Tout-Rien

I watched The Man Who Planted Trees the other night and an interview with Jean Giono,
the Provençal author upon whose book the animation is based. I ordered all of the english translations of his books I could find at the local library and look forward to snuggling up with them as autumn progresses.

Then I looked into Frédéric Back,
the Canadian animator who's colored pencil work won two Oscars and four nominations. I learned that, when he received his first Oscar for Crac!, he confided to his producer that he would have preferred that his previous piece, All Nothing had won instead because its message was far more important to him.

Small and out of date non-American films are hard to come by but fortunately, All Nothing (Tout-Rien) was posted in its entirety on youtube. Thanks mariobq!

Want more? If you're interested in hand-drawn animation, there's a good interview with Back by William Moritz. You can also watch Back's Illusion Part One and Illusion Part Two

Farewell to La Ronda

La Ronda
1030 Mount Pleasant Rd
Bryn Mawr, PA

My mother worked for an architect in Philadelphia before she married my father. I was born in Bryn Mawr Hospital and grew up along the Main Line where we would often spend Sunday afternoons driving around looking at houses — not because my parents were interested in real estate — but because my mother loved looking at houses.

I inherited that love from her and wanted to be an architect when I grew up. The etch-a-sketch was my favorite toy and I'd twist those knobs to make floor plans and elevations. I subscribed to Architectural Digest when I was 13 years old. My architectural thinking developed but career plans were altered early by guitars and songs and the stream of life.

In 1984, as I was finishing a year at Ringling School of Art & Design and preparing to transfer to New College, I made a sketch for my mother of the Mediterranean Revival house where I lived on Acacia Drive in the Sapphire Shores neighborhood of Sarasota, Florida where Mediterranean Revival style houses with barrel tile roofs and maid's quarters were de rigeur. That sketch blossomed into a much larger project on the history of Sarasota through its residential architecture that you can read about in an article called Styles of the Century.

Today, I am embroiled as Executive Director of Drawing America and, although I've been at work on the initiative since last December, in six months I have created Big Draw models for two museums, a private school and am single-handedly producing the first neighborhood Big Draw in the United States, Big Draw 12 South: This Is Where I Live! The neighborhood and school models I've designed both involve engaging community in drawing houses and buildings in local neighborhoods.

So there I was last Thursday, just finishing up my last mad sketch of a neighborhood building for the Big Draw promotional exhibit when I heard the news of La Ronda, the 1929 final commission of Addison Mizner.

I was listening to a Ray Bradbury story called "The Smile" while working on my drawings last week. It was about a not too distant future in which all cultural beauty is reviled and destroyed as community entertainment. The entertainment in the story was the Mona Lisa. 

Along the Main Line, however, the community was desperate to save La Ronda.  Grown men cried.  Because of one man's money, ignorance and selfish willfulness, an exquisite realization of an architectural dream met the wrecking ball. Only eighty years old, the value of La Ronda, and it's loss, cannot be estimated in terms of money.  Apparently, the current owner of the property hasn't yet learned that you can't take it with you.

Some buildings I drew in the Nashville 12 South neighborhood will go the way of all things in a matter of just a few years. The value of these buildings are not at all close to the value of La Ronda but they do have inherent value to their particular neighborhood and its history.

This was La Ronda:







This was La Ronda last Thursday:



Become a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and visit The National Register of Historic Places.

Postscript — Found this. Worth watching.

Take Five

As I have been on a mad drawing tear to prepare promo drawings for the first Big Draw Nashville preview exhibit (which I installed last night), I've been listening to Ray Bradbury read stories on tape and, all yesterday, to the Dave Brubeck Quartet Time Out. It really helped power me through to the very last second. The preview exhibit is up and I have taken five all morning.

Seeing as it's Friday, and once upon a time I had a regular Video Friday, I found this 1961 clip of the Quartet performing Take Five.

When I was just about 5 years old, Columbia Record Company placed a promotional slip of a vinyl sample with a taste of Take Five into an issue of Time Magazine. My father had already taught me how to place the diamond stylus into the groove of an LP. I played that little vinyl sample until it went the way of my ragged blue stuffed puppy dog. I didn't know their names, but Joe Morello and Paul Desmond gave me a thing for percussionists and alto sax players and Brubeck helped to ruin me for anything less than excellence.

To Autumn

Although the summer was rainy and cool, each day felt like summer. After many rainy days, all in a row, today that feeling changed and autumn is upon us. It was a perfect day.

To Autumn

1.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees.
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more.
  And still more, later flowers for the bees,
  Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

        —John Keats

Kissing Summer Goodbye

Just now, as we mark the last day of summer, my garden enters its most glorious phase. Busy bees of many varieties, butterflies and birds all scamper through exploding marigolds, overgrown grass and plastered walnut leaves to reap intoxicating nectar that I whiz by and miss entirely. Finches pull at sunflowers, mockingbirds nibble at pokeweed and jays grab hackberries. The squirrels always seem to find something. It's a feast!

Experiencing the Garden

It's tough to photograph a garden. Gardens really must be sensually experienced. Fingernails caked with dirt, stray seeds in fabric, tender shoots arising, musty, sweet and pungent scents, color that can never quite be replicated, wafting breezes, dewy blades, soaked and softened earthy indentations, shade, sunlight, and times of day.

I spent so much obsessive time making the garden this year and now, in my busyness, I pass through it — back and forth, back and forth. And sometimes, just sitting, being thankful for my great fortune — To be alive!

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver and Percy

What a great privilege and pleasure to hear Mary Oliver read her poems for almost an hour tonight. My pleasure included tears and welling up of deep emotion and commiseration. I can honestly say that I have never been so consistently moved by one person reading their poems.

Thanks to my old friend, Carole Raye, for sending me a copy of her American Primitiveon my birthday in the early '90's.  After reading through it again, I'll place that now signed volume back on the shelf, right next to my signed copy of Merwin's Rain in the Trees.

There are many, many of Oliver's poems that I might choose to include in this post but the first one I found suits me right this very moment.

Read Mary Oliver's poems. She's is a master. Find the poems she's written for her dog, Percy. They're a delight.


The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

-Mary Oliver