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A Painting Exchange with Words about Hobbema's Wooded Landscape

This is a painting swap and collaboration that James proposed the other day where he gives me a painting to write about and I give him one. He had done this last year and wanted to do it again. Last year’s, Painting impressions with Zachary - with words, wonder.

I Gave James the Tower of Babylon

I gave James Pieter Bruegel‘s The Tower of Babel - Wikipedia. I have tried to see the actual work twice and was foiled both times. I’ve studied it formally and have a deep fascination for the breadth and detail in the work. You can read James’ words on the piece in his site: James’ words on the Tower of Babel Painting.

Meindert Hobbema’s Wooded Landscape

To me, James offered up a painting hanging in the National Galleries Scotland by Meindert Hobbema, Wooded Landscape.

When first looked at Meindert Hobbema’s Wooded Landscape my eye quickly saw the people, the path, the woods, and boldly clouded sky. The people in action, as if captured in a photo, are very reminiscent of Pieter Bruegel the Elder paintings of towns people in a mix of action, but this with with far few people and action. It has that life captured and people living their lives in the painting of Early Northern Renaissance painters like the works of those who came out of a Bruegel (elder or younger) or Bosch studio.

Looking at the people they seem to be wearing the dress of the English pilgrims who came to the US in the early to mid–1600s. Many of these pilgrims spent time in or near Leiden, Netherlands before heading off to the Americas. The men in their tall hats with sizable brims and wide band fits that pilgrim dress quite closely. The women’s modest dress and the men’s cut of their coats is very much akin to the paintings of pilgrims that Americans know.

But, the woodsy nature setting is a little different from Dutch paintings and are something I more often associate with English or German paintings. The sky framed by the trees seems like it is snippets of the long sky so common in the Netherlands, but also like it was dropped into England as well.

Staring at the painting for a while I kept trying to get it to tell me where it was.

The skies fit the long sky paintings of Dutch pastoral scenes or the vast paintings of Dutch fleet under sail or in combat on the North Sea. The large clouds billowing is common in both Dutch and British paintings, and very much a John Constable focus years later where the clouded skies are prominent and a focus.

But, in this painting the clouds are there, but occluded by the woods. The woods are a bit dark and provide shadows and cover for the people and buildings. But, as we back out a bit and pay attention to where the light shines it is on the blue grey building with a woman looking out, as if she is in anticipation of someone arriving or returning. With the one of the paths moving somewhat through the middle of the painting and out and away, that is mostly darkened, so not the focus. But, the light is favorable to the path to the right mid-ground with a man and woman walking toward the meeting of the paths near the front of the house with the woman looking out. Is the couple walking the awaited arrival? Or are they just walking through like the others.

In the foreground in the shadow of the trees on the left there are a couple of people talking to a woman and possibly touching hands or one handing something to the other, as the woman sits in front of a rather dark house. Across from her is a tree that has been toppled some time ago and weathered. There are rough piles of large tree trunks somewhat piles, was there a storm in the not too distant past? Are the clouds a new storm coming (but isn’t there always a storm brewing)?

One interesting element missing is a patron and person clearly in focus in the painting. It isn’t the people, nor their built environment that is the focus, which 100 to 200 years prior van Eyck, Memling, and others would have leaned into in their painting. Hobbema’s painting is more organic and not as structured as artist from earlier years. But, Hobbema is a contemporary of Vermeer and there is some rhyming of pale Northern light in this piece somewhat akin to what is found in a Vermeer. In the look across time the rough details in the distance of the couple walking past the house a ways ahead, but the leaves and foregrounds have soft details and rough shapes and not the pristine details of prior generations of Netherlandish painters.

The Gallery Painting Annotation

I tried to steer clear of the gallery’s annotation for the painting at the start, but reading it and mention that this is likely a imaginary place, makes a bit of sense as the mix of Dutch / Netherlandish styles, but the woods were something I couldn’t place (but I’m mostly thinking of flying over the Netherlands today with the vast swathes of farms, flat, and mostly a lack of woods). There are many tells that this is a Dutch painter, but there are pieces that seem to come from elsewhere, or a time in a place I am not quite familiar.

