After this weekend, having received a boatload of candy and the ability to once again drink pop, I have found myself with superhuman energy and peppiness.
That's my own hand-dyed easter egg in there. Hopefully this will lead to a slightly increased frequency of posts. Easter was amazing. My family had it's own little Easter miracle in the form of none of us having a complete meltdown. I even didn't make my sister cry. Mass was better than I thought it would be too. I'm very spoiled here on campus by the quality of our Masses, but the one at home was great. Interestingly the Priest devoted his entire homily to the scandal currently going on, and it was generally felt he did a very good job addressing the situation.
A part of the reason I haven't been posting as frequently is because like Easter the rest of the past several days haven't been filled with many juicy fiascos. It's mostly all been chicken soup for the soul type stuff. For example, yesterday I heard from my undergrad friend who I haven't heard from in probably over a year. That was fantastic, and it made me so happy. Turns out he is going to be here for the Film Festival later this month and wants to meet up. So we're going to try and plan a mini-reunion with all our old friends. But for you readers this is probably all a yawn.
On Easter, once I got back into town, I got a hold of my salsa friend who wants to be a nun. Remember I haven't really considered her as a potential because of this, but she is fun to hang out with and since I hadn't talked with her in a few weeks I thought I'd call her up. I didn't really think she'd want to hang out that night being it was Easter and all, but surprisingly she did, so we went to one of the local pubs and chatted for a couple hours. It turns out she went and got herself a boyfriend! I wasn't exactly happy about this and asked what about the nun thing? She explained how she still is very much considering becoming a nun but decided that God must have put this guy who asked her out in her path for some reason so thought to go with it and see where it leads. They met each other through a Church group that I have not yet joined. Anyway, I wasn't heartbroken or anything, I wasn't even considering asking her out, but I'm going to be upset if I just lost my second and currently last dance partner because she needs to start spending more time with this new fella of hers.
That story isn't all that interesting either. So even though it's not yet tasteful Thursday, I thought I'd spend today talking about some art. One of my favorite artists is James Christensen. Ever since I was a little kid I've loved his paintings. They have a fantasy type quality to them, which appealed to the little kid in me, but even now they still do not fail to impress. At one point he wrote a picture book called the Voyage of the Basset. I think this was about when I was in the 8th grade so about 1996. Back in the 8th grade all of us Catholic children had to prepare for the sacrament of Confirmation, and one of the things we had to do was meet with our Priest (parents were present) to chat about some subject I cannot remember. Everyone in town loved that Priest. He was exceptionally smart, joyful, and simply fun to be around. He was one of the few adults who managed to retain their childlike nature and it was infectious. Well when I went in for my meeting I saw that book lying on his coffee table, and I was super excited to see that he too liked Mr. Christensen. That made me think I was cool because I had the same taste in art as my superstar Priest.
James is neat because he sometimes works as another artist. I can't think of the word but its like how Mark Twain's real name wasn't Mark Twain. Pen name or pseudonym maybe is the word I'm looking for. WAM help me out here, you are good with words. Anyway, you'll see in that link what I'm talking about. While most of his paintings are fantasy based, every now and then he'll paint a Renaissance like work that looks like it came right out of the 1400s.
A few weeks back I got my hands on one of his prints. It's called '6 Bird Hunters in Full Camouflage', and is signed and numbered by James. Now if you look closely you'll only see 5 of them. That's because the 6th is so good you can't see him! The neat thing about this painting is that it's divided into three sections. That allowed for some unique framing options. For example, I had considered putting them all in one massive frame but staggered. In the end I decided to frame them all separately and stagger them, which is what you see in the picture below.
Update: I've recently noticed that the photo looks incredibly different depending on the monitor it is displayed on. For example, on my laptop the background of this photo is white, and the details in the right panel are clearly visible. However, on my monitor at work the background is yellow and the details in the right panel are nearly indiscernably blackened out.
2 comments:
Pseudonym!
I like the art. Though there is something unsettling about the unevenness of the right and left panels. Why not even those up and keep the middle one higher?
Ha, got it right. I had remembered there's a theologian named Pseudo-Dionysius.
As for the art, I chose three different levels to exaggerate the hilly look. It's also theraputic because my obessive complusiveness would much rather have those two panels be level like you suggest. I have thought about lowering the right panel and raising the left panel because the guy on the right is looking up more than the guy on the left.
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