My mountain dulcimer

Eli and Fred.

Lotus.

First sunflower in my little garden.

My youngest niece.

Almost pascha

I find these surroundings more in keeping with my dignity.

Sent from my iPhone

Cherry Blossoms at the Japanese Internment Memorial

I always make it a point to go to the National Japanese American Memorial when the cherry blossoms are in bloom. It commemorates the Japanese internment and valor of the Japanese American community during WWII.

It's near Union Station and the Capitol and like the community it represents is fairly easy to miss being small and private.

In front of the memorial is a reflecting pool surounded by cherry trees.

You enter through a gap in the wall and are confronted by a plinthe with two cranes pinned down by barbed wire.

On the wall are the names of the camps and the number of people that were in each one and the names of the men who died while their families were locked behind barbed wire for years.

Rockman exhibit

Lately I've been going to a lot of art exhibits at various museums around town. Last Friday Max and I saw an amazing exhibit of Bukharan silk robes that were stunning in their complexity and colors. Yesterday I went to the American Art Museum in Chinatown and saw the Rockman exhibit there.

His paintings all were centered on the interaction of birth and decay and natural conflict in general. This played out in a number of pieces in odd ways.

There were a number of paintings that featured extinct animals with modern equivalents in the same swamp or aquarium.

Or industrial themes combining with nature. I rather liked the fetid swamp birdbath.

There was a clarion call warning of impending ecological disaster and the potential extremes that could produce. There were a series of paintings involving a sort of outer space arc of preservation that was intriguing.

If you are in DC you really ought to go see this exhibit. The paintings are enormous and complex. One of the aspects of Rockman that is not conveyed by photos is the depth and contrast of his paintings. The background are glossy and flat while the figures create almost a diorama like effect popping out of the painting with bright colors and gorgeous textures. This diced up bird is actually a real gull preserved in resin His primary early inspiration came form looking at museum exhibits and this shines through clearly.

It has been awhile

So for whatever reason I have been rather uninspired to write here for a number of months. I think for many people uncertainty is a thing that spurs innovation but for me it causes a very distinct circling of my mental wagons where I'm very conservative with my mental energy. That being said I feel like I should be documenting at least a few things outside of Facebook for the sake of posterity. I've been keeping a written journal of my weekend meandering since January and think that I'll transcribe that onto the blog along with my knitting.