Kurt's view

Just really liked this photo of his. It has the content he so loves, and the shapes, the frame, and the color are so sophisticated...

While we're on the subject...

While we're on the subject of architecture, there is a wonderful Scottish Gothic building (gargoyles and all) up the street from my studio. The McIntyre building at Broadway and 18th Street was designed in 1892 by Robert H. Robertson for Ewen McIntyre. It is very ornate and decorative, all recently revealed through restoration. The amount and style of details boggles the mind, including a prominent cross at the top. I have even heard the building described as "unspeakable eclectic."

This is a Japanese view, like the moon hidden by the clouds or a few blades of grass held to the night. Stripped of its detail, the shadow building still has a distinct and pious fingerprint and is no less beautiful.

Love is a funny thing...

These are snaps of a a large scale sculptural installation, "afterparty." It was created by the architectural firm MOS, architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample. I saw it at P.S. 1 last year, and I keep thinking about it. It is part of the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centers joint Young Architects Program (YAP), an annual series of competitions that gives emerging architects the opportunity to build projects conceived for P.S.1’s facility in Long Island City, Queens.

The objective of the project is to provide visitors with an outdoor recreational area for the summer—a much-needed refuge in an urban environment—making the best use of the pre-existing space and available materials. The architects follow a program with a tight budget, and are involved in every aspect of the design, development, and construction of the project.

I experienced it as a large furry tent city. Love is a funny thing...

Highline#1

So far I've been to the Highline twice, once on a rainy and once on a sunny. It's a park created out of an elevated abandoned freight line. In the olden days when I was a child, shipping used to be unloaded from giant ships on the Hudson, stored across the street in giant warehouses, then loaded onto giant freight trains going to final destinations in tiny towns. The trains rode right into the warehouses on tracks above the city streets.

The new park is spare and lovely. There are greeters to answer questions, benches with views and little food carts. It catches a nice breeze and sports some spectacular artistic features. My favorite is the amphitheater of traffic watching. In this context even the pigeons look beautiful.

Week in a Day

Yesterday was one of those travel days where disparate things, make a day feel like a week compressed. We started on Lake Martin photographing birds and gators with Bryan Champagne.









Had a cafe, des graton and boudin, went to a Jam at Tom and Lori's, went over to Jenerette to see Stephanie and the sugar cane fields and ended up eating vast amounts of shrimp and crab at the local.




We met Joel Breaux, a sculptor/architect who's building a sustainable house that as it is transformed by the weather, becomes a work echoing that transformation. Turns out he is also a fiddle player and turned up at the jam.
The distaff side of art was represented by Lori Henderson, a sculptor of bird and humanoid forms, and of course, Stephanie Patton, feminist sculptor/painter, who showed us some early works including the zany purses in the photo.