I’ve always liked Cindy Sherman’s photography. She uses herself as subject, and she takes on different identities. Her Untitled Film Stills are exceptional. Click on her photo above to go to her photographs at the MOMA in NYC.

I noticed that there are a lot of people visiting this page of mine. Can you please let me know what prompted your interest in this Matisse Painting? I am very curious. Here is a list of old comments about this painting [click here]. Please add your new comments at the bottom of this post.

Henri Matisse
French, 1869-1954
Bathers with a Turtle, 1908
oil on canvas
70 1/2 x 86 3/4 inches
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. 24:1964

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Among the first of the 20th-century French painters to break completely with observed reality, Henri Matisse focused on color, pattern, and decoration. He believed in the simplicity of idea and line, breaking things down to what he saw as their simplest elements. Matisse’s work was strongly influenced by the Impressionists and by Oriental art, particularly the designs and colors of the Near East.
Like Picasso’s famous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of just a year earlier, to which Matisse may have been responding in this painting, Bathers with a Turtle presents three nude female figures. Placed in a landscape of bands of color, the women seem more interested in the feeding of a small red turtle, an ancient symbol for eternity, than in relating to each other.
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�1996 Copyright The Saint Louis Art Museum

I took this picture on my last trip to Rochester, NY. I can’t remember where it was, I think it was in the car on my way to the airport in NY. I really like this picture and I think I might frame it. What do you guys think? Should I add it to my “official” photography site?

So a lot’s been going on at work.I got a promotion which I feel fits very well, and I still get to work with people who I’ve been working with for a long time and that feels good. I’ve been neglecting this blog for so long because I’ve been busy, but also I feel it’s unfair to ramble on without attaching a picture of some kind. I don’t understand why anyone reads this blog to begin with, but having to read without some visual distractions must be even worse :). More to come…

I went during lunch today to look at the American Indian Art display for auction at Christie’s. I had been reading the catalog all weekend and there were so many things I wanted to see and get the chance to touch. When I went today they only had a few of the rugs on display, all of the rest had been taken away in preparation for the auction. I would have had to ask one of the specialists to bring me back into the rooms where the stuff was stored, and I figured I didn’t have enough time to do that, so I went back to work after seeing the rugs. I guess I am disappointed, I did really want to see the pottery. It would be up close with no glass between. There were some exceptionally beautiful rugs, though. This one in particular.

Estimate:
$25,000-35,000

A TLINGIT CEREMONIAL DANCE BLANKET, CHILCAT
of classic form, finger woven with commercial wool in yellow, blue, ivory and black, mountain goat’s wool and twisted cedar bark fiber, with a highly stylized totemic crest design, probably representing a killer whale, composed of typical conventionalized formline elements, a panel of long twisted fringe at bottom, smaller panels of twisted and plaited fringe along the sides, with tag sewn onto the reverse, inscribed, 1-82.5.21.2
Dimensions: 70 x 35 in. (177.8 x 88.9 cm.)