Thematic Photographic - White

Each week Carmi at Written, Inc. has challenged readers with a theme for photographic inspiration. This week the photographic challenge continues with the theme WHITE.

As you walk down Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, the hustle and bustle of the busy street begins to dwindle past Ninth Street, as the old downtown gives way to the garment district. But just before Olympic, the sidewalk is filled with classical statuary, stark and white.

It's Marco's Art Store - selling Greco-Roman statuary and garden art, and reproductions of oil paintings. You can buy a bust of a bearded Roman senator - and a column-shaped pedestal to display it on. You can buy a bathing Grecian beauty. You can by a rampant lion, a cherub, a plaster angel, a bird bath or a concrete garden urn. You can buy a Corinthian column, any height you'd like.

You can't miss the place - it's right next to a hostess dance-hall, a falafel stand, and a travel agency - right across from where a televangelical church occupies the United Artists' Theatre.

This article, in the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, mentions owner Marco Escobar, who creates these sculptures.

I love L.A.! You never know what you might find here.

Pink Saturday - A shy blossom

Pink Saturday - Beverly at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!

This is Paeonia californica, the native peony of southern California and the Santa Monica Mountains.

If you're familiar with garden peonies, their large and showy blooms like giant crinolines, this flower is shy and understated in comparison. It naturally nods downward, so even to take the photo above, I had to hold its face up to the camera.


But looking at the shape of its burgeoning marble-shaped bud, the thick texture of its leaves, the golden boss of stamens that cluster around the center, you can see right away that it is related to its more showy relatives.


This plant grows in Red Rock Canyon Park, where we enjoy hiking. I've found other plants along trails that wind up through the canyons of iron oxide rich rocks of the Sespe Formation, rocks that some locals call "Malibu mauve" for its dusty rose color. Perhaps the pinky-purple rocks create the perfect habitat for this shy plant.

Red Rock Canyon Park

Of course, pinkness depends on your definition. This flower is sort of a ruddy brown russet color. And there's more pinkness to this plant than just the flower - it's leaves and stems are tinged with a kind of carmine flush.

The new shoots as they burst from the soil are brilliant magenta.

See how pretty, yet subtle this shy blossom is? There's an elegance here you find in native plants, that's absent in overblown and over hybridized flowers.

I've been meaning to collect seeds of this native peony to try to grow it on my west-facing hill. This year, I promise I'll do it.

Thematic Photographic - White

Each week Carmi at Written, Inc. has challenged readers with a theme for photographic inspiration. This week the photographic challenge continues with the theme WHITE.

Performance artist Tim Dey has recreated the "Ghost of Versailles" as white-wigged and white-powdered aristocrats of the court of King Louis XVI of France, using bubble-wrap for materials. That's right - their costumes are made of bubble-wrap, plastic hose, water bottles and plastic wrappers.

This photo was taken at the UCLA Fowler Museum during the opening reception for their 2006 exhibition Carnaval!

Art

Painting in a gallery in the Passage Jouffroy, Paris

"When I was a kid, art meant dirty and that's the way it should stay, I think."

- John Waters

Thematic Photographic - White

Each week Carmi at Written, Inc. has challenged readers with a theme for photographic inspiration. This week the photographic challenge continues with the theme WHITE.

Although we're not getting the winter weather most of the country is getting, it can still get frosty here in Southern California. One morning walking the dog, I took this photo of the leaves of weeds in the park, white-rimmed with frost.

Earthquake in Haiti

A girl in Port-au-Prince was in tears after the quake. Photo: Tequila Minsky for The New York Times

Neg di san fe.
Bondye fe san di.

People talk and don't act.
God acts and doesn't talk.

- Haitian kweyol proverb

These are our neighbors. Let's work to see that those in peril are rescued. That those who are suffering are comforted.

Pictures in museums

This summer while visiting Paris's noted Musee d'Orsay, home of one of the greatest collection of Impressionist paintings in the world, I was shocked to see so many patrons taking photographs of the artwork.

It was clearly OK with the museum - the guards were standing in full view and said nothing.

It actually struck me as kind of funny. I began taking photos of the photographers.

Of course, I succumbed to the practice myself, taking photos of pieces I wanted to remember. Not so much as a picture, but as a record.

Like this painting by Fantin-Latour of roses.

But it was the first time I think I've ever been in a serious art museum where people took photographs of the artwork.

Most museums prohibit cameras in the gallery - for reasons that include copyright infringement, art conservation (in the case of flash photos) and good manners. I don't have any desire to take photos in museums, because I always figure the museum will have postcards on sale that would be of better quality than my photos.

Unlike the Musee d'Orsay, the Louvre in Paris prohibits photography in the galleries.

Recently we went to the opening of an exhibition at a museum here in Los Angeles. It was the members' opening - there was a lecture, and there was a bar and catered food.

While I enjoy these kinds of events, they're more like parties and less like going to a museum, for me. I find it difficult to concentrate on the actual exhibitions. As we wandered through the gallery we encountered, in short order, a colleague, a museum staffer we knew and liked, a donor we wanted to thank, the curator of an earlier exhibition at this museum, a local radio art critic, and our neighbor from down the street.

