Friday, November 29, 2013

Friday, November 29, 2013

Tonight's picture was taken in November of 2008. Before Mattie's second limb salvaging surgery. Peter and Mattie had a wonderful post Thanksgiving tradition. Some people go shopping and are looking for the best sales on Black Friday. That wasn't what was happening in our home. Instead, the day after Thanksgiving all our Christmas lights would come out of storage and Peter and Mattie would start to decorate our commons area. I suppose technically this area doesn't belong to us, but none of our neighbors ever complained. In fact, just the opposite. Many of them would stop to THANK US for bringing joy and happiness into their lives through beautiful lights. Each year Mattie got a new light to add to the display. In November of 2008, Mattie and Peter selected a Scooby Doo light! Mattie loved Scooby Doo and this was a very meaningful addition. We watched 100s of Scooby Doo's in the hospital. Tomorrow night I will show you a photo of the display they created.

Quote of the day: Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest man it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow. ~ Edward Sandford Martin

Peter and I had a very slow start to our day today. We are both exhausted. We got to New York exhausted and when I combine that with the intense cold weather, I am just out of sorts. So much so that after I got up, dressed and ate breakfast, I came back upstairs to our hotel room today and went to lie down. Something totally unheard of, once I am up, I rarely go back to sleep.

We are staying at a hotel that means a lot to my family and certainly something to Peter and me. When I was in 10th grade, my family relocated from NY to Los Angeles. This was a hard adjustment and in that first transition year, we flew back and forth to NY often because we missed family and friends. When we would come back to visit, we stayed at the hotel Peter and I are staying in. In addition, when Peter and I got married, this is the hotel our guests stayed at for our wedding celebration. This hotel holds many memories for me, but now I really have to dig QUITE deep to find them. Mainly because everything about the hotel has changed. Everything from the interior and designs, to the service. I do not handle change well, and certainly these types of emotional changes don't make me happy.

Before we met up with my friend Karen and her mom, Peter and I drove passed the two houses in NY that I grew up in. The first house I lived in was located in Hartsdale and my maternal grandfather designed and built that house. I arrived into that house as a baby and left that house when I was about 12 years old, for our second house, which was located in Scarsdale. It is an interesting perspective to go back and visit your old homes. Somehow their physical structure remains the same, but I know I haven't. My perspective has changed and with that, the lens I view these homes also has changed. I always thought I would take Mattie to NY one day and show him where I grew up, but it never happened. You know that old saying..........you can never go home again? I would have to say there is a great deal of truth to that. At the time when I was 14 years old and was transplanted from NY to Los Angeles, I thought my world was ending. Certainly for a teen, this was a hard adjustment but my thinking was I couldn't possibly live anywhere else other than NY. Now as an adult, I realize that was the least of my problems in life. Nonetheless, these are all stories I was planning on sharing with Mattie. Stories which I had hoped he could learn something from, and that we could discuss together. Life lessons.

This afternoon, Peter and I met Karen and her mom, and we headed to the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY. I have to tell you that not only have I never been to this museum, I never even heard of it. But what a delightful gem, an intimate experience, filled with wonderful art, that captures the intrigue of the Hudson River and Westchester County. 

As I was walking around the permanent collection area, I was captured by this beautiful face. Believe it or not this is a painting of a little boy by the name of John James. He died in an accident and I learned today that parents in the beginning of the 19th century commemorated the loss of a child by commissioning a painting of the child. A placard by the painting stated that even in wealthy families, infant mortality rates in the 19th century were high by modern standards. I just couldn't believe this cutie was a little boy. But I also learned that it wasn't until the 20th century that gender specific clothes and colors were defined. So in essence John James and his sister wore the same clothes and it wasn't unusual for a boy back then to wear pink. 

This is NOT a painting!!! This is an actual room that I walked in and around. So basically I walked inside a piece of art today!!! Red (a nick name for artist Charles Roger) Grooms’  dazzling installation, was created as a working gift shop for the Hudson River Museum in 1979.  After extensive conservation, this beloved Westchester landmark has been reinstalled in its own gallery. The Bookstore incorporates many of the themes that run through Grooms’ best work: the marriage of art and commerce, the clash of high and low, colorful New York characters, and an inviting three-dimensional space that envelops and transports the viewer. The Bookstore deftly joins two favorite haunts of New York City book lover – the lively, oldest secondhand bookshop in NYC, the Isaac Mendoza Book Company, and the Pierpont Morgan Library – into a work of art. In terms of materials, The Bookstore was one of a limited number of pieces in which Grooms incorporated vinyl figures. The figures are painted from the inside, a technique inspired by medieval glass-painting techniques, and then are stuffed and sewn. Tens of thousands of visitors passed through The Bookstore, and, embraced by its environment, it inevitably began to suffer ravages caused by its popularity. Plans were developed to restore the work and Grooms enthusiastically approved the conservation efforts and changes, which include altering the position of the two entrances to fit new gallery space, the creation of a central island that incorporated the original vinyl patrons, and the design of a painted floor. 

