Standing Woman 1, at the Getty Center

In my first post of the Giacometti sculptures at the Temple of Dendur, I mentioned how, every time  I entered this gallery at the Getty Center, I was stunned by the presence of one of his figures so striking, up against a white wall.  The other thing is, that this sculpture is nearly nine feet tall!  So you are actually looking up at it when you stand in front of it.  I thought I would take the time to show this "Standing Woman 1" in more detail so that you could appreciate how it is made.  Please click on each image to see it larger.

So this is a medium view and you can begin to see how little dabs of clay were put together to form the rough structure of this woman. When the clay figure was finished, a mold was put around it and then molten bronze was poured into the mold, to form this bronze figure.

And here is even more datail from a closer view.  So here is what is wonderful - I looked up this photo in my collection and then went to the Getty Center website to to look up the information.  Along with all that, there is a wonderful description by one of the Getty curators.  So I hope it will offer some insights if I reproduce just part of the description.

"Nearly nine feet tall, this larger-than-life, extremely slender figure towers over the viewer.  Despite her emaciated frame, she commands the surrounding space.  Her rail-thin arms appear almost fused to her torso, hightening a palpable sense of empty space around the figure.  The relatrively large base emphasizes her fragility.  The deeply kneaded, distressed bronze surface suggests a morbid, decomposing form."

OK but I find I have a problem with that.  I have never had a feeling when seeing these different Giacometti statues of woman that they were decomposing figures at all!  Never a hint of that so I disagree with the curator on this note.

 

Cloud Watching Again

We went to the beach again today, so Kathy could do some of the walking she needs to as part of her recovery.  The minute I got out of the car I saw this scene.  So many different kinds of clouds visible, both low level cumulus which you see closer to us and then higher clouds further away.  I was not sure, but at first right in the center of the photo, over the dark trees, I thought that might be a rain shower, but I don't think it is.  It was a showery day today.  After walking for a bit, I looked to the north across the sound and there was a similar rain shower as I photographed yesterday.  When we left the parking lot, there was another huge rain shower just across the harbor that obscured the whole horizon to the north.  Just beautiful gray clouds everywhere today.  And a single person down by the water, watching the clouds as we were.

 

Storm Clouds Over The Sound

We were on the way home after doing some errands and as we drove back along shore road I saw these brilliant white clouds, with the much darker gray clouds above them.  I have never seen anything like this in all the years I have lived here!  I quickly pulled over, grabbed my camera and took this photograph.  Notice the different reflections in the water, with the white clouds leaving a brighter reflection.  Notice that it is a bit more gray under the center area of the white clouds.  That gray color is either rain coming down from the clouds, or it could br "virga" which is when the rain falls from the cloud but evaporates before it hits the ground.  What a joy it was to see all these beautiful clouds!

 

Walking Woman

I was sort of familiar with the thin, rough surfaced Giacometti sculptures that were in yesterday's pictures.  What is really cool is they placed this bronze sculpture "Walking Woman" inside one of the structures of the Temple of Dendur.  In the wide angle photograph yesterday, this sculpture is inside the larger, far structure.  I would never have guessed that this sculpture was made by the same artist as all the other sculptures on display!  That shows you how little I know!  I was curious what people who know about art thought this sculpture was about.  So I looked it up!  "Alberto Giacometti's Walking Woman was created between 1932 and 1936.  It is an iconic slender sculpture that transitions from the surrealist experimentation to his signature elonged human style.  It reflects ancient Egyptian and Cycladic frontal proportions.  This figure captures the weightless balance of a living person in motion rather than a heavy physical body.  It also emphasizes rigid, timeless posture and profound psychological presence." What do you think?  I am not sure what I think.

 

Giacometti at the Temple of Dendur

                              

There is an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where 14 works in bronze and plaster by Alberto Giacometti are displayed in and around the Temple of Dendur.  It is explained that this "places the work of one of the great sculptors of the 20th century in dialogue with the ancient civilization that strongly influenced his art and his practice."  I love this shot because it shows the familiar unimaginable thin women statues against children and adults looking at the temple.

The Temple of Dendur was completed in 10 BCE as a commission by Caesar Augustus shortly after he became emperor of Rome. Gifted from Egypt to the United States in 1965, it has been one of the most beloved works of art at The Met since it opened to the public in 1978. 

It is further explained that "Throughout his career, Giacometti showed a particular fascination for the art of ancient Egypt. The Egyptian statues he saw in Italy as a young artist made a lasting impression on his visual repertoire, and after he moved to Paris, he regularly visited the Egyptian galleries of the Louvre." These statues are astounding to look at and to study.  There is a single bronze statue of a woman at the Getty on display up against a blank wall which you see when entering one of the galleries, and it always stops me in my tracks.