Everyone seems more interested in socializing than the artwork. Plus, it was so crowded you felt as though you were blocking traffic if you stopped a moment to contemplate a piece.

As we stood there, I saw a woman across the room pull a digital camera from her bag and snap a few photos. I was surprised. Was she taking pictures of the artwork? Or was she taking photos of her friends, or the scene?

What do you think - should it be OK to take pictures of art in museums? Is it different depending on what kind of art it is?

The latest fashions

"This year....fashions are bizarre and common, simple and full of fantasy. Any material from nature's domain can now be introduced into the composition of women's clothes. I saw a charming dress made of corks....


A major designer is thinking about launching tailor-made outfits made of old book-bindings done in calf....Fish bones are being worn a lot on hats. One often sees delicious young girls dressed like pilgrims of Saint James of Compostella; their outfits, as is fitting, are studded with coquilles Saint-Jacques.

Steel, wool, sandstone and files have suddenly entered the vestementary arts....Feathers now decorate not only hats but shoes and gloves; and next year they'll be on umbrellas.


They're doing shoes in Venetian glass and hats in Bacarrat crystal....I forgot to tell you that last Wednesday I saw on the boulevards on an old dowager dressed in mirrors stuck to fabric. The effect was sumptuous in the sunlight. You'd have thought it was a gold mine out for a walk.

Later it started raining and the lady looked like a silver mine...Fashion is becoming practical and no longer looks down on anything. It ennobles everything. It does for materials what the Romantics did for words."

- Guillaume Appollinaire, Le poete assassine, 1916

The Passages of Paris - Cashmere fever

Pink Saturday - Beverly at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!

Shawl seen through the window of Wolff et Descourtis, Galerie Vivienne

In 1798, Napolean Buonoparte brought a gift home to his wife, Josephine. It was a shawl woven from yarn made from the hair of mountain goats in the Himalayas. It was soft, but held the warmth, and yet it was light and gracefully complimented the informal, flowing muslin gowns worn by the court ladies which, following the political aesthetic at the time, evoked classical Greek and Roman images, to celebrate the democratic ideals playing out in the streets of France.

Portrait of Empress Joséphine, 1805, Pierre-Paul Prud'hon

Empress Josephine was being re-gifted - the Ottoman imperial ruler of Egypt, Mameluke Pasha Mehmet Ali, had been given the shawl earlier in the century by an envoy of the Mughal rulers of Kashmir. When Napoleon defeated the Mameluke's army in 1798, the Mameluke gave the French Emperor the Kashmiri shawl in appeasement.

Empress Joséphine, 1809, Antoine-Jean Gros

Josephine loved it. She wanted more shawls. So, too, did all the fashionable ladies in Paris, and that hunger invigorated not only the weaving industries in India and Kashmir, but also French and British entrepreneurs who decided to import and breed the Himalayan goats and start home-grown weaving industries of their own.

Images from Journal des Dames et des Modes, New York Public Library

Scholar and social scientist Walter Benjamin, writing about the covered shopping arcades that sprang up in Paris during the first half of the 19th century, mentioned this fad for Indian cashmere, called "cashmere fever" in newspaper and magazine accounts he quoted in his notes.

Madame Riviere, 1805, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Image from the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

Empress Josephine went on to collect over a thousand cashmere shawls. Every high-class and bourgeoise woman wanted a shawl, and if they couldn't get a cashmere shawl, they wanted something that looked a lot like one.

French fashion plate 1803, New York Public Library

It was kind of like back in the 1990s when everyone wanted a pashmina. Remember that? The pashmina craze of the 1990s was a re-run of the cashmere fever of the 1790s. The same thing happened - the sudden introduction of a new product from the Third World fed a hunger for exoticism, and started a craze that spurred an industry - and inspired a whole lot of charlatans and imitators.

French fashion, 1800, New York Public Library

If you couldn't afford a pashmina, you got something that was blended with rayon and viscose (I have just such a wrap I bought from a street vendor in New York City for $25 and still wear today - it's lovely!)


In Paris during the 1820s and 1840s, ladies wore them to the theatre, and to stroll among the galleries at the Palais-Royal, and as they browsed at the boutiques in the glassed-in passages. Bridegrooms gave them to their wives as wedding gifts. As time went by, mothers passed their cashmere shawls down as heirlooms to their daughters.

French and British weavers learned how to mass-produce the fabric using less luxurious fibers, and soon a woolen shawl woven with a paisley pattern was a common commodity bought by women of all classes, to warm their shoulders in the cold of winter.

This summer, we walked through the Galerie Vivienne, where the Wolff et Descourtis shop sells shawls and quality yard goods. The shop was closed, for lunchtime, but we peeked through the glass at the bolts of brilliantly colored cloth on display.

Lunch was a good idea. We sat down at the Bistrot Vivienne, and enjoyed a nice meal - including a dessert of tarte aux peches.

What a tasty way to enjoy the passages couverts of Paris! I'll make do with my knock-off shawl, and just eat this ice cream.