day 12

Iteration number 3:

The big news this morning: Al Gore received a Nobel Peace Prize.

My second reaction to this was that I didn’t realize that a Nobel could be given as a consolation prize. I mean, there are conservationists who have spent their lives working themselves to the bone, with little reward, to achieve land or species preservation, and scientists who have risked careers to warn us of the dangers of emissions and carbon fuel consumption, long before Gore put a power point presentation together. And yes, the United Nations climate panel represents this. So why give it to Gore at all? Is there a subtler way to say “stupid American administration?” So political. I don’t think I like it.

My first reaction: a little welling of tears. This was because I felt some of that collective relief that these issues are receiving significant attention. It moved pretty quickly to reaction 2.

My favorite snarky comment over on Gawker.com: “Will he use his Nobel money to buy a small generator for his house?” See the article here.

I suppose this is the moment to point out that all opinions on this site are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect the positions of any associated organizations…

The weather today was schizoid. Not global-warming schizoid but New England fall temperamental. Even when I spend hours working, I am connected to the weather, not just because I am a geek, but because my studio is currently in a sun room here, with windows all around me. Pretty nice. I kept getting lost in my drawing, occasionally looking up and finding myself in the middle of a squall. And then I would look up and it would be sunny again. There were heavy clouds scudding through, so I decided to put some in the drawing.

I spent part of the afternoon visiting the Visual Art Center’s art collection. After walking me through an impressively organized computer catalogue, director Amy Montague left me with a couple of hundred years’ of works all curated around natural history, and primarily focused on birds. You might think that rummaging through an underground vault with rolling stacks and flat files full of art that carefully spends so much time out of the light might feel a little musty, a little Victorian, but I found it to be exactly opposite. There is something very unique about this collection. At one point in a past life I received a faculty study grant and spent a few months looking at paintings in the Museum of Art at RISD, also combing through rolling stacks, but this experience was profoundly different. When in the vaults there, the famous historical associations with various painters, and the brash and blatant egos that screamed out from the canvases colored that experience. Each artist was competing not only with each other for greatness but also with themselves - anyone who regularly visits museums begins to get a feel for when a work by an A-list artist may in fact be one of their B-list works - and this made the collection very inward-looking and almost stony. In contrast, the works today were all outward-looking: regardless of time periods or culture, there was a singular focus, and instead of artistic ego, as I pulled each potential treasure from its slot, I was overwhelmed by a such a strong sense of life. Even the Andy Warhol pieces were tamed, they seemed less ironic and more an expression of joie de’vivre. Here was a room full of the recordings of natural life, and of the quiet and more humble lives that were spent in pursuit of this. No Nobel Prizes.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 10:29pm and is filed under Drawings, Residency, Readings, Landscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.