My grandson has an obsession: Big Ben. His waking hours are devoted to drawing and building models of Big Ben, tinkering with clocks, drawing clock faces and dreaming about visiting the real Big Ben in England. Here is one of William’s chalk Big Bens:
I’ve mentioned before that both my parents loved music. Dad let my older brother Mike* play on the piano and I’m sure they played classical music records all the time when he was around. For a time Mike responded. I’m told he could hum entire movements from symphonies. By the time I came on the scene, Mike […]
My father loved classical music. Once, I took a picture of him playing. I was hoping to find it. Dad enjoyed playing much more than others enjoyed listening. This is what I imagine he felt like as he was playing. I think it is better to use my memory instead of finding old snapshots.
Today, I added my self portrait to the imaginary brother I have been experimenting with for the past few days, based on inspiration from Willem de Kooning (Imaginary Brother – New Ideas, So Simple, and Yet…, Imaginary Hug, with Feeling. Tri-Cyclopean Portrait). I think I was spoiled by using oil paints on my last portrait. […]
Yesterday’s post was an edited photograph of Dave (my younger brother) and me standing outside Mike’s building at Willowbrook. (For those of you just joining me, Mike is my older brother who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal.) I’m hugging Dave. I replaced my head with Mike’s, from another family photograph, and Dave’s with mine. […]
Over a period of about 10 years or so, I must have taken 300 rolls of film of my brother Mike. I combined these photos with old family snapshots, my journal entries and information garnered from my parents, to create a photographic memoir. It is a safe bet to say Mike didn’t know that I […]
One of the more fascinating bits in Eric Kandel’s* book, The Age of Insight was an alternate appreciation of the people who drew the cave drawings in the Chauvet caves, estimated to be about 30,000 years old. Art historians, including Ernst Gombrich noted that the realistic representation of horses in these caves implied that the humans who […]
I’ve been working from and old family photograph of my mother and older brother, Mike*, taken in the late 1950s when our parents took us on a camping trip (see Portrait, Mike and Mom, Abstract Portrait Mike and Mom, Mike – Close Up, Continuing to Abstract). Yesterday I created the beginning of a watercolor that […]
I finished Patient H.M. today. I have always been interested in memory and have read some of what has been written about this famous patient whose profound memory loss (induced almost certainly) by a bilateral resection of his medial temporal lobes. There was much personal and political intrigue and an appalling sense of the lack […]
For the past couple of days (see View and View – Update) I’ve posted photos of views from hotel windows. Joy and I don’t usually stay in hotels, but we traveled down south to Burbank and points south for a special reason: Our daughter Sarah’s wedding! It was a real Mickey Mouse operation. Everyone had […]
