Ralph Waldo Emerson Wants Us to Bloom Where We're Planted

"To laugh often and much;

to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;

to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better,

whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;

to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.

this is to have succeeded."

Magritte's The Empire of Light

Yet another find at book repair. I was working on a book containing a comprehensive collection of Magritte's works as well as a bibliography, and discovered many new beautiful images. Unfortunately I was not able to find copies of most my favorites online, but since this particular piece is fairly well known it was readily available. It gives a good look into the style and feeling of Magritte as a painter, but its hard to see the whimsy that he is so good at capturing. I found that he was good at capturing moments, as well as making fun of those moments. This picture gives a beautiful example of his skill at capturing movement, the water seems to be awake and alive. One of my favorite things about 

Magritte as an artist was his appreciation of women and their natural beauty. He had many busts and paintings of women and the female form, and I can't recall any of them that were stick figures wearing pounds of make-up. He used paintings of female forms without heads to represent the way in which our society can tend to see women as objects or items, rather than living, breathing, feeling, women. Any time an artist is able to capture and criticize an aspect of society that they disagree with, they have my respect. I admire most the artists who use their talent to not only create beautiful things, but to express their own beliefs and truths to others. Some are not able to express their views through words and ideas, and so they turn to other mediums and outlets. Magritte uses his skill as an artist to express his own sense of whimsy and beauty and truth, and I'm grateful that I have been able to see and hopefully understand something about him and his personality and beliefs.

Another Lucky Find

While repairing a book on the life and paintings of Jean Fragonard, I was happy to stumble upon such a beautiful painting. A fair amount of his paintings were of cherubs and fairies, wealthy lovers and fat, rosy cheeked children, and lacked a certain depth that usually attracts me to a piece of art. But this particular painting manages to reflect Fragonard's warmth and cheerfulness, while still portraying a believable moment in a girl's life. The attitude and expression of the girl's face is far more natural seeming to me than many posed smiles or lofty looks in other portraits of the same era. I imagine that the girl was told to pose while reading and, if she were anything like myself and it was even a half-decent book, she became caught up in the story and forgot to affect a look of coy enjoyment or sophisticated contempt. The rich, warm, yellow tones of the painting are very appealing and make the girl seem far more real and breathe life into the painting. I love working in a place where one day I can just happen to find a painting that I love, and the next day and I run across a beautiful poem, and then next day I can get sucked into reading a new and exciting story. Not to mention the amazing things it has done for my stores of random trivia knowledge.

The Reader by Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Wind and Window Flower by Robert Frost

LOVERS, forget your love,
  And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
  And he a winter breeze.

When the frosty window veil
  Was melted down at noon,
And the cagèd yellow bird
  Hung over her in tune,

He marked her through the pane,
  He could not help but mark,
And only passed her by,
  To come again at dark.

He was a winter wind,
  Concerned with ice and snow,
Dead weeds and unmated birds,
  And little of love could know.

But he sighed upon the sill,
  He gave the sash a shake,
As witness all within
  Who lay that night awake.

Perchance he half prevailed
  To win her for the flight
From the firelit looking-glass
  And warm stove-window light.

But the flower leaned aside
  And thought of naught to say,
And morning found the breeze
  A hundred miles away

Its beautiful and terrifying at the same time

Baile Tehuantepec

Diego Rivera

I work in the Book Repair Deptartment of the BYU library, and I run across some pretty interesting books as I work. In the past few weeks my favorites were How to Lie With Statistics, Zsa Zsa Gabor's How to Catch a Man, How to Keep a Man, and How to Get Rid of a Man, and a book containing Diego Rivera's complete works. Its been making me miss California real hard. And not just because the paintings often have that southwest, Mexico feel, but because so many of his paintings were murals done in public places and beautiful homes. You were a lot more likely to run across public art in California than here in Provo or up in Kennewick where my family lives now. Even though I grew up in a small town, it seemed like there was more value placed on the beautification of public places than there is out here. There may not have been a whole lot of people in town, but the places we visited were always asthetically pleasing, unlike here in Utah where the goal seems to be to get as much building or advertisement as possible into every space. Views are blocked, spaces are crowded, and everything seems to sprawl without direction or meaning. It makes me feel like a hamster thrown into one of those complex system of tubes. Everything is well maintained and organized, but its full of unnecessary turns and hills that could have been avoided if anyone had taken a little while to plan instead of just connecting tube after tube. As Anne would say, there is absolutely no scope for imagination in a place like this!