Mastheads

A panoramic view of Dubrovnik Croatia. Dubrovnik holds great significance for me personally. I traveled to Croatia with some friends during a semester abroad in college. We began our "ten day" adventure in Croatia, eventually we made it up to Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam, and Munich. Of all the places I have had the honor and pleasure of visiting, I was never so struck with the natural beauty, the friendliness of its people, and spirituality of the place as I was with Dubrovnik. I will return someday.

A photograph (stolen) and made to look post-modern.

a photograph taken with my new digital camera. It is adjusted and saturated a bit, but I like the feel, I wanted a bit of a chiarascurro to it, like Caravaggio's "Judith Beheading Holofernes" or his "Calling of St. Matthew." The books on the shelf were not chosen in advance, they just happened to be the ones that were on the shelf where I took the picture.

a detail of Raphael's The School of Athens. A few of the characters in the detail: Alcibiades (the one that looks like a soldier), Averroes, Epicurus, and many others.

The Voyage of Life: Youth

The Voyage of Life: Adulthood

The Voyage of Life: Old Age. Cole is associated with the Hudson River School. Because of a serendipitous lack of formal art training his aesthetics came from poetry and literature. His family immigrated to America from England and lived in Steubenville for a while; eventually he got formal art training and began his career in Pennsylvania as a landscape artist. Cole has a sense of the sublime found in the Romantic paintings of Turner, but his paintings are very much more American indicated by Cole's interest in the state of innocence and its movement throughout life.

The artwork below (which previously flanked the text of the blog) is by a Scottish artist: Andy Goldsworthy. Mr. Goldsworthy uses only found objects in nature to create his artwork; as he uses only found objects, and usually works within a natural setting, his artwork is therefore, by nature (hehe), fleeting. I believe that Mr. Goldsworthy is able to capture that maxim well in his art which says 'Death is the mother of Beauty.' His art approaches and interacts with the dimension of the fading and ephemeral qualities of beauty found in the natural world; moreover, by the fact that his work is man-made, he brings the concept of beauty and nature within the scope of the human imagination and condition. I encourage all to find out more about Andy Goldsworthy's imaginative and beautiful artwork.