Shutters perspectives or the art of shutters. Perspectiva de persianas o el arte de las persianas

 

Plastic shutters unusual perspectives with the sun of 7.30 AM through them. Or how to look at banal architectural objects from an artistic point of view.

 

Perspectivas inusuales de unas persianas de plástico con el sol de las 7.30 AM a través de ellas. O cómo mirar los objetos banales de la arquitectura desde un punto de vista artístico.

 

Para ilustrar con palabras acerca de encontrar el arte (la estética) en las pequeñas cosas, citaré a Benedetto Croce:

¨....algunas expresiones harto complicadas y difíciles aciertan a manifestarse con excelencia y se las llama obras de arte. Los límites de las expresiones -intuiciones que se denominan arte, con relación a las que se califican de no arte- son empíricos y es imposible definirlos. Un epigrama pertenece al arte; ¿porqué no una palabra sencilla? Un cuento pertenece al arte; ¿porqué no una simple nota de información periodística? Un paisaje pertenece al arte; ¿por qué no un esbozo topográfico? (.....) así tampoco puede haber una ciencia de las grandes intuiciones y otra de las pequeñas, una de la intuición común y otra de la intuición artística, sino una sola estética, ciencia del conocimiento intuitivo o expresivo, que es el hecho estético o artístico. Esta estética se corresponde perfectamente con la lógica, que abraza, como cosas de la misma naturaleza, la formación del concepto más pequeño y ordinario y la construcción del más complicado sistema científico y filosófico.¨

Benedetto Croce. Estética. pp 98-99. Ediciones Nueva Visión, Buenos Aires, 1969

Details from ¨Sacred Realms: Temple Murals by Shashi Dhoj Tulachan¨

 

Sacred Realms: Temple Murals by Shashi Dhoj Tulachan From the Gayle and Edward P. Roski Collection.

I´ve been enjoying this great exhibition today at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. It´s impossible to capture the beauty of the whole temple murals but at least I am sharing some details. Please do not reproduce without my permission.

From the Museum´s web page:

¨ The nine oversized paintings shown in this exhibition are all the work of one extraordinary 69-year-old Buddhist monk named Shashi Dhoj Tulachan, a second generation thangka artist living

in Tuksche, a remote village located in Mustang, Nepal's northernmost district adjacent to Tibet.

Shashi Dhoj Tulachan has devoted much of his life to the restoration of a nearby 16th century gompa (Tibetan monastery) known as the Chhairo Gompa.

He is part of a local initiative, the Kali Gandaki Foundation Trust, which is dedicated to raising money to preserve the Chhairo Gompa.

The practice of thangka painting is centuries old and is an art carried out by highly trained monks for the purpose of teaching about Buddha and the tenets of the Buddhist religion. The overwhelming amount of detailed imagery in each painting includes deities, mythologies, and the use of repeated and abstracted design. For those seeking enlightenment, thangka paintings exist as objects of meditation.

The paintings in this collection are not thangkas in the traditional sense. Thangkas are usually much smaller and are rolled on canvas so that they can be easily transported and hung anywhere for teaching. The thangkas exhibited here are similar in size to mural paintings found in monasteries. These paintings also deviate from the rules for the creation of a thangka where the exact use of color, shape, proportion, characteristics and qualities of the imagery are all strictly regulated.

Shashi Dhoj Tulachan has painted this set of images by combining the traditional motifs of one of the foremost schools recognized by high-level monks in Tibet today, the Tibetan Karma Ghadri School, with images that are purely and cleverly of his imagination. The vibrant colors he used are made from natural mineral pigments.¨

Graffiti abstracts at Murdy park

Murdy Park is ill famed in the city of Huntington Beach. Being it a beautiful park with a Sports Center, sometimes gangs or addicts gather under the trees, maybe because this area of trees is somehow isolated from the sports fields. The police is aware of the problem and it seems everything has been quiet in the last years.

Anyway, there are graffiti on the torn canvas and sponge that serve as protection for the huge lighting columns. And today, while I was walking around, I took some pictures that I consider artistic, setting aside the social problem.

Please do not reproduce without my permission.

Textures in the water channel

Just in front of the engineers' office, there has been civil works of parkings and drainages. This drainage has no slope and it's blocked as well. One of the engineers is always complaining about this and the rotten water that is left. To calm him down, I promised him to take an abstract picture (I have two already) to see the problem under a different light :) I see a face of a man in the middle looking at me in desperation, he is trapped.

Dry leaves and pines are also adding abstract beauty in this channel.

Tree bark with "ancient or futuristic" inscriptions

I had to meet a client today and he was late. I was waiting for him at the parking lot of a warehouse, the place was empty and there was nothing interesting to see, except for a single yellow flower at the entrance. Until I got closer to this tree, apparently a common tree, no flowers, a straight trunk.... And I looked in detail, and first of all discovered some spheres adhered to the trunk. 

If you look at the next picture, it is almost perfect. And then, the textures, like tiny futuristic inscriptions. I say futuristic, as they remind me the perforated cards that were used at the beginning of the computers era.

But there was still more.

A weird stain, a natural carving as a hieroglyph.....

A tiny spiral and a rectangular depiction without bark, like Indigenous symbols,

And a man made inscription, very old I suppose, like initials.

I am always fascinated with barks but this time I've got more than expected. I hope you enjoy my "abstracts," I'm posting them as an homage to PI day.

The shadow of a chair. La sombra de una silla

It is well understood that architecture is not interior decor. Though, there are lots of architects who dedicate to the design of furniture, which at last are part of the architecture.

I´m more positioned on Loos´ side, good architecture, in my humble opinion, doesn´t need any decoration. But how dull a kitchen would look without the table, and the clothes, and the chairs....

I am trying to show here how a simple element, like a white leather chair can produce an interesting effect in a boring corner of the kitchen, a concept that makes me think twice about my Loos´ position, at least today, while having breakfast and enjoying the sunlight through the glass doors at 8 AM.

Somebody, and most probably my husband, has left the chair aside, and the hard shadow was drawn on it and on the free standing freezer. Besides, there´s the white shutters behind. All of a sudden, there´s an interesting effect.

Though I was expecting I could take a couple of bright white abstract pictures, my camera wouldn´t allow me to, so I switched to expressionist shots to illustrate my point.