S.O.S.

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Through the window this morning, flickering behind poplar leaves, the sun rose. Was it S.O.S. he coded? I was on the phone, but I wanted to end it, someone else was calling. What if I, and only I, were the last hope of the sun, losing his way? Now tonight, three flaming candle wicks in glass duck and bob in the corner of this dimly lit bathtub like ladies urgently gossiping around a red tablecloth. I can almost hear them lisping. Yellow heads beat toward each other, but not toward me, and too rapidly and quietly to be comprehended while I am submerged, steamed and exhausted into stillness—eyes fixed on them and nearly hypnotized into sleep. I am an outsider, the last to know, and then, slow to respond. Is it urgency when poplar leaves twist and flutter like drowning hands? Or are they not drowning, but waving? Earthy sheaves of leaf and flesh lace over what burns and glows. Even just atmosphere alone flips the flame into frenzy. Glimpsing, we see some truth of it. But the light is still, in itself, and does not need rescuing.

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synchronizing art & fashion continued: New York Fashion Week Spring 2012

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I painted and designed clothes for fun when I was young. I should have done more with it. Maybe it’s not too late. One way I get my fill of art and fashion now is during the fashion shows when I challenge myself with a visual matching game between pieces of art and new clothes designs. I become a junky looking for color and pattern every day at Fashionologie to see when the next designer’s photos get loaded, and then I go scour online art galleries for matches. It’s creative hedonism. I ignore the news. I forget about poetry. It’s also creative masochism, as my right arm, shoulder and wrist ache with mouse overuse.

My arm will recover, and the somber and complex tapestries of the world will go on being spun without me paying attention for a week. Poems will keep. (But the pears wouldn’t, so Don and I canned six quarts of them after we got home from work last night; bruises and soft spots were spreading.) Of course I was also with our son Peter in spirit through his scary accident when our world did stand still. Thank you for your caring wishes, he is on his way to recovery after reconstructive surgery Monday.

Truly, I look forward to these creations as much as I look forward to morel mushrooms sprouting overnight after April rains when we practically crawl through the woods by the pond and the fallen apple tree scouting for their weirdly beautiful brainy patterns.

I am especially excited by one pairing today. You'll see why in a minute.

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Sometimes a girl just really gets lucky. I don't know how Zac Posen could have designed a suit to look any more Picasso-esque. That peplum on Posen's jacket: serious cubistic hips! Zac Posen, a Manhattanite, first began designing clothes as a boy when he stole yarmulkes from his grandparents' synagogue to make ball dresses for dolls. If you're into clothes like Zac, browse his entire collection of ball gowns, it's simply gorgeous.

Don't you wonder what's happening in this painting?

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 "Interior with a girl drawing" by Pablo Picasso

 Zac Posen suit with Picasso Peplum

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More cubism from Carolina Herrera. Every season this woman's designs knock me out with simple elegance, and this spring collection she does it again. There are actually many cubist paintings of gray that this dress reminded me of, by Braque and Picasso. I settled on Juan Gris.

Painting by Juan Gris

Dress by Carolina Herrera

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Another designer who never fails to satisfy with her confident sense of design and beauty is Donna Karan. She manages to be playful with pattern without being silly. Some of her fabulous collection had pattern, like this, which instantly reminded me of this textile by Lucienne Day, though I had a time finding it, since I didn't know the artist's name. Now that I do, I have learned that Lucienne Day (who just died last year) was a British textile designer who was inspired by abstract art by the likes of Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Hellooo! After the print pairing, see the graphic browns and blacks Donna Karan designed, which reminded me of Paul Klee's painting "Intention."

