Saturday, October 5, 2019

Saturday, October 5, 2019

Tonight's picture was taken in October of 2005. Mattie was three years old and dressed up as a calico cat. Peter snapped this photo of us as we were walking from home to the George Washington University. That day, several of my students invited Mattie to a Halloween event they were hosting for children in the community. Mattie was excited to be invited and I should mention that Mattie and I hand made his costume that year!

Quote of the day: The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. ~ Tahereh Mafi


We walked about 7 miles today. One of our stops was the National Gallery of Art. The first exhibit we saw was entitled, By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs. The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Photography played a significant role both in preparing for the mission and in shaping the cultural consciousness of the event. The exhibit had 50 works that included a selection of photographs from the unmanned Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter missions that led up to Apollo 11. 

This is a photograph of the moon in its first quarter. It was taken by Lewis Rutherfurd in 1865! 

Trained as a lawyer, Rutherfurd devoted his time and wealth to astronomy. He built his own small observatory, outfitted with a substantial refractor telescope, at his home in Manhattan. Beginning to photograph the moon in 1857, he developed several technological improvements. These included a lens for the telescope that was designed for rays of the light spectrum more sensitive to photographic chemicals than to human perception, which enabled him to produce extraordinary clear photographs of the moon. 

A select survey of lunar photographs from the 19th and early 20th centuries features works ranging from Warren de la Rue's late 1850s glass stereograph of the full moon to a suite of Charles Le Morvan's rich, velvety photogravures from Carte photographique et systematique de la lune, published in 1914, which attempted to systematically map the entire visible lunar surface. These photographs, from the 19th century to the "space-age" 1960s, merged art and science and transformed the way that we envision and comprehend the cosmos.

This lunar photograph was taken in 1899 by Maurice Loewy and Pierre Henri Puiseux. Lowey, director of the Paris Observatory, and lunar geologist Puiseux painstakingly photographed the moon on nights with clear weather conditions using a large telescope developed at the Observatory. With precisely positioned mirrors to reflect images from a rotating telescope to a fixed eyepiece, the instrument permitted viewers to remain stationary while observing celestial movement. They produced the first extensive photographic record of the visible areas of the moon. It identified craters and other geological features. 

This is a NASA photo. It was taken in 1969 and is titled, Earthrise across Mare Smythii. 







Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin deploy the American flag on the moon (July 20, 1969).

Buzz Aldrin poses with the American Flag (taken by Neil Armstrong, July 20, 1969)









Buzz Aldrin, Moon Walk Reflection. Keep in mind that Neil Armstrong took this photo, and you can see his reflection.

Buzz Aldrin's footprint on the moon (July 20, 1969). 










Stars and Stripes on the Moon. 

Apollo 11 Astronauts in Houston (August 16, 1969).

The second exhibit we saw was entitled, The Touch of Color: Pastels at the National Gallery of Art. It traced the history of pastel from the Renaissance to the 21st century and examined the many techniques that artists have developed to work with this colorful medium. 

Known for its brilliant colors and its delicate, velvety texture, pastel is one of the most versatile and beautiful materials in the history of art. Artists have found innumerable ways to use it, from glowing portraits in the eighteenth century to the shimmering landscapes of the impressionists, to the abstract compositions of the twentieth century. Fabricated from a paste of pigment, white opaque filler, and binder, shaped into sticks and dried, pastel is an almost endlessly adaptable medium: it can be used wet or dry, by drawing directly with the intact stick, or by grinding it to a powder and applying it with a brush.

An Elegant Young Lady with a Lace Cap (Pietro Rotari, 1750)

 The Ballet Dancer (by Edgar Degas)

The Waterloo Bridge (Claude Monet, 1901). Monet used pastel sporadically throughout his career. This is one of a series of scenes he made to study the effects of weather and light from a London hotel room while he waited for his painting supplies, which had been held up in customs. Although the pastels were not made as direct preparatory sketches, Monet noted in a letter, "it's thanks to my promptly made pastels that I saw what I had to do," when his supplies arrived and he returned to painting. 

Madame Michel-Levy (Edouard Manet, 1882)

The Black Hat (Mary Cassatt, 1890)

At the Grand Prix de Paris (Childe Hassam, 1887)

Woman with an Exotic Plant (Henri Matisse, 1925). Pastels by Matisse are rare, as he experimented with the medium mainly during a few brief periods. Here he drew on paper coated with a layer of sawdust, depositing think lines of pastel to create rich colors and emphatic patterns.