Marc Chagall’s America Windows

Posted on March 24, 2013 by RegenAxe

America Windows, by Marc Chagall – Music and Painting

America Windows, by Marc Chagall – Literature and Architecture

America Windows, by Marc Chagall – Theater and Dance

Marc Chagall created America Windows in 1977. Originally conceived as a tribute to the American Bicentennial, it was rededicated to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s after his death in 1976. Designed for the Chicago Art Institute, it was created in collaboration with stained-glass artist Charles Marq. Marq fabricated the 36 colored glass panels and Chagall painted his designs onto the glass using metallic oxide paints. These paints were subsequently annealed to the glass. The windows are eight feet tall and 30 feet wide. The work is composes of three panels, each composed of 12 sections of glass. Chagall’s work is infused with images of familiar American icons, references to Chicago, and symbols of the fine arts. These windows are a rhapsody in blue that suggest the creativity possible under America’s freedom and liberty. In the 1986 movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris and Sloane kissed in front of them. They have been a favorite site for lover’s trysts ever since. They were removed for cleaning in 2005, with Q-tips and baby shampoo no less and reopened to the public in 2010.

All day, we’ve been holding vigil for Virgil, the Weather Channel’s latest named storm. Winter has got to be drawing to a close, because the Weather Channel is running out of letters in the alphabet. Virgil is a wet sloppy snowstorm. I don’t know how many inches of snow that we’ve really gotten, because since the temperature hasn’t dropped below freezing all day, a lot of it has already melted away. In a fit of optimism, I put down some grass seed this morning, before the snow really got going. I had heard once that you should re-seed the lawn on the eve of the last snow storm of winter. The new fallen snow prevents the birds from eating up all of your grass seed. I also filled the bird feeders with the last of our bird seed. I can hear them all tweeting to each other, as I write. After a while, Aeneid and I walked up to the grocery store, if only to get out of the house and abate the building cabin fever. The wet snow was perfect for one thing, snowballs. As I was passing beneath a snow draped pine tree branch, Anne launched a missile across my bough.

Sky above Clouds IV, Georgia O’Keeffe

Posted on March 20, 2013 by RegenAxe

Sky above Clouds IV, Georgia O’Keeffe

Today’s news is mostly good, although there is one dark spot. Work today was the most satisfying that it has been in weeks. Primarily because I was able to at the end of the day overcome a particularly difficult technical problem. This success will allow me build a more sophisticated and hopefully more accurate computer model in the next few days. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is.

Dan has been texting us with updates on what appears to be an ever more encouraging job prospect. He first told us that he had had two interviews for this librarian position at the Otis art school and that they both had gone very well. Then he told us that they had initiated a background check on him. Dan’s roommate, who already works there said that this was very positive news. Stay tuned for future developments.

Last Saturday in Chicago, a man was beaten to death on a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) L platform. This murder occurred at the 43rd street station of the Green line. It occurred at 12:30 in the afternoon and was recorded on CCTV. Chicago police are reviewing the video, but as of last I heard, no one has been arrested. The previous Tuesday, when we went to the Museum of Science and Industry, we took a CTA bus. We could have taken the Green line and then transferred, but our L experience Monday night dissuaded us. It was not a decision driven by personal safety concerns, but rather we were put off by the complexity of the Chicago train system, after our rush hour baptism of fire.

We took the bus to 47th street, where we got off and had breakfast at the Original Pancake House. The neighborhood was African-American, but didn’t seem unsafe. We were aware of all the murders in south Chicago. To make a long story short, nothing happened to us, but some other poor soul died not too far from were we had been and not too long after.

I am a great admirer of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. I’ve already posted the entirety of the relatively small collection of O’Keeffe works that have been displayed at the Saint Louis Art Museum and the couple that I saw on my last visit to the Amon Carter Museum, in Fort Worth. The following text is a portion of the Chicago Art Institute’s description of this painting:

Painted in the summer of 1965, when Georgia O’Keeffe was 77 years old, this monumental work culminates a series based on the artist’s experience as an airplane passenger during the 1950s. Working in Abiquiu, New Mexico, O’Keefe began around 1963 to capture the endless expanses of clouds she had observed from airplane windows during trips all over the world. Beginning with a relatively realistic depiction of small white clouds on a three-by-four-foot canvas, she progressed to more stylized images of the motif on larger surfaces, ultimately extending her idea across a canvas that spanned the entire 24-foot width of her garage. Given its scale and the predominance of rounded shapes in the composition, Sky above Clouds IV has often been compared to Claude Monet’s famous water-lily murals.