I forgot

I forgot I have this blog.
Be back soon I hope.

VIrtual Paintout

Bienvenidos a La Perla

Sometimes I check out the Virtual Paintout website to see where they're off to next. The month of October's "destination" was Lima, Peru. I looked around Lima via Google maps all month before I found this view. To me Lima appears a little grim, lots of cement and somewhat arid, and not heavily traveled by the Google maps mobile. The blue dots get pretty sparse. This little island of welcome sits in an intersection facing a highway. The pool was not doing anything when the maps mobile went by but I did see a night time photo when the fountain was turned on and lit up. Still I wonder at the concept. Does a visitor stand on the traffic island and pray or sit on the little red benches behind the statue and look at the statue's back? Perhaps it serves as a landmark for the area which, like a lot of my own country, is given over to urban sprawl with a lot of sameness.

Sheep and Wool Festival

Sheep competition

Sheep… I'd need more time to look at them to get their anatomy better and let's not forget they're covered in wool. I tried sketching their faces: all different. And their coats, some tight like a Berber carpet, some more like people hair, dread locks. The contestant in the foreground above appeared to have gotten himself a high-top fade.  Did this "do" occur naturally or did his shepherd fix it that way?  I couldn't figure out all the criteria the sheep judge was using, he felt their coats, their legs and backs. He worked at a clip, signaling his decisions with hand motions, making color commentary and encouragement. Their shepherds kept trying to coax the sheep into a stance, as if they were show dogs. No one seemed fazed at all that the sheep relieved themselves almost continually during the process. It didn't seem to count against a contestant.

Young competitor

WOOL. We went all the way to the festival of yarn and fiber knowing we did NOT NEED ANOTHER THING. Madeline got a few silk hankies for Nuno felting and for our felting friend, Linda who couldn't make it. I DID NOT BUY ANYTHING! Nothing called out to me. That is how big my stash is already. I couldn't even make a good excuse for the fiber blending board I saw in person, which I've been gazing at online, where your brain can interpose a great many more possibilities for an item than reality may allow.  
All I bought was a hamburger and fries so I could have the dense calories needed to keep trudging around the fair grounds sucking up fibery goodness with my eyes.

Our operating premise for the trip (I thought it was a pretense really) was that we would go to Sheep & Wool to sketch. My brain snickered at me every time I thought it. Nevertheless it was sketches: 3. Bags of wool: 0. 

Cold Spring, New York

On Sunday after the festival we drove to Cold Spring, NY. It's right on the Hudson, a ferry deposits tourists. They stroll around just as they do in other places full up on the quaint. The mountains on the other side are majestic. Architecture and landscape, I suck it up with my eyes.

Happy to meet Sonya Philip again.

Good Company

Voorhees, Ross, Amill and Caswell

 My cousin Margie chose Trinity Church cemetery as her final resting place. She was 90. I hadn't been here since her mother's,  my Grandma Jenny's 60th wedding anniversary party. I was a teenager when my sister and I wandered through here reading tombstones. Here I found a little yellow tobacco tin I still keep buttons in. It is a beautiful and peaceful place. 
At the top of the hill Mayor Ed Koch is buried. John James Audubon's marker is an obelisk nearer the Church of the Intercession

The Middle Redoubt, Trinity Cemetery

Also in the cemetery is this marker citing the location as the Middle Redoubt …"built by the American army 1776, at this point in 1776 under General Washington occurred some of the fiercest fighting of the battle of Washington Heights."
Upper Manhattan is wonderfully hilly and from this point down to the Hudson river is a pretty steep decline. 
This spot is also not far from the highest (natural) point in Manhattan, the Morris Jumel mansion where Gen. George Washington was able to look down and see what the British were getting up to during the Revolutionary War. If you visit the Jumel Mansion, you may feel the presence of the slaves who tended the place. I felt it through the bare ground under very large trees on the property. I could see someone pulling a rake through the sand to remove dead leaves and make patterns; something my great aunt Anna did in her front yard before Sunday.

A Day in Court

Mural: "The Power of the Law" by Edwin Howland Blashfield

I Spent a few hours inside the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division last week. Had to sit for a few minutes concentrating on getting my just mouth closed because the room is so awesome. Even with about 24 attorneys giving brief summaries of their appeals or responses to the five judges' questions there was not enough time to take in the entire room let alone sketch it. Closest to where I sat was the mural above "The Power of the Law". I enjoyed "reading all the symbols the muralist Edwin H. Blashfield where a woman in green kneels before Justice, who is drawing her sword. The appellant holds in one hand a petition against a peevish looking young man in fancy clothes, he holds his own scroll but we can only see its outline under his brocade cloak. Next to him a figure in judge's robes holds the book of Civil Law. The putto in front supports a red shield with a banner reading "Uphold the Right". The appellant's other hand, empty, is held up beseechingly, her palm facing justice and also in front of a man holding a book with a cross on its cover. He wears a simple crown and looks like every late nineteenth century representation of Jesus you've ever seen. Next to him, but not in my drawing, a man holds the book of Common Law somewhere to the lower right is another putto supporting a shield with a banner completing the motto marked "Prevent the Wrong". It's a formal, symmetrical composition with enough symbolism to chew on you don't mind waiting, although the attorneys waiting to do their thing are probably too anxious to take note. And I would have snapped a picture but for the fellow there in black kevlar. 

Judges, swamped by the bench but having a good time.

The bench is not only high up and far away but probably a small forest's worth of carved mahogany.

The fifth justice didn't fit into the spread but I couldn't leave her out.

The history of the court can be found here.

  

Stand and deliver

West 35th St. & 7th Avenue

When I'm on the ground in town, in this case, West 35th street, I'm thinking mostly about dodging the other pedestrians and getting where I have to go. But there is always a sketch kit burning a hole in my bag the whole time. This time saw horse barrier  stands near the corner of Seventh Ave. it makes a perfect rest for a little sketch book so I straddle the shopping bag of yardage I'd just bought and have at it. I finished and got half a block away before I remembered to go back and take a snap shot. The Vitamin Shop had a window full of bottles next to  a blacked out window I could see. I switched it for the more visually appealing bottles. I was drawn to that little snack shop and the invisible barber shop with its vestigial pole. I wonder how many people actually enter that dark doorway and climb the stairs.

Virtual Painting

The Azores!

I can safely say I don't have any plans to visit there. I'd forgotten they are part of Portugal. While it was raining chicken cutlets here in New York, and there was nothing on the TV, and I wanted a sketchy hit, I stopped by the Virtual Paintout blog to see what was up. This month, they're visiting the Azores.

I am easily drawn into looking around on Google Street View. Of course, there are places you can't see. China comes to mind. But there is something about looking at places this way that is a bit disturbing and sad; it is that there are so few people in the photos. You can stop in one place and look around 360 degrees but not see a soul. How could there be no one? I dropped the little orange man all over the Azores, I don't think I saw more than a dozen people and some cows.

I realize that the people must be edited out in many instances. I checked my hypothesis by visiting West 23rd street and Broadway. There were more people than I've seen in any place else I visited  on Street view but not as many as there certainly are at any time when the sun is up. It appeared the shots were taken in the morning before noon judging by the 10:00 AM shadows cast from the east. I gather population density via Google Street View must be relative. Where there are scads of people, you'll see a few. Where the population density is more modest, you won't see anyone at all.

The Virtual Paintout sets a different place in the world to visit every month. You can submit your art for posting, up to three images if you include the Street View URL of the place you sketched. It's pretty good fun for a rainy day.