The gallery note of a made up place would make sense of the billowing clouds of darkening long sky, but paired with wonderful sun dappled woods and a potential village are added to a more pastoral and flat scene-scape. With Hobbema known for their wooded landscapes, I think of Thomas Kinkade’s cozy town cottages and paintings of the 1980s to early 2000s and the request and offers of payment to add more warmly lit candles and touches of light. But, with Hobbema was the request, “add more woods”?

Where Do I Land?

The painting has entertained me with the exercise of trying to sort out where this would be, what is the story being told (or what myriad of stories can come out of the painting), or is the painting just a painting to be a painting. Was this painted for a Dutch audience or a British one, as both around this time leaned toward large scenery and sky paintings. Constable is a half century or more yet to arrive.

This is now a painting I would like to see. I could also craft stories from this painted scene, with each visit to view and craft some new tale, much like sitting in a cafe with a street view and many tables of customers and telling the stories of the table guests and passers by.

Religion in Literature Made an Impression

When I was in college at Saint Mary’s College of California I needed to take a religion class to graduate. I chose Brother Micheal Meister’s class, Religion in Literature as it covered a book I knew which I wanted to read (Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). There were three or four other books to be read in the semester.

The first book up is one that blew me away. It was Chiam Potok’s book My Name Is Asher Lev which focusses on a coming of age young adult, Asher Lev, who is an artist in training and wanting to become much better. He is in a Hasidic Jewish family and his father is very conservative and aims to strictly abide the framings and limitations of the faith. The book moves through Asher’s trying to learn to be a better artist (with the assistance of Jacob Kahn a successful artist) and grow in his faith.

The book and the class are a wonderful dive into the art world, a myriad of artists, and works of art. The class became not only a discussion and deep dive into the book and its connection to religion, but a great discover into art appreciation and art history. Brother Michael used about half of the class to give background on the artists and the works mentioned in the book before we’d focus on the text. This focus on art was a great bonus for this course.

The Framing of the Art

Coming into this course I was playfully dismissive of impressionist art, particularly Claude Monet. Posters of Monet’s works were on the walls of many (if not most) of the women’s dorm rooms. I called impressionist art “far away art” as the farther away you got the more it looked like something, as well as “these artists could benefit from a good pair glasses”. But, in the time we spent reading the book and the background presentation on art my perspective changed a lot. I gained an understanding and appreciation for Monet, but also many more artists. To this day I have paintings I enjoy seeing and spending time with that are works of Monet.

Monet had some of the focus. But, Picasso’s Guernica played a large part and there is a lot in this large work. Brother Michael brought solid understanding of not only the Guernica, but many other works of Picasso, as well as the history of the town of Guernica that Picasso was trying to express. I had interest in Picasso’s works, but this focus gave me understanding and appreciation beyond what I came in with. Picasso’s quote, “Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth”, also makes it in.

Understandably, Marc Chagall’s works were also a focus. Going in I found Chagall’s work, odd at best. But, the framing and background in the book through the instruction of Kahn, and the professor in class framed the semi-absurd constructs and color use in a way it made sense and how to take it in. Within a few months I would be going back into the Pompidou Center for the second or third time, and one of the first pieces I passed and it quickly caught my eye was a work of Chagall. Not seeing the signage, I knew it was Chagall, which I wouldn’t have given a moment prior nor recognized it. I spent a few minutes trying to understand the painting and interpret it, but I was there to see a few other works and not a lot of time allotted that day.

The book opened up the class for time learning about Michelangelo, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Kandinsky, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, and Renoir among others. This was far more than just a religion or literature course in a fantastic and lasting way.

The Appreciation

The appreciation of Monet has grown through seeing 6 of the works (may have been eight) of the paintings of the time and light studies of the Cathedral of Rouen when they were brought together at the Musee d’Orsay. This gathering of the works was stunning to see the shifts and changes captured so well. I also have spent many trips to the National Gallery in DC to see the study in time and light of the Houses of Parliament at sunset, which evokes an emotion of longing that is almost a light ache, in sort of a good way.

