Serpent head. Aztec, ca. 1250-1521. Stone, 90 x 92 x 155 cm. Museo Nacional de Antropología, INAH, Mexico City. Photo Michel Zabé, assistant Enrique Macías. [click here for details, but not until you’ve browsed my website first PUNK!]

I’ve been to this exhibit twice. The first time I went with Chris, Devon & Jeff. Not only was it great hanging out – but I am always transported when it comes to Aztec and Mayan art and architecture. I’m not sure what happens, but something comes over me and it’s very easy for me to picture what I think it must have been like living in those times. I wish I could speak thier languages.

Then I went again, with my brother and my dad a few months later. It’s even more impressive the second time. We were making fun of old franky and how he built the museum so that everyone’s knees and backs give out before you get to the bottom floor. And – we think he designed the bathrooms as a big “f-you” because how could anyone ever sit down in those toilets?!

Anyway, I liked the art.

So I’ve got camera fever! I bought a new digital camera and I love it. It’s a Nikon D70 body (I already had the lenses from my film cameras). Man I love it. I bought it before christmas and the batteries haven’t run out yet! I have posted pictures of my trip to the Zoo (check out the giraffe pictures – don’t they look like some wacky david lynch movie set?!) I had fun with jenn and Scott that day. They’re the bomb! (boogie down, what what!)

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?