In View

Narrative Paintings - Giotto (Ambrogio Bondone, detto) (1267 - 1337). Click on selected images for clear and enlarged views of each image of 'The Stories of St. Francis' and Giotto's stories at the Upper Basilica in Assisi, the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padova, and the Basilica di Santa Croce in Firenze. Giotto "converted the art of painting from Greek to Latin and brought in the modern era" - this is Cennino Cennini's synthesis fifty years after Giotto's death, underscoring the revolutionary character of Giotto's painting."

Tempus Fugit -Time Flies - "Take a few moments to explore this beautiful exhibit from the Nelson-Atkins Musuem of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, and you'll be rewarded with a in-depth view of the interconnectedness of time and art. Browse the illustrated 20th-century timeline, featuring the work of noted artists such as Pierre Dumont, Edward Hopper, and Mark Rothko, or just travel the seven continents investigating different cultural views of time. Either way, the art is both beautiful and beautifully presented, and the curators' notes are detailed and thought-provoking. Make sure you catch this collection before time runs out." - (Quoted from Yahoo Directory).

Tulu Bayar creates 'Visual Narratives' - "My work is timely," Bayar says. "I listen to the news. I derive my information from the didactic." - "The work of Tulu Bayar, a photographer and assistant professor of art and art history at Bucknell, exceeds the limits of two-dimensional prints. Bayar is strongly aware of the power of narrative and uses story as a chief component in her multimedia installations." - (Bucknell)

Leonardo da Vinci's Notes: Visual Explanations & Visual Narratives (pdf file) - "Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) used a vocabulary of both images and words to help him make sense and make visible the ideas in his head. Through such "studies," he learned and shaped the ideas that lead to his final paintings".

FotoMuseum Winterthur - "Fotomuseum Winterthur was founded in 1993 and is dedicated to photography as art form and document, and as a representation of reality."

Jacob Lawrence: Over the Lines - "Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) called himself "a child of the Great Migration." Like thousands of African American families, his parents had come from the south . . . . " - (The Phillips Collection - Washington, DC)

Vermeer - "The camera is only a tool. The creation of a masterpiece is always ineffable, a kind of miracle no matter what the process or equipage. . . . . " (Ivan Karp in an interview and response to Vermeer's use of the camera obscura). And - many other resources "for studying the work and life of the 17th c. Dutch master Johannes Vermeer."

NOTE: - "System of sequential relations that any event has to any other . . . . Past, Present, Future . . . . Duration . . . . Indefinitate continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another . . . . Finite duration [contrasted with eternity] . . . . System or Method of measuring the passage of time . . . . Reckoning the passage . . . . "

Temporal Dimensions

QUOTES: - Describing a tutor in 'A House of Children,' he worte: "We delighted to be with Pinto, becaue he was one of those people who could give the power of enjoyment; the sense of concrete experience." That characteristic applied not only to Pinto; it was perhaps Joyce Cary's greatest gift. . . . "

"There is no obvious theme to Cary's novels; he was much too skillful a novelist to be caught preaching a sermon. Nonetheless, he was a metaphysical man who spent years writing novels and tearing them up because "I hadn't decided what I meant." It was not until he attained what he considered sufficient maturity that he let his work be printed. He regarded all his published novels as parts of a whole, which he considered calling "The Comedy of Freedom." Its thesis, in the nonconformist, Protestant tradition of British radicalism, is that life is an endless but necessary struggle between the individual and society, between the creative imagination and the established order . . . . By building his tales around exceptional characters rather than a neat progression of events, Cary avoids allegory. . . . .

He studied art in Paris and Edinburgh, served with the Red Cross in Montenegro during the Balkan War of 1912, was wounded in World War I while fighting with a Nigerian regiment in the Cameroons campaign. After the war he served as an acting district officer (like Rudbeck in Mister Johnson) in a remote, unruly province of Nigeria. Malaria and his old wound forced him to resign from the colonial service in 1920. Both he and his wife had modest inheritances, so that he could afford to settle down at Oxford and devote his life to writing.

An essayist and poet as well as a novelist, Cary doggedly kept on working after he contracted a rare and debilitating paralytic disease that confined him to a wheelchair for the last three years of his life. With a pen tied to his hand--and later, when his limbs failed, dictating until his lips could no longer form words--he completed the first draft of his last novel, 'The Captive and the Free,' shortly [p. xv] before his death in 1957. It was his only novel to have religion as a theme, and it expressed Cary's belief that "the fundamental question for everybody is what they live by, what is their faith." As for his own life and work, Cary said: "I create a work of art to show the world as I see it. I hope to save people from stupidity of judgment, at any rate from misery. I keep alive the intuition of human love and human freedeom, of beauty." (The editors. 'The Horse's Mouth' by Joyce Cary with an introduction by Elizabeth Lawrence. Alexandria, VA: Time-LIfe Books, Inc. 1944.)

THE WORK FEATURED ABOVE: - 'The Races' - (1871-1872) by artist: Edgar Degas, French, 1834 - 1917. Oil on wood, 26.6 x 35.1 cm (10 1/2 x 13 13/16 in.). Widener Collection 1942.9.18 (National Gallery of Art - Washington, DC) . . . . . . . MUSIC: - 'Taqui Taqui' - "Flamenco music from the Group Suerte. You'll hear both flamenco puro and nuevo flamenco elements. Also some rumba's and easy to listen to spanish music."