Having visited the gardens and house in Giverny so much more came, uh…, into focus. I didn’t expect this to engross me as much as it did, but seeing the subject of many paintings and on many dorm walls, was impressive. Yes, I squinted and unfocussed my eyes. Seeing the Japanese garden bridge made the paintings with it as the focus more tangible and not just something someone painted but captured the spirits and grace of it all.

Thank you Brother Michael for waking up my mind and giving me the ability to appreciate and experience something prior I just shrugged off. The understandings from not only Chiam Potok’s book, but Angelou, Falkner, O’Conner (my mother is a fish), and another were expected, but also opened my literary mind as well.

BBC Global Focus on Lina Ghotmeh and Her Architecture

This morning I woke too early to head to the farmer’s market so I hit YouTube (as one does) and found this gem from BBC Global, Lina Ghotmeh: How to design buildings that remember the past. It is about Lina Ghotmeh, whom I didn’t know about before.

The video is wonderful, but the work of Ghotmeh is stunning. It has been a while since I’ve run into a new (to me) architect who is refreshing to hear discuss their work and perspectives, but also sees things differently and that difference make a fantastic outcome. The beauty of flow and space in her work, but also deeply considered understanding of history and cultural context is magnificent.

It has been a while since I’ve heard good architecture discussions, from basics to really good quotable insights.

Architecture has to talk about the environment, it has to talk about context, and to do that, we have to understand that environment in the large sense of what an environment is.

There was a great quote regarding her winning the work to be the architect for the Estonian museum - Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture | Estonian National Museum - and she said the blind review panel thought they were Estonian with how well they understood the culture, history, and environment. That is the sign of good design and development, where the needs and concerns are understood and perceived as those doing the work are “one of us”.

The competition itself was opened in 2005. It was an anonymous competition, so they didn’t know that we were foreigners — they thought we were Estonians.

The discussion of the Stone Garden work in Beirut, Lebanon provided really good insight and creativity to embrace the pained history while easing a means for inspiration for growth and recovery. (Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture | Stone Garden Housing - Beirut)

In 2020, August 4th, there was a huge explosion in the port of Beirut. Stone Garden was one of the first buildings that was hit. It actually resisted the explosion. It was designed to endure earthquakes because Lina did look back at the site, at history, at what was happening in Beirut. In itself, the building embodies resilience.

A term that Ghotmeh’s firm uses is, “archaeology of the future”, which I find to be a really good reflexive perspective while researching, designing, and building something informed for the near now and the future.

It’s about always digging in the place, understanding the context, understanding the client — that takes the form of different research elements, images. Every time you build something, you’re actually projecting into the future. And that’s why it’s an archaeology of the future.

The video wraps with her presentation to the British Museum for the redevelopment of the Western Range - Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture | Stone Garden Housing - Beirut and the outcome of that pitch and review process.

Looking at the Corpus of Work for Lina Ghotmeh

This video has had me digging into the architecture firm, Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture | Paris and going through the volume of work she and her firm have already done. There is so much wonderful work and many insights, that I know I will be returning to it.

Great Art and History Pairing

A week or two back while reading the Financial Times I stumbled upon a piece about The Metropolitan Museum of Art having added Alberto Giacommetti sculptures to the Temple of Dendur room - Giacometti’s fragile figures mingle with the gods at the Met.

I have a strong appreciation for The Temple of Dendur in The Metropolitan Museum of Art room. I think nearly every trip I’ve made to New York City / Manhattan and stayed, I have made a stop to visit this room. My first trip to The City in 1991 I stopped in to see The Met and gave myself around 45 minutes to an hour (yeh, I know) and I wondered through the galleries on a speed run looking for something that would match my (then) art appreciation. After about 15 minutes I went down and wandered into the Temple of Dendur room and was instantly amazed.

There are a few galleries and museums that bring the outside world and inside world into the same space. The Uffizi in Florence has a spot leaving the upper level of the gallery to exit where you look out a window and the Duomo is perfectly framed by the window. My thought was, of course this is included in the gallery, but yet it isn’t. The Temple of Dendur room to me is much the same, but at a much grander scale.