The Ghost Building

When I came up out of the subway I saw this building right away.  It looked like a ghost building instead of a real building.  So this building looks like this because they are doing some kind of construction on the outside.  They have set up scaffolding to work on the building, and then think they have regulations that some kind of fabric has to surround the scaffolding, I believe so that if anything was dropped, the fabric would keep it from falling out into the street.  So that's what makes it a ghost building.

 

How to Make a Cowboy Hat

I went to the city on Thursday to meet Stan and to see a huge photo exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum.  The photographer was Christopher Payne and the exhibit is called "Made in America."  His photographs of both giant factories, like at Boeing, or smaller facilities, like the Bollman Hat Company founded in 1868, in Pennsylvania are both beautiful and illuminating.  This is an exhibit showing the all the stages of how a cowboy hat is created, and there are a number of photographs on the wall in this room showing the people and the process.  But seeing a pink cowboy hat was amazing!  Who ever heard of a pink cowboy hat!  But it is something for a woman to wear when she is dressed up.

The construction starts at the lower left foreground with the wool, and then it is made into the next stage, to the right, and you can follow the procedure to the finished hat.  There are text blocks which explain each phase.  What a wonderful thing to see. And the photographs are just beautiful and astounding.

 

Waiting for the Train

I love changing trains in Jamaica.  There are  eight tracks and you get off your train, and then wait for the next train to take you to either Penn Station, or Grand Central Madison.  So I am always kind of idly looking at the passengers on the other platforms.  When I saw this woman I stopped in my tracks. I think it was the light illuminating her that caught my attention first.  There was a band of bright sunlight illuminating the platform just in front of her, and then reflecting up to illuminate her.  And then I noticed the quiet way she was standing there, moving very little.  So I took my camera out of my backpack and held it down at my side and pointed it at her blindly, and wonder of wonders, she was in the frame.  I love that is such a quiet photograph, and beautiful as well.

 

"Street Photography" in the City

I was trying to take a candid photograph of this young woman because she looked so cool, with her wonderful hair and headphones on.  I first saw her in silhouette, and her headphones were more obvious.  So I didn't look at her, but instead held my camera down by my waist and pointed the camera in her direction and took a few photos.  In most of the others she was not even in the frame!  I cannot believe I got this one!  I had seen the man but he was looking down the tracks.  So this is an accident, but, still I got this photograph in the end.  "Luck favors the very prepared."  "Street Photography" by the way is when you photograph people candidly walking down the street or on subway platforms.  It is really hard to do well.  And luck really helps.

 

A Puzzle

I was on my 2 mile walk, shortened from 2.6 miles because of the heat.  I walk by the swimming pool at Tappan Beach every time I walk, but never noticed this.  But I was walking earlier in the day and the pool was still open and this is one of the attendants I am thinking, sitting in a chair on the other side of this privacy fence. This just caught my eye and I stopped and quickly took about four frames and then looked at them on the back of the camera and figured that I got it.  I think it is unusual for me to shoot anything like this.  I called it "The Puzzle" because it looks like one, I thought.

 

Storm Warning

Today was Dunkin' day at the beach.  It was very windy and there were low gray clouds overhead. I noticed these red and green flags frantically blowing in the breeze and wondered what it might look like if I tried to take a photograph of the flags against the sky.  I really only tried one view, with a slight move from left to right to get the flags so they didn't overlap.  These are not about storm warnings at all, of course.  They are the flags posted on the beach, with one set to the right of the lifeguard tower, and an identical set to the left of the  tower, so that the swimmers know where to swim and where not to swim.  I like the photograph a lot because of the mood it establishes.

 

Flowers at Rum Point

When I was down photographing the water company workers, I wandered just a small distance down the sidewalk to look at this little park.  It is not very big, but has maybe 5 benches that people can sit on while looking out at the harbor.  I used to stop here at the end of my bike ride and cool down.  I realized recently that the park looks so much nicer!  The lawn is no longer bare and someone has made this beautiful garden of flowers.   So I spent some time looking for the best view.  I love the geese seen through an opening of the fence.  Oh, they have a sign there that says this piece of the land is called Rum Point.

 

Observing Night

This is my friend Lawrence and I out observing for the first time together.  We have been trying to get together with our telescopes for more than a year.  He found a used telescope in a shop and wanted to go out observing so that I could show him a few things about using it.  Tonight was the night and the skies looked pretty good so we went to Sunken Meadow State Park.  It turned out that there was a lot of light pollution but we saw a globular cluster and a galaxy and a triple star and a beautiful double star, with stars of different colors.  This was his first time observing and he was overwhelmed by the experience and can't wait to go observing again.  We will have to head further out east to darker skies for out next trip

 

Finishing Up the Water Main Repair

                             

Boy, this watermain damage turned out to be a big deal!  I could not believe all the trucks and heavy equipment the water company had on site to fix the damage. They had to close our street where it met Shore Road.

