Windmills

Windmills offshore in Copenhagen. Wind power now accounts for one-half of all public power in Denmark. The Danes have reduced their reliance on oil.
The windmills are huge, about 250 feet high.

Windmills in Amsterdam.

And now we see that windmills have been constructed in the Philippines. As oil becomes more scarce, and the price increases, greater reliance on wind to generate electric power seems inevitable.(Link)

Madame Matisse

Madame Matisse
Helen Frankenthaler, 1983
Acrylic on canvas, 60x122 1/2 inches
University Art Museum
State University of New York at Albany

Born in 1928 in New York City.

"Frankenthaler is best known for changing the direction of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s when she began pouring cans of paint directly onto unsized, unstretched canvas. Madame Matisse is an example of how acrylic paint improved Frankenthaler's technique. The water-based paint helped intensify color stains and control the halo effect that oil paint produced." (From website of SUNY Albany, Art Museum Link)

Although I do not really care for much of Frankenthaler's work, I do like this piece very much. (I judge all art work in the same way -- by the feeling it evokes in me.)

Nude Descending a Staircase, Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase
(No. 2)
Marcel Duchamp
American, born in France
1887-1968
1912 Oil on canvas


This painting created a sensation when it was exhibited in New York in February 1913 at the historic Armory Show of contemporary art, where perplexed Americans saw it as representing all the tricks they felt European artists were playing at their expense. The picture's outrageousness surely lay in its seemingly mechanical portrayal of a subject at once so sensual and time-honored. The Nude's destiny as a symbol also stemmed from its remarkable aggregation of avant-garde concerns: the birth of cinema; the Cubists' fracturing of form; the Futurists' depiction of movement; the chromophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins; and the redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers. The painting was bought directly from the Armory Show for three hundred dollars by a San Francisco dealer. Marcel Duchamp's great collector-friend Walter Arensberg was able to buy the work in 1927, eleven years after Duchamp had obligingly made him a hand-colored, actual-size photographic copy. Today both the copy and the original, together with a preparatory study, are owned by the Museum. (Description taken from the website of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Nude)

This painting was not intended to depict the Madonna, but that is the image that comes to my mind when I look at it. It is my favorite painting of all time. I have a copy hanging in my home, and I feel a sense of reverence when I look at it, as I do every day.