Lucienne Day's textile "Calyx"

Donna Karan dress

Donna Karan

"Intention" by Paul Klee

Donna Karan

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Now here are my favorite pairings. My charming friend George is one of those people who does many things very well. He ponders, writes, travels, walks, paints, photographs and blogs with utter grace and beauty. If you are not yet familiar with his posts at Transit Notes, you are in for a treat for the eyes, mind and spirit. On his sidebar, George has posted a few of his stunning abstract paintings, and it suddenly occurred to me in my last fashion post a few days ago that I might be able to match his paintings with fashion this season. Although I'd hoped to match clothes with more paintings of George's than one (I'll keep looking), I confess I didn't expect to find anything this well matched, by two different designers: Timo Weiland and Peter Som. "Subterranean" is among my favorites of George's work, partly because it represents an invisible world where life swarms and vibrates, like the inner realms we discuss at his blog, the Rilke blog, and elsewhere.

Timo Weiland dress

 "Subterranean" by George McHenry of Transit Notes

Peter Som dress

Suit by Peter Som


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Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; 

and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

~ Luke 12:27

And now for the local show room. These simple jewels around the farm are beautiful in color, form and pattern. Any designer would be envious, and I imagine that songwriter Solomon himself would compare them with his beloved . . . 

My beloved is unto me as a cluster of pokeberries . . .

As the goldenrod in the field glows like the sun, so my beloved's love is to me . . .

My beloved's lips are the color of the sumac blossom, and as soft . . .

You have stunned my eyes, my beloved, with even one of your lips,
red like the sumac leaf . . .

I have come to your garden, my beloved, and gathered your peppers, as colorful as the jewels of my temple, as sweet as flowers and as fiery as the days of our youth . . .

All fashion photos from Fashionologie.

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Poem: September morning

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September morning

He’s tall as a tower, my son — graceful
in the resilient way

of bamboo, lithely connected
at joints and knuckles.

With guitar he eases out
a tune’s vulnerabilities, bending

fingers and strings as if not
bending at all, as if he were himself

the curve of wind on
a leaf ribbon,

tapping dew-riffs out of air.
Wind is the maestro,

we the geniuses who play
our one sublime

sound — tapering,
sometimes stuttering, ruffled

into harmonics, being blown
with the rest into a song untouchable.

Our son took a bad fall last week and broke a bone in three places. It’s times like this, on this day of remembered tragedy, that we see how fragile and vulnerable we all are.

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syncronizing art & fashion: New York Fashion Week Spring 2012

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Venus of Urbino, 1538, by Tiziano (Titian), Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Those maids in the background of Tiziano's painting are looking for her clothes, apparently. Yet she is unconcerned, and so is the artist. Who needs clothes, to be rendered charming?

An answer from Liotard:

Portrait of Maria Adelaide of France in Turkish Costume, 1753

by Jean-Etienne Liotard, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

I love clothes. I don't shop much now, though I love the adventure of thrift shops.

While there is a lot of misery all around, there is also a lot to admire and enjoy, in fact, we need beauty more than ever in such times as these, like bouquets of flowers for a loved one suffering from injury, illness, or loss.

Looking at women in new fashions is my pastime when the seasons of fashion shows arrive, and Thursday was the first day of the New York Spring 2012 fashion shows. Fashion is wearable art, poetry in motion. After last February's fall shows, I had fun compiling a gallery of art pieces paired with designer duds. I first explore the photos from shows at Fashionologie, then scour thumbnails of paintings and sculpture at the Google Art Project and at online museum collections. I look for arresting designs, both in art collections, and in fashion collections. They lead to each other back and forth, like a game of visual tennis. I'm back at it and plan to make galleries until the end of the New York shows next Thursday. We'll see how things go. You just never can tell when you will experience vita interruptus.

Hans Hoffman and BCBG square up, below. I don't think much says "spring" more than spring green:

Cathedral, by Hans Hoffman, MoMA

BCBG design; I really like BCBG;

the dress I wore for Lesley's wedding was this designer,

but I only paid 200 bucks

Imitation showed some beautiful clothes Thursday. Romantic and feminine. I see several artists' work in their dresses, and I'm not done exploring. Tara Subkoff launched the Imitation line after brain surgery a couple of years ago. Talk about obstacles increasing creativity! She is an actress in films like "American Pie" and "The Cell" and previously founded fashion design house "Imitation of Christ" with Matthew Damhave. Was Imitation imitating these pieces of art?

