Chladni plates, Klee, and Kyoto

"The vibratory impulse is the heart of the matter. It causes the sand to arranges itself in a corresponding rhythmical order. First in other words the vibratory impulse, the will or need for living action, then the transformation into a material event and lastly the visible expression in the form of newly arranged material." Paul Klee Notebooks, the Nature of Nature. 

Klee was steeped in music. Theme and variation, rhythm and proportion. The Chladni plates which prompted this passage must have fascinated him- the visualization of the vibratory impulse. 

Klee continues, "We are the bow, we represent the expressive impulse, mediated by the substance, with the sand figures as the final formal result. ... It is though matter were being fertilized and became invested under this dictate with a kind of life of its own."

Last month I saw sand arranged in forms aimed at stilling or at least distilling  the mind's vibrations. Here are some examples. First at Tenryu ji Temple in Arashiyama then at Ginkasu ji Temple in Kyoto.

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Saturday on the Mall with Meghan

This afternoon Meghan and I walked the Mall, stopping first at the Renwick and then meeting up with Peter before going to the Hirshhorn (too bad the Kusama Infinity Mirror slots were sold out), then a nice interlude in the Mary Livingston Ripley garden, and then lunch at Ebbitt Grill. We had a great time.

Phillips-Lautrec

Before I painted I did cartoons inspired from childhood influences such as comics, caricatures, and satirical stuff like political cartoonists, Mad Magazine, and underground artists like Shelton and Crumb. So when I moved on in my teens to learning about painters, especially turn of the century French painters, Lautrec was incredibly magnetic. Full size torso on stunted legs, he carried a hollow cane filled with absinthe. A parade of continentals behaving badly, a spontaneous sense of composition that caught life on the fly, chaotic compositions, like the dancer's leg thrust into an aristocrat's beak. I've seen many paintings of his but this exhibit at the Phillips was the first time to face the actual posters, and they are much, much larger and more varied than I realized.  I saw stages of his prints, not something I've seen before. Cheret, Mucha, and Lautrec helped fuel l'affichomanie at the turn of the century, but its power endured. Mucha's art nouveau Job cigarette paper ads were newly popular when poster-mania overtook me in my teens in the hippie shops and music outlets,  and I decorated my ceiling with posters of all types, heavily leaning on black light op-art and vintage movie stills. Once while I was  away, my parents let an elderly friend from Memphis sleep in my bedroom. The next morning she said, "I felt so secure with Winston Churchill looking down at me all night" (it was WC Fields). 

In 1977-78, I went to France to paint and on my return I placed in a cargo container a year's worth of paintings removed from stretchers and drawings encased in a series of jumbo concert posters yanked off the walls of Aix, London, and Paris.

National Portrait Gallery

Late today I spent some time at the National Portrait Gallery and was delighted to find so rich an assortment of people, from colonial days through the Civil War to the Golden Age and on into modern times. Here are some samples, and what a range of emotion they have. The colonial portraits had a more intimate emotional effect than usual for formal portraits. So glad to see included people inside and outside the power structure. One corridor had rows of tiny Matthew Brady portraits of everyone from PT Barnum to Harriet Tubman. Upstairs in the Presidential collection I enjoyed the portraits of Lincoln, Grant, TR, FDR, among others. 

Above the Portrait collections was a remarkable group of American art work, some traditional, some dada/surreal, some pop and post-pop. It wasn't until I got on the Metro home that I realized how long I had been standing and walking around in that place. 

At the end of this slideshow is Indiana's Figure 5, inspired via Charles Demuth by William Carlos Williams's "The Great Figure" 

Among the rain 

and lights 

I saw the figure 5 

in gold 

on a red 

firetruck 

moving 

tense 

unheeded 

to gong clangs 

siren howls 

and wheels rumbling 

through the dark city.