Attached to the museum is the Glenview Mansion (1876-77), also known as the John Bond Trevor House. The mansion is a Late Victorian-style and is located on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. It was designed by architect Charles W. Clinton, and contains Eastlake-style interiors and furniture by cabinetmaker Daniel Pabst. It is operated as a house museum by the Hudson River Museum, whose 1960s building was built directly in front of the mansion. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

John Bond Trevor was a successful Wall Street stockbroker who decided to build a summer home in Yonkers in 1876. He chose a site on the Hudson River, near his friend and business partner, John Boorman Colgate. The home was designed in the High Victorian Gothic style, which included many flamboyant elements. Six of the rooms are on display now and they feature authentic pieces of furnishings and decor. One of the docents explained that a professional specializing in Victorian design comes to the mansion each holiday season to dress Glenview up in style.  

This is the mansion's sitting room. The interior design follows the Eastlake style, which incorporates abstracted designs inspired by nature, such as the carved and inlaid sunflower details of the woodwork. Glenview is considered one of the finest examples of an American Eastlake interior open to the public. Delicately incised birds eye maple cabinetry is a notable feature of the Sitting Room.

The dining room.

Children visiting the museum today were thrilled by this display!!! A recent gift to the Hudson River Museum was a dollhouse created by enthusiast Mark O’Banks over the course of a decade. Some of the architectural elements of the 26 room dollhouse were suggested by nineteenth-century houses in the Hudson Valley as well as sites around Washington, D.C.

Creator Mark O’Banks looked to the wisdom of a ouija board to name his dollhouse creation (Nybelwyck Hall). The house is furnished with found objects and rugs O’Banks designed. Among its 900 objects are minute musical instruments that play, doors with intricate locks that work, and a tiny dollhouse within the dollhouse’s nursery.

The special exhibit today was entitled, Industrial Sublime:
Modernism and the Transformation of New York’s Rivers, 1900-1940. Because these paintings are on loan to the museum, I was unable to take photos. This was a wonderful exhibit which truly captured how the industrial age influenced our times and therefore our art. No longer were artists painting landscapes but instead featured factories, shipping, docks, and smoke stacks. In essence the age of machinery. 

The movement away from painting the land to painting the life on the street is often seen as a clean break with the depiction of the landscape, and with landscape painting generally as a mainstay of American art in the face of European Modernism. However, artists continued to paint the Hudson River, as well as its tributaries, the Harlem and East rivers, and the great harbor of New York City into which they flowed. What was different was their approach. Having jettisoned the romantic ideals of their forebears, artists like Henri and Sloan, and later, Georgia O’Keeffe, George Ault, Edward Hopper, and Preston Dickinson, celebrated the changing way of life along the city’s waterfront. As the century progressed, they did so with sharper focus and with ideals borrowed from the Machine Age. Instead of majestic mountain ranges, their subjects were the arching bridges, swinging cranes, and streamlined ocean liners resting in the harbor. Artists took the elements of the Sublime, combined them with Modernism’s interest in structure and form, and applied them to the man made industrial one—thereby creating a new visual vocabulary for the 20th century ─ the Industrial Sublime.

The museum and of course Glenview sit on a hill overlooking the glorious Hudson River. Though it was cold and at times bleak looking today, there is something very therapeutic about the water. 

While in the museum, I began talking with another docent. This fellow is intrigued by science and art and he is using his creativity to try to artistically get children interested in science. This whole notion caught my attention because I view art as a very hands on process and also I think the best way to learn something is through a visual. So his whole concept intrigued me. I asked him how he got interested in science and studying the elements on the period table. Want to know the answer?!!! The answer is he is a childhood cancer survivor and he needs to make sense out of the chemicals placed in his body as a child that have helped him survive. Needless to say he was talking my language. As Karen said to me, if someone has a story to tell, especially a cancer story, I am going to find it. I am not sure about that, but I have no doubt he probably thought I had no idea about childhood cancer or about his experiences. I did not tell him about Mattie, I was instead listening to him. But one thing is for certain, it was because of Mattie, I understood this man's passion on a deeper level.