The temple room not only has the temple assembled in it with a water feature around the temple as an echo to the Nile, but the room with its floor to ceiling angled glass wall not only bring in natural light, but provide an amazing view of Central Park. I’ve been in the summer, but the fall and winter views out are amazing. In fall the changing colors come in and are a background blanket of colors and textures that add a wonderful glow to the pace. In winter, when the trees are barren the site is more stunning as the room pulls in the stark nature sketched remnants of trees as a backdrop and part of the exhibit with a bit more of a view of the architecture of The City and its artful glory.

From my first trip to each that followed, I’ve entered the room and been absorbed and it takes a while to get out. The room brings focus and often calm. But, it takes me in different directions with bring drawn in by the inside out gallery view, where the park and The City are fittingly part of the exhibit (as they should be). But other times it is the interplay of now and then across history and time, were I to blink (maybe really hard) would I open my eyes to an other time?

Now with More Elongated Forms

I have long been a fan of Giacometti’s works as the elongated forms seem fragile yet elegant, as well as whimsical as a giraffe. I’ve never sorted the how nor why they pull me in. They feel a little like alien form, but comfortably familiar like your long shadow from a low sun has taken more than a flat form and you can see it from many sides as you walk around it.

But the addition of Giacometti’s sculptures to the temple room seem like a magical fit - Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur - The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The pairing of the elongated forms and the tall elongated passage entrances to the temple and the gates seems like it would add to the magic of the room and space as a natural fit.

I’m really hoping to get to New York to catch the exhibit before it is gone. The bringing the now, to the nearly now, to the ancient versions of now into one magical space.

Musee d’Orsay and the Three Mixed-media Arabs

I swear I have written about this before, well I have, but just in my notes going way back.

It took James asking about Museum memories for this IndieWeb Carnival March 2026 to get this out. James asked about museum memories and I have many (I may link a list of them which I may write on) and there were at least four that throw me and get me lost in a good way. One of these is this…

Musee d’Orsay and Three Travelers

In 1987 I had my first trip to Paris and was told by many I needed to go to the Musée d’Orsay and many had suggestions of what I must see. The expanse of the museum in an amazing spacious former train station is a gem of a work in and of itself. The stone and light play wonderfully in the space. As we started out for the museum we had to work around Le Tour de Francethat was racing into Paris that morning, it was great to see it. But, arriving in the museum I couldn’t remember what I “should see”.

Toward the end of the main room there were three sculpture busts that called me over. It was three mixed media pieces by Charles Henri Joseph Cordier that were listed together as The Three Arabs (Algerians). Each was a bronze face with alabaster hats and clothing that were moved by the North African breezes. But, one of the three really caused me to pause, consider, and think. It was the Arabe d’El Aghouat en burnous - Charles Henri Joseph Cordier | Musée d’Orsay who had an alabaster robe with hood that went around his bronze face and head.

Part of what struck me was the movement of the alabaster cloth. But, with the cloaked sculpture and a hood, I couldn’t sort out how the hood, face, and head worked. Each angle and time I’d look I was see another detail of the sculpture that drew me in and distracted me from the static mechanics of how it was done. Whomever I’m with often nudges me onward, but my mind is stuck and enrapt with the hooded in hard alabaster bronze face that seems to have the alabaster moving freely like cloth captured and frozen in an instance (yet crafted over much time).

The Returns

I have been back to the Musee d’Orsay three to five times since. With each visit I wander around a little, usually making sure to also see the sub-set of Monet’s studies of light of the West Facade of the Cathedral of Rouen up on the fifth floor. But, I first make sure the three alabaster and bronze sculptures are still there. Early in the visit I will make my way to the three sculptures and take them in anew again. Then I get drawn into the how the hood, head, and face work. The head looks full or mostly full.

This minor mystery to me will still be with me for years between visits. I run into people who are fans of Musee d’Orsay (but, who isn’t) and want to talk about the three Arabs, but nobody I’ve met seems to know they exist. I am so grateful to the museum to have these sculptures on their site, but also Google Maps has them in the 3D exploration of the museum. When others have said they did not see or didn’t notice these sculptures I have to go and check it wasn’t some personal mirage of my own, and it isn’t. But, the mystery of the hood is still real to me. My inspection of the mystery also has me (and sometimes my museum companion for the trip) a little concerned that a guard has flagged me for the close inspection from all angles with fear I am prepping to steal it.

