Everything's going on all at once...

Another photograph from the Lotus Market in Chengdu.  Every once in a while, I get this revelation that life is going on all over the planet, all the time.  At the same time that I'm typing this, for example, countless huge blue trucks all over China are being stacked full of cardboard boxes and are then probably rumbling off to countless marketplaces full of countless people.  Meanwhile, most of the people that I have known for more than three years (i.e., most everyone I know who's in North America right now) is either getting ready for bed or already asleep. Life is going on more or less as usual in all of the places that I've lived or visited, even if I haven't been there in the last twenty years...

Simplistic?  Obvious?  Nostalgic?  Or incredibly cool that we make the connections that we do as we go about the world?  In any case, welcome to my brain, everyone.

But back to Chengdu - the guy in the bottom center of the photo who just noticed me and the camera?  He makes the shot happen, don't you think...?

Taken at the crossroads

A couple of pictures from the main intersection just outside the side gate of the university where we live.

Foreground/Background

!

Mostly about the color, these...

Red, Green, and Orange



Blue with bits of red, purple, and black


A big hunk of pinks, oranges, and yellows, with stars and candy bananas


Chunky blue, gold brown and beige rectangles, and grey.  And a white arrow!

A small place in a large place, and the other way around

Last summer, I took a four day trip to nearby Guang'An, to report on a few projects that my organization is helping with.  One of the people that we visited lived in a fairly isolated area.  As in, "Well, the main road is under construction, so instead taking you on a 45 minute motorcycle ride to the ferry across the reservoir and then hiking up another half hour from there, we're going to drive another hour to the back side of the mountain and hike for just over an hour to get there instead" kind of isolated.  But not that I was complaining - coming up through the woods and cresting the ridge of the mountain, this is the view that I got:



Right around the bend was this building, which turned out to be a small temple, build and maintained by the farmers in the area.




Here is a small hint of what it looked like inside, minus a feeling of dust, dim light, and the feeling that something was still happening that had been going on for a very very long time indeed.





I'm not going to pretend like I know very much about what was going on inside, or even if the temple was Buddhist, Taoist, a combination of the two, or something predating both.  I'm even reluctant to post the photos, but am doing so because, um, why?  The word 'continuity' comes to mind...

Overcast, with patches of umbrellas and isolated lettuce

A photo from the archives showing a not-too-uncommon sight in China - people finding a patch of land just about anywhere to grow a batch of veggies for themselves.

Time warp

Pictures again of the area in and around the coal mining town of Bagou, this time with a bit more focus on landscape.

Two Years Ago - Bridge over changing waters

2009:



2011:



2009:



2011:

Two Years Ago - the vanishing playground

Two Years Ago - Errr, does this symbolize anything?

Our "township" of Hongguang (红光) means "Red Light" in Chinese, and no, that phrase does not have the same connotations here as it does, say, in Amsterdam. (Though I've been told that there is a small, err, business district outside of the University's side gate) Chairman Mao visited a collective farm in this neck of the woods in the sixties, and in his honor, the locals decided to rename their town to reflect the triumphant and illuminating red light of Communism.

When we first got here, the main street from the highway into town was flanked by a large public square on both sides, followed by a roundabout with a statue of the Chairman surrounded by followers and eager nation-builders, like so:



Then came the road construction. For the next year and a half, our walk to the bus looked something like this:





And now we have a nifty brand new underpass!



Notice anything missing?



No word on if the Chairman and crew will make a future reappearance in the public square next to the road, which is still being refurbished...

Two Years Ago - construction timelapse

Many of these pictures came from a hike around campus that Zekey and I took about three days after we had officially moved in, in late August sometime. If I stood at the exact same spot as I did when taking the above picture, you'd get a photo of a six foot tall concrete wall, so I had to back up a bit for this one.



For more pictures of this area, see this post from last September.

From the air

Walmart and Other "Big Box" Stores, Augusta, ME II, oil on canvas, 2006

Picking up a loose end from yesterday's post, I would be remiss if I didn't mention New York artist Yvonne Jacquette before moving on any further. Yeah, it's a bit of a tangent (welcome to my brain, ladies and gentlemen), but she's an interesting painter worth knowing about.

Right Wing II, oil on canvas, 1989

Her work captures the "Oh-my-gosh-I've-gotta-see-this!" feeling that you get (well, I still get, anyway) when looking down from far above.

Lake Shore Drive II, 1997-98

If you want to know more about her, this profile is a good place to start.

Art, Scribbles, and Cy Twombly

From my distracted grazing through the internet this morning comes the news that the artist Cy Twombly died today at age 83. As quoted in the Washington Post -

One of his leading proponents, Kirk Varnedoe, a former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wrote in a 1994 essay that “Twombly is the original ‘My kid could do this’ sculptor and painter.”

When I started out studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, I suppose I found myself agreeing with that statement, though I was a bit too intimidated by the world of High Modern Art to say so. However, over time, I found myself warming up to his work - not necessarily because I had now acquired properly academic Good Taste (though that may have been a part of it), but mostly because Cy seemed to be having so much fun doing what he was doing, and it became contagious.



And because he did it so well! If you've ever worked with oil paint on big canvasses, you'll know that it's not so easy to move around the surface like he did. Doing large gestures like that, you run the risk of having your line looking boring and meaningless on one end of the spectrum, or like a self-indulgent puddle of vomit on the other. Twombly never let his paintings run to either extreme. He slung paint around like Zorro, and his gestures and scribbles turned from heroic to comic and back again.

The thing about abstraction like Twombly's is that once you start to appreciate it, things start to reverse in your mind. Instead of scoffing and saying, "Humph, my kid can do that!", you start to say, "Wow, my kid can do that, too!"



A wall becomes more than a wall. You start to see traces of time, history, and the hands and energy that made it.



(Of course, in this case, it helps that this particular wall was hand plastered and exposed to the elements for quite a while, but you can see my point, right...?)

You start to see art everywhere, even if it doesn't have a recognizable form as such. We all like to look at fireworks and fountains, right? They're simply moving versions of the same principle at work.





I'm not saying that makes me particularly cultured or insightful, but it does mean that I'm often easily amused...


(Look! Some kid built a shelf in the middle of this one!)

And am I the only dad that has a secret urge to join in with his kids in the competition for the window seat on the plane? I hope not...



You mean all along, we've been flying over abstract artworks? Shucks, they told me it was mountains...



Happy noticing, everyone!