Empty birdfeeders
Monday, 16 April 2018
Last night’s sunset. This landscape is dominated by light and shadow and shape. No wonder artists flock here. That is the visual dominance; living here you also notice the wind, dust, and temperature. Also sounds of birds (here), perhaps cattle elsewhere.
We cross a dry wash to our casita. In the solar lights along the path, the footprints in the sand looked like a lunar landscape with the treads of sports shoes not those of space suit boots.
Here’s a still life from the counter and wall left of the range in the main house.
This is the handle of the cupboard in the left edge of the photo above. The rest of the knobs are normal.
That’s Green Chili Bread on the left, quite spicy for bread. From the ovens of the restaurant/store we ate at last night. Paired with a normal, simple omelette. Superb breakfast.
After breakfast, I went out to the pool, took my shoes and socks off, and stood in the shallows. The Foot in the wild!
Our main focused activity today was to visit the historic plaza of Santa Fé, eat lunch, then head for the Georgia O’Keefe Museum. Stunning paintings, of course. Loved the photos of her, as a window into the person through her choice of garments, shoes, accessories, etc. This is a crop of O’Keefe’s 1939 painting Bella Donna.
Here are titles from her library. The display included a few sentences from a 1963 letter in which she observed that she’d taken three-and-a-half months to go around the world, then went across the Pacific to Bangkok and back with island stops. She went on to note that twice she’d been to Egypt and the place that stood out to her always was Peru. I assume the mountains….
Of course, there are few Stieglitz photos. And there were soundless moving images of them together, interesting—he seems to be putting up with being filmed while she seems to be somewhat cajoling him to participate (my hypothesis).
These are considered by some the first abstract photos. These two are from 1930 and 1929. Others in the sextet dated back to 1926. They are lovely dark, ghostly smudges, and not the kind of image I think of when I think of AS photos.
Off to cocktail hour chatting and laughing.
The title refers to my viewscape out the picture window in front of me at the casita, and what I noticed as I tried to formulate a title for this post. Very stream of unconsciousness.