When I am there and taking in the three pieces I am usually the only one around it looking at them for anything more than a few seconds or passing glance. It feels like they are hidden in plain sight.

The Others

The other two pieces are also really well done and I do feel like I have neglected them each visit. Homme du Soudan en costume algérien - Charles Henri Joseph Cordier | Musée d’Orsay is one that the museum site has a decent back story about the work and the artist. He has a strong pose and looks quite determined.

The other is Femme des colonies - Charles Henri Joseph Cordier | Musée d’Orsay and the bronze has more details with an under garment under the alabaster robe, and also has a piece of sturdy jewelry on her upper arm. Her hair stands out with is braiding and spikes. Her stance is mostly strong and confident, with a serious dose of “I’m over it” and taking a break.

These two pieces and the hooded one all do great justice capturing humanity and a moment in time, with more than an essence of being. In these works the museum as brought in everything but the breath of humanity in its glory.

Time to Notice

These pieces stand out to me and I wish others would see them too and be struck by them in the same, or similar, manner. But, I know they are actually there and amazing to someone as others walk by not giving much notice of any kind.

More…

I have more than 30 notes on memories of museums that I’ve been fleshing out a little. I may post the full list and sketch more out with words over time. There are three more museum piece I hope to write in the near future. There is also a piece about cities as museums I really want to finish framing and wrap up its writing.

IndieWeb Carnival - Totems

This is following the prompt - IndieWeb Carnival July 2025: Totems | Maxwell’s Realm, as set by Maxwell Joslyn. All interpretations of totems have come to mind from things I’ve kept in my pockets, a Swatch watch on my belt loop from high school through much of college, my dad’s watch, to a regular cap. But, growing up in the Pacific Northwest the idea that comes to mind when someone says “totem” are the native tribes of the Pacific Northwest’s totem poles and art.

As a young child living in the Seattle area and Portland there were not only totem poles around, but a lot of Totem poles - (Wikipedia) around and I enjoyed them and if we were traveling and there were totem poles around, we needed to go see them. I picked up a couple replicas for my book shelves as a kid and had them for a long time (I swore I still had them). But, it was not just the poles, it was Northwest Coast art - (Wikipedia) that also drew me in.

We would take regular trips each year to Vancouver, British Columbia, which meant even more totem poles and art. Stanley Park had is large totem pole, which we needed to visit, but as I found or more we needed to go see those as well. I could stand and look at them for a long time, but my parents didn’t have the same interest in staring at them and walking around them.

Once my family moved to Portland, Oregon the opportunities weren’t as prevalent to see the totem poles, but the art was all around. In my perspective the best thing about Portland was being close to Lelooska Foundation & Cultural Center – Living History Museum. Going to see Chief Lelooska and the Cultural Center for school trip and cub scout trips, and any other opportunity, was a perfect time in my book. Going to the long house celebrations with the stories and dancing, which came with explanations were fantastic.

This art and gathering called out the local salmon, ravens, hawks, orcas, and more in celebration and made each of them seem even more special. The sometimes world around you that can get overlooked by the day to day (even for kids) gets pulled into pure focus.

Weeknote - 10 January 2021

The first week back at work after a 10 day break was going well, other than a continual battle with my work computer that had a battery bulge that started six months ago and slowly turned into throttling, slow cursor and slow recognition of keystrokes at times, and regular crashes. The long replacement / fix cycle is pure Covid impact. After on Friday 5pm my refresh the laptop arrived, it felt like I got half my brain back spending time getting it setup (that process is still underway).

But, the insurrection actions to take over the U.S. Capitol took the focus of the week. Work Thursday and Friday was a welcome distraction, but lack of sleep and a computer doing its best to die made them not overly productive. I never thought I would see the U.S. foundations attacked in such a brutal way. Large mobs fed by outright lies trying to keep Congress from doing what the Constitution requires them to do is years and decades in the making. Chants to execute the Vice President because he said he couldn’t do what there is no legal path for him to do is beyond excuse. Attacking the the monuments to the democracy, but also attacking the Constitution and what it has laid out to protect the U.S. democracy is pure insurrection. This is a true wicked problem that is a tightly wound gordian knot of complexity. Having leader still sitting in office that supported the insurrection and the lies that created its actions is beyond me. They are sitting in seats and elected bodies they don’t believe in and want to destroy and want to run a country with a Constitution they want to destroy.