The big red arm on the upper right was a tank truck vacuum cleaner to pump water out of the deep hole that the excavator at left, dug.  It was at least six feet to get to where they needed to be.

Because the hole was so deep they needed to put heavy wood planks around the hole to keep the soil under the road from collapsing into the hole because a worker needed to be down at the bottom to make the repair.

We can assume the workman in the hole is almost 6 feet tall and all we can see is his helmet.

Look at all the trucks lined up on the left side of the road in this photograph.  And they needed to keep shore road open, so things were pretty crowded while the work was going on.

They worked past quitting time on the last day of their repairs, and then filling everything back in.  All you can see here is the blacktop they covered all their digging with.  If you click on this photo you can see smaller black patches on the road going back into the distance, where they had made other holes in order to repair the water main.

Maybe the Last of the Smoke?

This photograph is also from the walk yesterday when the smoke was still heavy.  I love how, in the background, you can see the trees that are furthest away from me, get lighter and lighter from all the smoke, and the closer trees are darker.  Because they are closer, I am not looking through as much smoke to see them.  Those trees, by themselves are not enough to make an interesting photo.  In this case, the long string of geese paddling by gives the photo a lot more interest.  Well, I hope it does!

 

Smoke is Still With Us

When I go to the bottom of Laurel Avenue, instead of heading south toward where the old powerplant was, I turned north and into a park that leads to a strip of beach with these kind of breakwater rocks leading out into the harbor.  It is such an interesting photograph looking out over all these rocks up to where boats are moored off Sea Cliff beach and Glen Cove Creek.  As you can see the two sailbots on the horizon like are barely visible through the smoke from the fires that is still with us.  But I think these rocks make a really interesting photograph.  If you click on the photo to enlarge it you will see many more sailboats moored to the right of these two.

 

Smoke from Canadian Wildfires

The skies and the air here on Long Island are terrible these days, because of smoke from Canadian wildfires.  This afternoon I could even smell the smoke. According to the EPA "AirNow Fire and Smoke Map this smoke is coming from Canada, where the fires are North of Wisconsin and Minnesota.This view is from Memorial Park, on the cliff overlooking Hempstead Harbor and Long Island Sound.

Here is a view from the little park down at the foot of Laurel Avenue looking over at Sands Point, partley obscured by the smoke.  

This is the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map, and you can see that where we live in the NY Metro Area we have some of the worst air conditions anywhere in the United States.  Amazing that we can be affected by something so far away from us.

 

Ancient History

I found this photograph of me, photographing a baseball game at Yankee Stadium.  I started at Newsday in November of 1966 where I shot sports, like the Yankees, and the NY Jets because of the days and hours I worked.  I think I was a general assignment photographer for 5 or 6 years, before the Sunday Magazine started and then I was the staff photographer for that from then on, until they folded the magazine, in 1990.  I cannot believe how young I was here!  And ask me if I ever saved any prints of my sports photos!  I photographed Joe Namath every Sunday home game and never saved a print!  What a dolt!

 

Behind the Greenhouse

My sister Betsey asked for more photographs from Cedarmere, so here is one more.  While wandering around the property and the gardens, I happened to walk behind the greenhouse after seeing all the formal gardens.  And this view really caught my attention.  Because it is not really an organized part of a garden, but rather random pots with flowers that kind of randomly ended up here.   I think this is a good photograph, but I am not sure.  Please let me know what you think, if you would.  Thanks!

 

The Weed

OK, this is a silly post.  It was a bit cooler today, so I decided to open some of the windows in the back room because it was cooler outside than inside!  When I went to open this window I was stunned to see the top of this weed, higher than the window opening!  "What the heck is that?  So I got my camera and went so I could look out and see more of this weed.

This thing is huge and this photo is only a small part of the top of the weed!  How long has this been growing here?  This is growing on the west side of our house, in the narrow section of lawn between our house and the hedge, which we share with our neighbor. I have not been as diligent mowing the grass on this side of the house, so that's why this weed got so tall before I saw it. 

So I told you this was a silly post, but look how tall this weed is!  I have never seen a weed like this anywhere in our yard before.  I wonder if perhaps a bird brought some seeds here in some way.  Anyhow as I write this, the weed, along with two others that are similar, is still growing out there.  I will pull them up tomorrow.

 

Flowers in the Garden

When we were all at Cedarmere the other day, I was seeing photographs everywhere!  So I did post five photographs of the home and mill and so on, but I found so many more photographs.  So I will take a couple of days to post some others for your viewing pleasure.  I photographed this scene because it was beautiful, and because I have never seen a garden quite like this.  Thats because the Hydrangeas are on a much higher level than the flowers in the foreground.  They are the orange daylily or ditch lily and except for one single blossom they have passed.  The hydrangeas here are just so numerous, just a blaze of wonderful colors!

