Mr. P has graduated! Yay! I'm so very, very proud of him. He graduated, on time, with honors (magna cum laude, suckers!), while working, teaching, having shows, and making art. *And* the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts recently purchased one of his pieces from Flight Patterns for their collection.
Yay!
We moved to Richmond almost five years ago with the plan that Mr. P would be going to school. (There is a long, amusing story associated with the series of oblivious decisions we made in association with this. The take home lesson of which is that there are times when the universe rewards you for being oblivious). Now that he has completed that mission, wheels are in motion to send us on to the next chapter, new adventures, and a whole new part of the country. Details soon, but let us just say that it is perhaps a good thing that my years in grad school got me used to lake effect snow.
Well, most of the deadlines have been wrapped up (there's a couple of stragglers, but what can you do?), so I've let out a biiiiiiiiig sigh this weekend. As soon as the new year opens I'm back on the treadmill set to high, but I have a couple of weeks of visiting family and reading novels and maybe even knitting something, in store....
Mr. P's birthday was this last weekend, so I took him out to dinner at his favorite local restaurant. (They still haven't sorted out their seating issues, but the food is purdy darn good. And who can resist tater tots?). I attempted to surprise him with his birthday gift, but was foiled by logistical issues. I got him storage for his tools, but when the larger of the two chests (this one) came out on the palate I knew it wasn't going to fit in my car by itself, never mind with the second one. So I had to call Mr. P to come to the store to pick up his own gift. Not exactly the surprise I was going for....
I also took him to see the musical South Pacific. It had gotten a pretty good review in the New Yorker a while ago, and I must admit that I love the movie. (Yes, yes, it trades in all sorts of uncomfortable and icky stereotypes. But still. How can you resist 101 pounds of fun?)
Wellllll.... the ensemble numbers were good. And the guy who played Billis (though younger than he should have been) was funny. All the singing was good. But the leads for the traveling show.... Uhm.... let's just say that we know why they are in the traveling show.They both sang well, but they both had some major accent issues that were totally distracting. Nellie kept claiming to be from Arkansas, but she was sliding all over the eastern seaboard every time she opened her mouth. She was one part New Jersey and one part Scarlett O'Hara. And zero parts Little Rock. I might have been able to live with the Scarlett O'Hara thing (okay, maybe not, but it wouldn't have been quite so bad) if she'd managed to just stick with it. Every time she spoke it was a little shocking. (She was fine when she was singing).
But she wasn't half as distracting as Emile. He is supposed to be French, but before he'd finished his first sentence I was thinking, "He sounds.... Argentinian. Or Chilean....." And then I thought, wait, he sounds like....
And trust me.... that isn't good. During the intermission we looked in the playbill and discovered that the actor is from Uruguay. Mr. P thought he looked and sounded like Dracula, which puts a whole new spin on things (Emile does say he had to leave France because he'd killed a man.....).
We finished up the weekend by watching an absolutely terrible, I mean mind-blowingly-bad, movie, and eating red velvet birthday cake. Yeay, Mr. P! Happy Birthday, Love!
Mr. P's gift for Valentine's Day this year was a new piece of art! A fabu, eight foot painting. Eight foot = logistical problem, so it took a while for him to find a way to get it home. He put it up this weekend! Yeay! I love it-- and he's delighted that it can be seen from the street :)
Meanwhile, kitty is loving the view out the door....
It was fab to get a tour of it from R, as she is both a docent at the museum, and also one of the artists who contributed pieces of coral to the exhibit.
The reef in DC is a satellite reef-- part of a larger project designed to shine light on what we are destroying when we are terrible environmental stewards, as when we dump trash into the ocean. You can watch a TED video about this intersection of math, craft, and environmentalism by going here. The coral reef in DC will be on display in the Sant Ocean Hall until April 24th. (There was also a lovely orchid exhibition going on, and a neat archaeology exhibit near the forensic lab and the skeleton of the Smithsonian scientist, Grover Krantz, and his irish wolfhound).
We went to my friend Leigh Anne Chambers' opening at ArtSpace at Plant Zero in Richmond on Friday evening. It was lovely to see her, as always, and I enjoyed seeing her work in person (she doesn't live in Richmond, so often I see her work only as photographs). If you are in town, you should pop down and have a look.
She titled her show Umheimlich, which I recalled from reading Freud in grad school as meaning "uncanny." I know that I read the Freud, but then I think that his theory of the umheimlich was picked up and used by visual culture theorists, and others, I would imagine. Since I saw the title I've been trying to recall where else I've seen that idea used. I have a rather unheimlich feeling that I really should know...
Speaking of umheimlich, Mr. P sent this to me, telling me that watching it made him feel queasy. Watch. Before watching it I didn't know what he was talking about. But then watching it, I totally get it. It is uncanny. In the queasy way that can make one feel unmoored. Or maybe just Mr. P and me.
Mr. P's opening was Saturday night, and things went pretty well. He gave an artist talk and there were quite a few people there with lots of questions and interest in the process, the project, and the work.
Two pieces sold at the opening-- my favorite piece, and his favorite, so how do you like them apples? But I like the whole show, so there's more to see, love, and buy, people!
We got to see loooots of friends, which was awesome. I so miss my DC crew, and so many of them were out for the show-- it's great to see them, and great to have their support.Got to have dinner with Anita and Bink and Dr. Scientist and Lea&B, and so many others who came-- yeay! Also got to see friends from a bit further afield-- down from Annapolis with the toddler that I've never met, which was great. And my parents who drove all the way down from Massachusetts! So nice of them to come. And we got to stay with our awesome friends Rebecca and Eric and have a super yummy breakfast before the drive back.... so good to see everybody.
