Try to keep some perspective on this

It's All About Your Perspective.

While wandering on the National Mall in Washington DC, I chanced upon the National Gallery of Art, so I went in there to have a look around.

What a beautiful place.

Especially interesting to me was the special exhibition on the work of the French artist, Gustave Caillebotte.

http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/exhibitions/2015/gustave-caillebotte.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Caillebotte

In the background of my unauthorized photograph, which you see here, is the canvas that Monsieur Caillebotte painted in 1877. The painting hangs upon a wall in the next room, beyond the room I was standing in while I snapped the pic:

Not visible to you is an explanatory placard that is fastened on the wall next to his famous artwork. Some art historian has explained therein that Gustave's work reflected a new influence on the painterly art. Photography, the emergent technology of that that day and time, latter-19th-century, had a profound effect on the artist's composition, perspective and use of focus in certain areas of the painting while rendering foreground and background slightly out of focus.

Now in my iPhone photograph, the whole picture is out of focus. I did this on purpose, imitating, as it were, the French impressionists, all of whom had rendered their oil-on-canvas opuses slightly out of focus, as if they had forgotten to put on their glasses when they went out to labor at the easel that day in 1877.

I can relate to this, because I am nearsighted as a bat; my profound appreciation for turn-of--the-20thCentury is perhaps related to this dysfunction in my eyeballs. I'm like one of those less-than-perfect persons you see in the Latrec paintings that came later.

So you can see here that I myself have entered into the gallery of impressionist phone-artists of the early 21st Century. And in my opinion this photograph is an artistic extension of the work that was pioneered by Messers Caillebotte, Renoir, Monet, Manet, Matisse etcetera etcetera.

The gentleman on the left in my etoîle image here was doing his job well; so he was obliged to tell me that I couldn't take pics in that room.

I did not know that (and I am telling the truth), I said to him.

"There's a sign at the entrance to the room," he said.

Oh.

Nevertheless, the image was already captured in my mobile device, so hey, what the heck, I thought I'd share my perspective with you.

Have a nice day. And remember. . .

As you travel through life, brother and sister, whatever be your goal, keep your eye on the detail, not on the whole.

Or maybe it's the other way around.

Anyway, try to keep your highest priorities in focus. As for the artsy stuff, that focus element is not necessarily essential.

Just please keep it in perspective, so that you know what you're looking at while you're looking at it, if that's possible.



Glass Chimera

The Ascent of Man

In the beginning

of his life, the man is born into this world. He is born and raised as a child.

Over years of time, the boy becomes a man. Finding himself in the midst of mankind, he looks around at the world and the people in it, and he wonders what it is all about.

The man tries to make his way in the world, striving to find his place in it, but the attempt is not easy, nor is it simple.

One day, he sees the mountain.

He is drawn to the mountain. He begins ascending it. After climbing to the top, he pauses to consider the city below, from whence he has just come.

That's interesting.

But there's more to getting perspective than just climbing a mountain. Because he lives in the 21st century, the man is afforded even better opportunities to get a lofty view of the world. And so he ascends even further.

After the man comes down, and his head is no longer in the clouds, he finds himself once again in the midst of the world, struggling to attain mastery over the elemental forces of nature, and contending among the diverse populations of mankind for his very own place of fulfillment and destiny.

After a while, he pauses to gather his thoughts. Writing them down for his children, for posterity, for whatever rhyme or reason, he attains a certain satisfaction in having experienced life. Reflecting upon his experience, he writes.

Life is good: life. But he knows there is something meaningful behind it all, some lofty purpose, but it is beyond his field of vision. He he cannot see it, and so he cannot readily identify it. He is not quite sure what is up there.

Nevertheless, the man continues. He rises from his reflection, and trudges on, moving through the opinions of mankind, and among the great monuments and feats of men and women upon the face of the earth, and the revelation of God among the men and women of the wide world.

For many and many a year, he sojourns along the path that is laid before him, for many risings and descendings, many decades, and yeah I say unto thee even, vicariously, through many historical epochs of mankind, and upwards into the mountain peaks of experience and downwards into the valleys to drink from cool, babbling brooks of refreshment, and then quieting himself to discover still, quiet pools of reflection.

It is good.

Then one day, he finds himself at an unprecedented place. A place he has never been before, nor will ever be again, a place from which there is no egress.

The man opens wide his eyes and looks fearfully, studying with wonder whatever it is that is in front of him. There, between the two constructs of experience and reflection, there directly across his forward path, he sees the obelisk of his destiny. He looks up; he squints, trying to figure it out.

There, at the top of the monument--there is nothing there.

No, wait. There is something there. What is it?

At the top of his obelisk of destiny, there it is: the way of all flesh. But beyond the way of all flesh, he could see only open sky.

And so he entered into it. But that was no end; it was the beginning.



Glass half-Full