Well, this day I woke all cozy with things I wanted to journal about, and then had to move the Christmas tree so the man from the oil burner company could get in and diagnose the problem with the heating system, and now we’ve got the Petro guy in the basement. Sigh.

Meanwhile, yesterday saw the Jan Gossart (Gossaret, Mabuse, etc.) exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum yesterday. Until I started to get tired, I had such a lovely sense of being right where all the power lines come together, which is to say I was having a really good time. The painter a new one for me, old Dutch master, moving from Medieval to Renaissance, contemporary (and mutual influence with) Durer. He went to Rome as a young man and then gradually participated in the invention of the more fully molded Renaissance humanist painting style in which the three-dimensional forms come into the viewer’s space, as the curators say.

There was a nice video at the end about cleaning the pictures, and I almost missed the portraits at the end that were most thoroughly Renaissance in their particularity and penetration into my space. Also lots of mildly scholarly observations in the documentation about the specific statues and images and possibly pieces of statues used for models for images. Especially something called the Spinario, or "Boy With Thorn," a kid a thorn out of his foot. Funny drawing of the back of a statue at a strange angle. I loved Gossart/Mabuse's monkey-blunt-faced Jesuses (two versions of "Christ on the Cold Stone"), one twisted in pain, one looking up at spiritual ease in spite of torture. Anyhow, a wonderful exhibition, leaving me with the ususal awareness of gaps in my knowledge but great delight that I can be in the same space with all that human history and accomplishment.



December 5, 2010





Two December Haiku



Sillver lining clouds,

Early December ev'ning.

Suddenly-- huge sky!





Saturate my hues--

Sharpen each newly bare twig

Breathe in deeply-- Me!