

Something a little Star Wars-y about these sculptures. I didn't look for an artist's statement in the park, but of course it's easy enough to find online.

MEMORIES

New York, New York

Art in the park.

Closing in on It

Woodbury, Connecticut

The order list keeps getting more and more highlighter as labels are printed and packages are shipped. To be fair, also, Click 'N Ship is working correctly today (although you still have to exit after five labels to avoid the system bogging down to second-per-keystroke). Email customer service also got back to me and says they will order a refund of the twice-billed labels from yesterday.

But on another weirdness front, postage rates are crazy. Guess what the most expensive packages have been so far? Great Britain. Postage to England is more than all the way to Australia or Singapore! There's a shipment to Japan coming up so I'll be interested to see if they can wrest the expensive postage prize from British hands.

A set of international packages ready for the trip to the post office. Except for a couple orders on hold it looks as though we'll get everything into the mail tomorrow before leaving for New York. We're going to the Penumbra Foundation Open House, which includes a Center for Alternative Processes Instructors exhibit, which I'm participating in.