Looking and Seeing

My little girl found a flower "falling apart" in the backyard this evening, and gathered these petals, placed them in a bowl of water, and set it on our table.



I don't know how long this fetish about colors in bottles at different lights will last. My obsessions, serial in nature, usually go on until I figure out the problem is I feel compelled to solve. These various photos probably seem identical to my readers; but they all represent different arrangements and different combinations of colors through time.

This set tonight was backlit as the sun fell toward Twin Peaks in the west.

I did something similar a couple years ago, before I was a Blogger*. Maybe I'll dig out those photos one of these long summer evenings. In that experiment, I filled water balloons of various hues with water, then arranged them in what (to me) seemed to be color patterns.

I've always loved colors, they seem magic to me. I don't have a particularly sophisticated color sense; many years around designers has led to this piece of self-knowledge, but I somewhat make up for this deficiency with my passion.

During my brief career as an art dealer, selling Rauschenberg paintings for hundreds of thousands of dollars per piece, I began to appreciate Rauschenberg's various obsessions, including the color palette that he employed over and over again. Even so, when it came to color, he often made me mad. For example, the subtle greens and browns he used for an Earth Day painting, a signed print of which my second wife and I received as one of our most special wedding gifts (it now hangs in her home), riles me up every time I look at it.

You could say I'm more of a Primary Colors kind of guy.

Still, Rauschenberg did produce one richly colorful piece during the period I was representing the owners of his works -- a deep red rendition with an image of an egret -- way back somewhere on this blog, I posted a photo off that piece, which is no longer available for purchase, sadly.

I believe I could still wrangle a piece free if anyone had about a million U.S. dollars they wanted to drop. Last time I checked, it could be had. It is a huge piece; you'd need the walls of a mansion to properly display it (or a museum). But, as it is essentially an ode to his favorite first assistant, himself now a successful artist on his own, the story behind the painting would make this kind of price a bargain once the last of our great American artists from the post-war abstract expressionism/pop art phases passes on.

Prices are always about relative value. That's what makes art such a strange commodity to trade. The death of an artist automatically results in an uptick in his market valuation, simply because (s)he, finally, is done, and the finite number of works (s)he has produced now stands as her/his legacy.

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Looking up into the weekend sky last Saturday night, I saw Jupiter juxtaposed with a slender slice of the Moon. Did you know that when you look at the sky, you are looking back through time? This is a sample of the kind of knowledge contained in a new book by Natalie Angier, called "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science."

***

Today, a slender Siamese cat I have often noticed several yards away was on my housemate's back stairs. My housemate, meanwhile, is in Mexico, working on her tan lines. I do not know whether this cat is young or old, but I do know she was in some sort of quandary this morning.

She kept trying to figure out how to navigate a narrow rail of the steps past some heavy vegetation that hangs over it. She would start to try and circumvent the blockage, then lose her nerve, and retreat. Then she would slink into a narrow space between two planks that caused her to stretch out narrowly like a ballet dancer imitating a snake.

She wanted something; what, I am not quite sure. But, given where her eyes kept roaming, I think she wanted to get back home. Home happens to be where that Asian family lives, an old man, an old woman, and a beautiful young woman who often smokes on their back porch.

I watched this cat for what seemed to be hours, but must not have been, because I was not late for work. Eventually, she gave up on her quest to solve the mystery of how to circumvent the vegetative block on the rail to descend the stairs and run across our yard, hop the fence, and return home to her family.

Much later, after an absence of many days, the young Asian woman appeared on her back stoop. The cat looked happy. The woman looked sexy.

I looked on peacefully, knowing all was once again right here in this little secret corner of our universe.

* This blog started in April 2006 and has been updated on a daily basis, with a few interruptions, and often multiple times a day ever since.

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