What a Mess!

You're not going to believe this one!  Our next door neighbor texted me in the late afternoon and asked if we had water - she did not.  We did have water, fortunately.  Well about 2 hours later we no longer had water.  So she heard that there was something going on down on Shore road - it looked like this!

Turns out that the gas utility has been installing new yellow gas lines under Shore road.  They use a method called "Horizontal Drilling."  The cut a hole in the road and insert a drilling head that can be "steered" as they drill a horizontal hole under the road for about 100 feet, to another hole they cut through the concrete.  Well...  Unfortunately the gas line drillers didn't know about a water main below this road, because the water main is so old.  So their drill, drilled right through the water main.  In two places!  There was water everywhere!

Then the people from the water company needed to come in with heavy equipment, find where the water main was damaged, cut through the concrete roadway, and then repair the broken main.  What a mess!  This is where one of the broken mains was.  Then they need to dig down and find the exact spot and make a larger hole in order for the workers to have room to make the repair.

Here one of the repair workers in standing in a water filled hole where a repair needs to be made.  They have a huge truck with a long snout that they they put into the water filled hole to pump it out, so they can make the repair.  They worked non-stop to do all that in two places, and our water was back on well after dark - perhaps around 9 PM!  I got to talk to a number of the workers and ask what happened and how the repair method worked.  They wear all very friendly and were happy to explain what had happened.  I love knowing about stuff like this!

As darkness falls, they have about finished the first break, and they will work on this break, which is right at the foot of Laurel Avenue.  What an amazing process this is, isn't it?

 

Amy & Vivian, on Their Way to France!

As I write this blog post, Amy and Vivian are half way to Paris, France!  We took them to LaGuardia airport and dropped them off at noon.  I will spare you the cancelled flights and late departures, but right now they are just south of Greenland, and half way to France!  Here they are at their favorite place here on Long Island, Tappan Beach, the "Dunkin' beach, where they love to be in the swimming pool.  In France they will be driving to Normandy and then to Aviginon where they will be staying with friends of Amy's from her times working in New York City.  We can't wait to hear details of their adventure!

 

Snug as a Bug in a Rug

Mother and daughter all curled up in bed together, hanging out and reading or using a phone for email and reading the news!  So cozy.  They both look so comfortable. I love the white headphones that Vivian has so she can hear the sound of the movies she is watching on her iPad.  Isn't that a great old bed we have in what was Liz' room?  I think we got it at a street sale years ago.

 

Cedarmere, Home of William Cullen Bryant

 Historic Cedarmere was the home of William Cullen Bryant, a poet, newspaper editor, anti-slavery advocate and confidant of President Abraham Lincoln.  It is located on the shore of Hempstead Harbor in Roslyn.  We dedided to go here today as an activity that we would all love, and that Vivian would enjoy as well.  She loved wandering around in this garden because it seemed like some kind of maze.  You can see Viv and Amy in the distance in this photograph.

This is a photograph of the house, which is only open for tours on Thursdays.  But it was a perfect day to wander around the grounds because it was cool and overcast.  We really enjoyed being outside in a perfect comfortable day.

This is the beautifully restored Gothic Revival Mill, built in 1862, and restored in 2013,  that got power from a water wheel, and the machinery in the basement inside includes lathes, saws, grindstones, and other tools used on the estate. The second floor has been used for painting classes.

This is the mill pond that furnishes water to the waterwheel outside the Mill, to power all the tools..  It is such a beautiful pond and so calming to walk around the edge of. In the far distance is a stone bridge that crosses over the water at that end.

I have spent time her photographing in the past but had forgotten the beautiful gardens!  They are maintained by volunteers from the "Friends of Cedarmere" and are so beautiful!

And here are a few familiar faces, posing for a portrait, sitting on one of the benches around the grounds, where you can just sit and relax and look out on to the southern end of Hempstead Harbor.  I was an afternoon enjoyed by all.  Even Vivian, who is a reluctant participant in this photo!

Learning to Sew

Kathy was looking for something to do with Vivian, and so she decided to show Viv how to use a sewing machine, certainly something a 6-year old could do!  Believe it or not, Vivian very carefully fed the material through the machine and sewed the edges together.  She ended up making a small pillow for herself.  She listened to instructions and very carefully followed them to make her first sewing project.  Grandmother and Granddaughter were really enjoying their time together on a rainy afternoon.

 

Umbrellas at the Beach

The day that Amy and Vivian went to the pool and then the beach, after they were done swimming, Amy wanted to go to the restaurant on the beach to have a drink, just to celebrate being here.  So we found a table under these umbrellas and each of us had something to drink.  While I was sitting there I happened to look up at the brightly colored umbrella and saw all the other umbrellas going away into the distance and thought it might make an interesting picture.  Please click on this because it will be more striking in terms of design when you see the image larger.