Read

Friends shared the Rijksmuseum’s now offering high resolution images of their collection, which are stunning.

I restumbled upon SPACE10, which I used to follow but the RSS feed seem to have broken, but some of their long pieces (which is many of them) are not structured well for a long read and they have the scroll bar in the browser turned off to know roughly how far along you are in a long piece, and there are no anchors in the long pieces to link to sections of relevance. It is a really not well conceived site for people thinking about architecture and a structured world.

That said, their piece on The Digital in Architecture: Then, Now and in the Future is rather good, it reminds me of a collection of presentations on information architecture from some of the top information architects from around 2003 to 2015 or so. The piece also has a good bibliography, but nothing is linked (I’m really not sure they understand what they are doing with the web, but they content is interesting and that is likely why I pushed it off my radar in the past).

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for fast Flow by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais finally arrived. This looks much better than what I had thought it was and may dig into it over the weekend. I picked it up to gut around the topic of teams and optimizing them, particularly around adaptive teams. I a lot of experience with building and running teams and team ecosystems in large organization and bringing helping them be modern and breaking out of the command and control as well as chain of command model non-digital companies lean on (which destroy capabilities and efficiencies and mostly died out in the early 2000s except for the dinosaur companies - for more than 20 years I’ve flipped that models and been able to vastly improve every important metric). I haven’t found good books on teams that echo not only the experiences I’ve had and have consulted others on, but ones I see as prevalent in most of the high performing companies that work the same way. I know Team Topologies is more focussed on DevOps / developer / engineering models, but some underlying foundations for improving my framing of things is what I’m looking to get out of it. There are some things I don’t fully agree with and I regularly see as problematic that are listed in headings, but I don’t know their take. What I do know is a lot of the reference materials they point to are ones I’ve long used and have in my foundations as they echo experiences and things I’ve seen in practice that are really good (I love well documented books, particularly ones that use solid references that hold up with time).

Also arrived is a used version of Paul Madonna’s Everything is its own reward, which is a book of his monochrome watercolor and sketches of San Francisco. It is wonderful and takes me back to a San Francisco I deeply miss and loved. Even though it was used, but still had the poster piece tucked into its back cover sleeve. This poster is a wonderful edition.

Watched

News…

Listened

New to me band, Her, fit the mood early in the week and I’ve added them to easy access in some playlists.

Exponent - Episode 191: Facebook, Twitter, and Trump was a good conversation that was a bit out of sync, but good from a thinking and considering the situation piece.

Postlight Podcast - WordPress and Beyond: With Matt Mullenweg was really good, as expected. Some of the side discussion that started Paul Ford thinking, really have me intrigued. I’m needing to go back and track these down.

I had A.J. Croce’s A.J. Croce album on and had forgotten how good it really is. It is so well recorded and produced as on decent headphones or sound system it sounds like you are in the room with them. This was the in the soundtrack of the cross country drive with my dad in 1993. But, even with those wonderful memories I’ve always loved this album as there is so much good music in it and the lyrics are really good with nice turns of phrase.

Productivity

I’ve gone back to a practice of daily notes (the daily dump) in Obsidian / markdown that helps keep track of thoughts. It is similar to the sections I have for the weeknote template, but include: Thoughts, read, talked to, health, watched, listened to, worked on (personal items - I haven’t kept a daily work journal in a long while, but have daily meeting notes I keep in my work environment), learned, ate, bought, added to wishlist. These last two are to keep track of why.

One of the things I’m trying to sort through in my notes, research, and writing process workflow that I’m doing between just the daily notes and weeknotes is a microcosm of my regular workflows for writing (which I’m getting back to). My notes sit in directories in markdown files that are now in Dropbox for mobile device access and Obsidian sits on top of them linking things together and all is searchable in spotlight and DevonThink Indexes it. My writing is now in iA Writer, which works best with iCloud directories, which can be searched by Spotlight, but is outside Obsidian and outside DevonThink.