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Imitation and two artists at MoMa:

Imitation

left: Helen Frankenthaler's "Jacob's Ladder";

right: Gertrud Goldschmidt's (Gego) "Sphere"

both at MoMA


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Imitation and Monet:

Imitation

Water Lilies, Claude Monet

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Imitation and Whistler:

Imitation

The White Symphony: Three Girls, by James McNeill Whistler

Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian


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I love these other designers' collections too.

Graphic blue:

Peter Som dress

Paul Klee's Blaue Nacht


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Graphic yellow and black (or blue) a la Matisse:

Yigal Azrouel

 Henri Matisse

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Sketches by Doo.Ri and Chagall: 
 

dress by Doo.Ri

Joseph sketch, by Marc Chagall


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Graphic gold leaves:

Andy Warhol's Rorschach and dress by Wes Gordon

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Blooming red flowers:

Yigal Azrouel

 Red Cannas, by Georgia O'Keeffe




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Sapphire Matisse blue:

Dress by Jason Wu, and blue nude by Henri Matisse

Those are my standouts from Thursday's and Friday's shows. More to come . . .


February's gallery of synchronized art and fashion for the New York Fall 2011 shows is here.




All fashion photos from Fashionologie

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Polka Dots

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When I was an adolescent in my mother’s kitchen, eating ambrosia salad and pork steaks with gravy made from canned mushroom soup, I was surrounded by the latest pop design. We had just moved back to my hometown after living one year in a depressed town up north. I was about to start sixth grade, and my twelfth (or eleventh?) birthday was imminent. When Twiggy cut her hair short, my sister cut mine like hers.

We moved into the house across the street from where I had spent all my years before the move. The house was my dream house: big, old, oak trimmed, and where I’d played with my childhood friend Jimmie. But the kitchen was a disaster of rusted out white cabinets someone had decided were a good idea when they were shiny and new, the same time they slapped white aluminum siding on the outside. So my dad had the kitchen completely gutted and refurbished with wood cabinets and a pretty wood kitchen table for us who were left at home: Mom and Dad, my brother and me, and an array of foreign students mostly from Thailand.

I remember drawing mushrooms between meals at that kitchen table (along with Snoopy flying his bullet-dotted doghouse Sopwith Camel in battle against the evil Red Baron). Some of the mushrooms had polka dots, which I copied from orange, yellow and olive green placemats, napkins, canisters and glasses Mom had bought for the kitchen. I thought they were cute. I thought they were cartoon imaginings. I didn’t know until walking the farm eight years ago where our own magic mushrooms sprouted, that polka dot mushrooms are real. So yeah, you can assume correctly that I wasn’t ingesting anything psychedelic in the 1960s and 70s. I don't plan to grind these into powder any time soon, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like, after reading stuff like this at wiki:

Spiritual and well being

In 2006, the United States government funded a randomized and double-blinded study by Johns Hopkins University, which studied the spiritual effects of psilocybin in particular. That is, they did not use mushrooms specifically (in fact, each individual mushroom piece can vary wildly in psilocybin and psilocin content). The study involved 36 college-educated adults (average age of 46) who had never tried psilocybin nor had a history of drug use, and who had religious or spiritual interests. The participants were closely observed for eight-hour intervals in a laboratory while under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms.

One-third of the participants reported that the experience was the single most spiritually significant moment of their lives and more than two-thirds reported it was among the top five most spiritually significant experiences. Two months after the study, 79% of the participants reported increased well-being or satisfaction; friends, relatives, and associates confirmed this. They also reported anxiety and depression symptoms to be decreased or completely gone.

Despite highly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, 22% of subjects (8 of 36) had notable experiences of fear, some with paranoia. The authors, however, reported that all these instances were "readily managed with reassurance."

There are many psilocybin mushrooms on our walking path, 
more this year than ever. 
Maybe the heat and extra rain are good for them.

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Poem: Wild

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Wild

Wild, the sky says “dance”
and the clouds obey.

My hands are birds, posing
in the trees, accompanying.

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