Word of the day: tramontane : foreign, barbarous; being from the boondocks, the other side of
the mountains

It's safe to say Friday's the weekend's appetizer, no? Especially if Friday's enjoyable and Saturday will provide a chance to get outta town and head to Savannah to see the botanical garden and, maybe, Fort Pulaski, along with a stop at Five Guys. Good games tomorrow, too. Football wise, there's the LSU-Georgia matchup; in basketball, Kentucky pits its top ranking against pres-season #1 N.C.

The Clyfford Still Museum has just opened in Denver. The Museum houses about 2,400 works of art over a 60-year period of the Abstract Expressionist. From the Museum's website, here's a description of the works on display at the museum:

COLLECTION

In the early 1950s, Clyfford Still ended his relationship with the prestigious Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis galleries in New York, and from that time forward, represented himself. Very few paintings entered the art market and subsequently the museum will house over 94% of the artist’s total output. The Clyfford Still Estate contains approximately 825 paintings and 1575 works on paper including:

100 paintings dating from 1920 - 1943: Still's student years, Depression-era works, Surrealist-inspired works, and first forays into abstraction.

350 paintings dating from 1944 - 1960: Still's "breakthrough period" and the years of "high" Abstract Expressionism. Many canvases span over ten-by-fourteen feet.

375 paintings dating from 1961 - 1979: later works, most of which have never been exhibited.

1575 works on paper spanning all aspects of Still's career in such media as pastel, crayon, charcoal, gouache, tempera, graphite, and pen and ink. Few of these have ever been exhibited.

In addition to the artworks, the museum will also house the artist’s archives of letters, sketchbooks, manuscripts, photo albums and personal effects, most of which has never been seen by the public. The Still Museum’s rotating exhibition program, drawn exclusively from the museum’s extensive collection, will illuminate this important period of American art history. The Still Museum also plans to work with the Denver Art Museum and neighboring institutions in the development of joint programming that will further contextualize and complement the collection.

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I don't know much about Still. He was a color field painter, but he didn't arrange his colors regularly like, say, Rothko, but, rather, in a more jagged, 'torn' way. The above painting, Untitled 1946-H, highlights some of his characteristic use of the same colors (red, white, black, yellow) and thick impasto. He was introduced to the art world on a grand scale in 1946 by, of course, Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition. He taught for a few years in San Francisco and, later in life, retired to his family farm in Maryland, the state he would die in in 1980. The museum is getting some rave reviews and has, as expected, been much visited in the two weeks it has been open to the public.

(Incidentally, Denver seems like it's a good art city. The Denver Art Museum has a renowned Pre-Colombian collection and is at the forefront of attributing as many of its American Art pieces done by Native Americans to the name of the artist rather than the tribe, making them less like artifacts - and, hence, ethnographic pieces - and more like singular works of art.)

I'm still reading and loving The Big Year. Today's bird: the harlequin duck.

It has a body of deep slate blue, with white stripes, crescents, and spots on its head. They prefer turbulent water, breeding in fast-moving mountain streams. They winter along rocky coastlines. Though they have a limited ecological niche, they function extremely well in harsh conditions and can just as often be found diving in the water for their food as they can walking along the bottom of stream beds, jabbing at their meals with their bills. Their nests are usually close to streams. These ducks live in large flocks, sociable as they are, and are the prey of wolves and foxes, and have a low-reproductive capability. Incidentally, they get their name because of the male's resemblance (especially its chestnut-red flanks and brownish-black wing tips) to the costumes worn by European clowns in comedy theater.

Where to see them? Naturally, along the northwest Pacific coast, Maine, Montana, New Brunswick, Newfoundland. They aren't endangered in this country but are in Canada, though in Maine they're listed as "threatened" and "of special concern" in the western states.

Here's a picture of this beautiful duck(s). Wouldn't it be a blast to see one in nature?

http://www.ducks.org/media/hunting/waterfowlIDGallery/_images/fullSize/harlequinDuck1.jpg

Until next time!