September (2009); Gerhard Richter

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of sometimes photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks, and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb. His September (2009) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

Flashback Tuesday: Aging Gracefully Edition

American artist Ivan Albright painted his lurid, mildewy Picture of Dorian Gray in 1944, inspired by Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel of the same name. It hangs just around the corner from Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 American Gothic in the Art Institute of Chicago’s American Art wing.

But the point of this post is that some stupid white-shirted jerk totally photobombed this handsome, distinguished formal portrait of me.

#lookoutside

FIXED IT

I walked by this kick-assery last night as it was being painted while I explored NewBo to kill time before my rehearsal:

It's no doubt a part of the neighborhood's preparations for this weekend's NewBo Evolve event, and it's now my favorite new thing in all of Cedar Rapids.

Our state capitol is capitoler than your state capitol

Our gold-leafed dome shimmers on the hill:

 The staircase up to the breathtaking rotunda:

Toldja it was breathtaking:

Boobies:

A vestibule off the first floor:

A gorgeous bas-relief tribute to women crowned by an unmistakably Deco sunburst:

Another vestibule has a creepy display of dolls fetishizing the inauguration gowns of our First Ladies:

The stairs to the second floor of the rotunda:

Corn art!

The I above the House chamber windows stands for I LOVE THIS BUILDING: 

But gross. Just fucking gross. Just because an impotent man-boy climbs on his Big Wheel and hurls his feces at the adults to play president doesn’t mean we have to sully our Senate chamber walls with his festering rictus:

Patterns and textures on the second floor:

The steps to the dome, which I unfortunately didn't get to climb:

The freaking STUNNING second-floor library, ladies and gentlemen:

It has lots of books:

And a dumb waiter. For smart people. They’re smart because they read books. And they figured out a way to avoid carrying them up the steps:

And an intricate iron staircase the is the envy of the entire Industrial Revolution:

More intricate wrought iron:

And a beautifully stenciled ceiling medallion:

 A little sorbet to cleanse the palate:

Monuments on the nearby grounds:

Iowa’s memorial to the drooling buffalo that used to wander our land, moistening our soil.

Walking away: 

 Goodbye for now, noble capitol:

Palimpsest

It's a rarely useful word for a re-used writing surface that still bears evidence of its incompletely erased original text. It comes from related ancient Latin, Greek and Sanskrit nomenclature for this very common occurrence in a time when writing surfaces were rare and therefore had to be frequently reused.

In the modern world where paper is available in abundance, palimpsest is used literally in the context of ancient documents and old handwritten diaries and metaphorically to describe extant evidence of anything from old buildings to previous marriages.

I’m always fascinated by the evidence of old windows, old staircases and even old painted rooms that are unearthed on the side of one building when an adjacent building is demolished. And there’s plenty of palimpsest currently high in the air around a demolition site in downtown Cedar Rapids. I’m especially fascinated by the evidence of the adjacent tan, blue and brown rooms that clearly had elegant frame moldings on this second story:

While the remnants of the painted rooms above are no doubt destined to disappear forever once they get primed or sealed or bricked over as the new building goes up, bricked-in windows offer a more always-on-display palimpsest, and to me they always look like secret-hiding ghosts, like the ones from the above demolition site and across the street in the alley next to the stately Granby Building:

I find history fascinating and engrossing in a macro sense, but personal, intimate, human-scale historical evidence—like old rooms where people lived and worked and made human-scale decisions like what color to paint their immediate surroundings—is to me far more meaningful.