I sometimes start writing in iA Writer, but they may be: Just a stub, more fleshed out but still a draft, mostly finished but not posted / published, or posted / published. I have many pieces from mid-summer around the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd was murdered, which really moved me, but they weren’t finished or posted. Weeknotes ran into multi-week notes, then into just idle and start from scratch. There are things I know I have written I want to point to, but they aren’t shared out (this is a common issue). I finally created a quick template for marking the state at the bottom of a piece in progress. But, this isn’t helping sort through my central repository in Obsidian where searching across that collection and interlinking to pull things closer.

I’ve swapped through a bunch of writing apps and at the moment I have no interest in moving off iA Writer as I really like it. There are some things I need to investigate for some writing coming (footnotes, tables, and possibly integration with Grammarly as I need to get back into good writing patterns and practices). In the past my long or focussed writing was in Scrivener, which I still love, but its treatment of markdown as second class citizen, which made it difficult to have a smooth workflow with for publishing to the web. I used Ulysses for a short while, but its own structures and not freely available markdown files made it not work well at all in my workflows. There is a lot I really like with Ulysses and Scrivener with notes and note management, but easy working across devices isn’t as smooth as iA Writer nor as smooth as the workflow that is easy with freely available markdown files.

Drawn by the Weather Project

Okay, I admit it, I have a passionate interest in the Weather Project. I have been enrapt with the photos of the visitors (David Gallegher, Eliot Shepard, Dan Hill, etc.

I have yet to completely figure out what has me fascinated with this exhibit. One element is the color as well as the light. There were early mornings in San Francisco when I was heading east on California Street near Masonic and watch the new sun rising over the hills and the bay with an orange-red glow. That was one of the more spectacular views I have seen anywhere. The weather project has a similar color and intensity, but with a more ominous power than one of striking beauty.

Design graduation speech to wake the artist

Communication Arts this month offers their Interactive Awards, but also opens with a great graduation speech to artists and designers from Sean Kernan. This speech really hit home as similar topics have been on my mind of late as I have been trying to work through some long writing pieces related to the Model of Attraction, but also have not been able to do what I truly enjoy and usually get paid for. In this time I have been helping Joy get ready for junior's arrival and running incessant errands. This piece really has struck a strong chord as at the heart of things I have a strong creative spirit that has been a musician and writer. This is balanced with an extremely logic driven side, that eases its way into programming and other highly structured pattern making and pattern discernment.

I wish to come back to this article over and over through time. I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did.

Portland Moving Public Art

I uploaded my quicktime movie of Portland moving public art(3.5MB Quicktime movie) that is located across the street from Powells Books. This was taken from my digital still camera, but I really wanted have a picture of this in action. Now I share.

Chiam moves on

I learned a great deal about art and myself from reading My Name is Asher Lev, which is now ingrained in my senses. The author, Chiam Potok passed away today. It is days like these that you wished you had reached out and said thank you, at the very least.

Film Strip Art

Film Strip art provided a great diversion. [hat tip Eric]

Cities of Ideas

Today's New York Times provides Creative Cities and Their New Elite, which theorizes that cities with higher than normal gay and bohemian populations are fertile grounds for economic sustainability, innovation, and technical growth. There seems to be a strong correlation between open accepting environments that recognize the importance of creativity and intelligence and the other measures of successful city cores that are economically viable. The article focuses on Robert Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life", which fully fleshes out these discussions. The Austin American-Statesman expounds on the Cities of Ideas in their series. The core of growth is based on knowledge and ideas that provide the fuel for the local economy. The precept seems to account for the cities I truly enjoy, including Amsterdam and Paris.

The Communication Arts Design Interact SOW is MoMA's The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934, a well done Flash presentation of the exhibition. As always the SOW (site of the week) provides great background on the how and why of the site. The exhibit site is http://www.moma.org/russian.

Carrie points to Launch New York City: After the Fall, a wonderful Flash presentation of post September 11 NYC by photographer Geoffery Hiller.