On the way back we stopped in Thornburg so Phil could get something to drink. In the quickmart or whatever at the gas station just off the highway I saw this display:
To which I really can't say anything more than whaaaat?
I've been thinking a lot about painting lately. I used to paint all the time, back when I was busy being a starving artist in New York. But then I decided I was going to be an intellectual instead of a starving artist and ran off to grad school, which too all of my time and I haven't really painted since. I kept telling myself that I would get back to it after grad school, but then I finished and found that the list of things that I wanted to get back to, that I'd deprived myself of for eight and half years, was very long. I'm still working my way through it... things like reading novels again and writing short stories, crafty things, photography.... I haven't quite gotten back to painting (or to making films, for that matter). But lately I've been thinking about it more and more, in my waking and my dreaming lives.
In my dreaming life I have been painting landscapes. Lots and lots of landscapes. Which is strange-- I painted a few cityscapes in NYC, but I have never, ever been a landscape painter. Or been much for landscapes in photography either, for that matter. But in my dreams I paint landscapes. And this year on our cross country trip I found myself making kind of painterly landscape photographs, too.
Someone sent me this link yesterday and it is just the Coolest. Stuff. Ever. I so want the monkeys. And the surprised kangaroo. The deer. All of it. Crocheted, people, that stuff is cro-cheted.
Other than that it's been a crazy busy couple of weeks. Mr. P is still in Louisiana getting his art on. I'm glad he's doing the project, but I'm ready for him to be home. The house refuses to clean itself, and the garden refuses to weed itself. Or grow, really, except the weeds, which grow like... uhm.... weeds. And then there's work where things just won't write themselves, data won't gather itself, reports won't complete themselves, budgets just won't balance themselves. Ah, the end of the fiscal year, sliding into the same week as one of our biggest programs of the year, in the same week that a multi-faceted complicated and important grant application is due. Why won't someone come serve me cocktails?
I did get to watch a hummingbird yesterday morning, though. It was flitting around while I was watering the plants. I'd say that was the highpoint of my week.
We had a busy holiday, and I'm only just starting to recover. And am finally starting to process pictures. Our holiday started early, as Mr. P's birthday is a week before Xmas. For his birthday, I took him to New York for the weekend.
We also went to ICP, MoMA, and the Met. It was the first time I'd been to the new MoMA-- neat space! We saw some really cool exhibitions, including the Robert Frank show at the Met, which was well worth going to.
When we got home, we exchanged Xmas gifts before the next leg of our holiday tour. Mr. P made awesome wrapping paper for the gift he gave me :)
We went on a whirlwind art-and-cultcha tour in DC on Sunday, driving up in the morning and hitting four exhibitions before dropping by our friend Rebecca & Eric's, and then heading back to Richmond.
Our first stop was National Geographic for the Terracotta Warriors exhibition. The warriors are awesome, and I was glad to have had the chance to see a few of them, having gotten within 400 km of Xian when I did a semester in China sixteen years ago, but not making it to see them. I haven't given up on the idea of getting to Xian at some point, but in the meantime, I'll take the chance to see them when they are here. The upside-- the warriors! The downside? Nat Geo has limited space, and there were way too many people in there. And someone was really not thinking when they set up the first part of the exhibit. After waiting outside in frigid temperatures, everyone with 12:30 tickets ran inside and stuffed themselves into a small room with one warrior and his horse. The space to walk around him was limited, and there was a ton of text on the walls that you couldn't see with eighty people pushing around to get to the statue, or wandering obliviously with those audio tour things stuck to their ears. Worse still, room two was very tight with a small opening to get through, so there was an immediate traffic jam made worse by the fact that they put a video right by the doorway moving from room one to room two, guaranteeing that no one was moving. Total gridlock. We saw almost none of the things in the second room-- the bells, coins, and other things. We saw a couple of other things in other rooms-- the armor, a sword, the two waterfowl statues (which were spectacular), but mostly we weren't able to get anywhere near the cases. So, exhibition is totally worth going to, but I suggest that you go at 8am on a Tuesday.
We went over to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the William T. Wiley show. For me it was kind of hit or miss-- his oeuvre spans a lot of media (drawings, paintings, sculpture, video), and I liked his work in some media more than others. I found the sculptures more compelling than the drawings and watercolors, though I did also like a lot of the larger paintings.
We also went to the National Portrait Gallery for a couple of exhibitions. We buzzed through the Faces of the Frontier show, which was pretty interesting. We also went to see the Portrait Competition show, which I really enjoyed. I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed it, as, admittedly, I often feel kind of eh about portraits. There were some really interesting pieces in the show-- including one by a friend of ours, Jen Bandini, whose self portrait is also on the cover of the show catalog. (Go vote for her in the people's choice competition!) We both really liked the sculpture by Justin Shaw, and I was particularly impressed by the pieces by Margaret Bowland, Stanley Rayfield (who is also a friend of my intern's), Maquitta Ahuja,Ben Tolman, and Jim Torok (which I thought was both skillful and clever-- it's tiny). We were both baffled by the first place choice of Dave Woody's Laura, which to me was one of the weaker entries. Skilled, but meh. We went to the ICP last month, and Woody's piece reminded both of us of Richard Learoyd's Agnes, Red Dress, but with all of the interestingness drained from it. In any case, go see it if you are in the DC area!
