Analysing art

We went to the second session of a 3-week series on analysing art, led by Mara Williams, director of our local Brattleboro Museum of Art. Her method was to show a work of art - this week they were projected on a screen because she realized last week that the group was too large to use prints - and invite responses from the group - of any kind. She would typically ask, "what's going on here?" She usually did not at first identify the work as to artist's name, title, date of composition, etc., but just invited responses to the work itself - form, color, emotion, narrative, context, etc. Eventually she would identify the work and that allowed me to look them up online and download them. The group of 60 well-informed seniors that constituted the audience provided a wide range of responses, as you can well imagine. Some in the audience were artists themselves, and brought that background to their observations, which added to the richness of the analysis. But often a very insightful observation would come from a person with no particular background in art.

Here are three of the paintings:

What do YOU see going on in each of these paintings?

After OSHER we went to an MLK Day event. It was pretty long - 2 hours - but it was powerful as well. The "keynote" address was given by Dr. Dottie Morris, who is a diversity coordinator at nearby Keene State College, and who has been doing diversity training with our local town officials and staff.  It turned out that John was there too - he had been alerted to the event by an earlier blog here! - and he had worked with Dr. Morris at Antioch. Overall, the event really drove home the work that we white folks need to do to overcome racism in our thinking, speech and actions.

Dr. Dottie Morris, Assoc. V-P for Diversity and Equity, Keene State College, NH

This week has been dominated by the impeachment trial, which began on Tuesday. We have watched much of it on PBS. It is a course in civics for sure. But it is disheartening also, because with the exception of Senator Collins of Maine, on just one vote on an amendment dealing with a relatively neutral procedure on the time allowed to  assess new information, not a single Republican senator has broken ranks on amendments dealing with witnesses and evidence, and thus all are in effect registering support for presidential behavior which one would think they would find utterly unacceptable. Nevertheless, I have indulged the fantasy that ultimately,  four Republican senators will break ranks and vote for removal from office, and Trump will declare the trial a sham, invalid, etc, and refuse to leave office, refuse to move out of the White House.  Then what? Will the Republicans support him in that?!

The other drama this week was more local. Our wood stove was giving signs of creosote buildup in the flue; viz., when I opened the door when starting a fire, smoke would come out, which doesn't usually happen when it is drawing well. I had recently cleaned out the trap at the bottom of the flue, but not the stove pipe that connects the stove to the flue. So with Ellen's help, we took the pipe off and cleaned it out. It wasn't that bad, so that probably was not the problem. But when we tried to put it back, it wouldn't fit onto the sleeve. Somehow, in banging it to get out the creosote, we had shifted the pipe and the angle.  Try as we might, we couldn't get it on. It was late at night, so we had to just leave the stove until morning. No heat from the stove. And it was near 0 degrees outside! We have electric backup heat, but we use it sparingly. So it got very cold overnight in the house. Fortunately,  Zach was able to come the next morning and he got it reconnected, and I have a date with the Chimney Doctor to clean out what I suspect is a partial creosote blockage up at the top of the flue. He has a gidget he can run up from inside. As long as we run the stove hot, it draws ok for now. So we are back in business and in a few days should be completely fine.

Kathy and Tom were going to come for supper tonight but Tom has a bad cold, so we are postponing that. We are thinking seriously of attending a talk at Centre Church tomorrow evening on "De-growth-ing" - i.e., can we envisage an economy which shrinks instead of constantly growing and actually reduce our consumption of energy, not just  get off fossil fuels and switch to renewable sources. This is the key question!