Sketchbook: Phoenix

Rosson House, Phoenix, AZ

crayon drawing by Rosa Phoenix

Hey! There's a Victorian house in Phoenix!

This is the Rosson House Museum in downtown Phoenix. It was built in 1895 for an early Mayor of Phoenix. It reminds me of the beautiful Victorian houses of San Francisco.

LINKS

Rosson House Museum

Sketchbook: New York

Cloisters Museum

watercolor pencil 

in moleskine watercolor sketchbook

by Rosa Phoenix

Fort Tryon Park is a beautiful hillside park overlooking the Hudson River.  On top of the hill is the Cloisters Museum, home of an important collection of Medieval Christian art.

Fort Tryon Park, NYC

watercolor pencil sketch

in moleskine watercolor sketchbook

by Rosa Phoenix

 It's a lovely place for a picnic!


I also wrote about the Cloisters Museum in my blog post here.

The Red Book by Carl Jung

image from the Red Book, courtesy of amazon.com

Here is a book that has a legendary past: psychologist Carl Jung's personal record of his visions, documented in calligraphic text and color illustrations, called the Red Book.  

Jung's family has kept this private volume locked up for decades, and finally it is being published.

The original is now on view at the Rubin Museum of Art (one of my favorite museums in New York, a mysterious treasure box of ancient Himalayan art). 

The museum is posting pictures of the pages on its website, as each page is turned.

This is a good thing because this is an expensive book with a list price of $195! Amazon has it at a discounted price of $114.07.

The Red Book at Rubin Museum of Art

The Red Book on Amazon.com

Carl Jung on Wikipedia

Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams at SF MOMA

Georgia O'Keefe, painter, met Ansel Adams, photographer, at Los Gallos Ranch in New Mexico in 1929. This show at SF MOMA compares and contrasts these two kindred spirits who were attracted to the same settings and subjects in the big open spaces of the American Southwest.

It's easy to see that for both of these artists, inspiration came from nature. Ansel Adams is known for capturing many of this country's greatest natural monuments in the early days of photography. O'Keefe is best known for her macro-view paintings of flowers and other natural forms.

The works are loosely grouped by subject matter: Taos pueblos and churches with crosses are powerful images in the O'Keefe and Adams works. We also see how both artists were fascinated by the twisting forms of trees, and by the barren hills and riverbeds of the desert in New Mexico.

O'Keefe was a painter who was influenced by photography. She often zeroed in on her subject in close-up, as a photographer would, to capture detail. She also played with scale, making small subjects like flowers and bones monumental on large canvases.

Adams the photographer was no doubt influenced by abstract painters. Many of his photos were taken at times of stark shadow, creating extreme contrasts between darks and lights. This creates abstract rippling lines of shadow in photographs of barren hills and sand dunes.

For me, the O'Keefe paintings outshine the Adams photographs. My eyes feast on her palette of colors, ranging from creamy yellows to rich warm earthy reds to expansive sky blues to velvety purple blacks. Adams' smaller prints seem to shrink in the shadows of O'Keefe's large, glowing paintings. Even her tiny flowers expand and radiate light. It would have been nice to have seen Adams' work on a grander scale, with large-format prints.

Georgia O'Keefe has been my lifelong inspiration. I was delighted to see old favorites and new ones in this show. She painted in a symbolic language that is like that of Chinese painters. A few lines, clouds of color, and spiraling shapes could create a landscape, or a flower, or a skull, or a hill. I admire her economy, spareness and simplicity. Yet her colors are so luscious and luminous, that her paintings truly come alive.

"Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities" is on view at SF MOMA through September 7.

Cloisters Museum, New York City

photo by Terraxplorer

The Cloisters Museum is one of my favorite places in New York City.  

In a castle-like building perched high on a wooded hill overlooking the Hudson River, it seems ages away from the crazed, chaotic city. 

Venturing inside is truly like entering another age...the Middle Ages!

The museum was built by the Rockefeller family in 1928 to house an extensive collection of European medieval art and artifacts, including large sections of stone walls, monuments and columns from cloisters in Europe. These enclose gardens planted with herbs and fruits that would have been cultivated in monastery gardens during medieval times.

The sound of vespers floats through the galleries. 

Butterflies dance around the quince trees in the walled garden. 

The garden terrace high on the hill overlooks a serene vista of a calm Hudson River and an undeveloped, forested wilderness on the opposite riverbank.  

Here in the middle of one of the densest, most crowded cities in the world, is a sense of tranquility and timelessness.

At this spot in Manhattan, it is possible to slip into quiet contemplation and peaceful prayer, as the devoutly religious did in medieval times.

Happy Birthday Satchmo!

American Jazz legend Louis Armstrong celebrated his birthday on July 4. He never even knew that his true birthdate was August 4, 1901.

I visited the Louis Armstrong House Museum in New York, where I took a wonderful intimate tour through the home of Louis and his wife Lucille. 

Interspersed with funny anecdotes of "Pops" you can hear snippets of the many tape recordings he made in the house, filled with impromptu trumpet playing and casual conversations with friends.

Here's something Louis Armstrong and I have in common: collage-making. 

He made a collaged cover for every recording he made.

I completed this portrait of "Satchmo" on July 4, 2008. 

Just in time to celebrate!