T Shirt designs

 

I have been working on t-shirt designs for some t-shirts I want to order and the process has become so involved that I have no recourse other than...

to show you them.

I don't make these in an attempt to sell them, though occasionally people have bought them and I get a tiny commission. I make them so I can buy my own designs on a site called Redbubble. And though I did not buy the t-shirts for all of these, I did get four!

These are all, or almost all designs from things that have at least partly appeared here in the past.

Distractions of the Chagall Museum

 

Because everytime we go to the Chagall Museum I end up talking about the pleasantness of the garden cafe there, I thought it would be nice to get a picture of it. It is both a nice place to be and very charming looking! So I took all my camera equiptment out of my pocket, walked to a suitable vantage point with the cafe entrance set off by an old tree, and...

there was a cat!

All my plans went out of the window.

I took pictures of the cat instead.

I'm like that about cats.

I made a drawing/painting out of one of the pictures of the cat, and this is it:

End of Carnaval

 

After the last parade of Carnaval, there were fireworks. Part of me doesn't like to miss out on fireworks. And I could have roused the household to wander down to the beach at around when we usually go to bed these days, but then I remembered I don't really like standing around in a crowd looking at fireworks.

I do however like seeing fireworks out my window!

At our old Saint Minneapolis apartment, also on the top floor, we had a glamorous view of the river and city and a golf course. Though we could see endless fireworks out broadly across the city, distance muted them a little. The golf course, though, a country club, had a spectacular show every year a day or two before July 4th and we would eagerly watch it from our balcony.

Still, I heard these end of Carnaval fireworks would be over the ocean, which seemed an amazing thing to see, and not something that we'd be able to spot from any of our windows.

But then it turned out that, despite what I read, the fireworks were not over the sea. They were over the Place Massena. And though buildings fully block anything remotely like a view of that heart of the city, it is nevertheless quite close to us as the seagull flies. So when the explosions started sounding out loudly in the city I went to my window, behind where I sit now, and I looked right.

We can't see Place Massena from here. Not even close. But...

BUT

We can see the sky above it.

Chagall, with the proper respect

 

Holy crap, that Chagall guy is a helluva painter!

Last time we talked about the Chagall Museum, right up near the end of last year, we gave the whole story; the way the museum works, the pleasant little walk there from our apartment, a bit of its history, its lovely garden cafe. Then with a little AI flummery I put myself in some of his paintings for fun, and with that another day at clerkmanifesto was taken care of. 

But with a "Free first Sunday of the Month" and a new show they had up at the local Chagall Museum, we went for another visit, and, well, check out my opening sentence. So I thought I'd take a more Chagall centric approach to this visit.

That said the first thing we did after going into the Chagall Museum was to go to the garden cafe. I love their garden cafe. My town has brilliant street cafes and even beach cafes, but is a bit lacking in its garden cafes.

I had a spritz.

After going through the security into the museum proper, we eschewed the permanent collection of biblical paintings. Brilliant as they are we have now seen them a few times, and we were excited about new stuff. 

The new stuff was work and preparatory work toward a production of a ballet of "The Firebird" in New York in the forties, around where he was living during the war. And then there was another smaller room showing his work for the ceiling of the Paris Opera, maybe from the sixties? I'd really like to get up to Paris to see that ceiling!

Picasso said of Chagall "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." It's a pretty nice compliment. Funnily enough up the street from the Chagall Museum is the Matisse Museum! And even more funny, I saw this same quote featured in the Firebird show, only in the Chagall Museum the Matisse part was omitted! It just said "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." Which barely makes sense! Ha!

Either way, Picasso might have been right. Although I don't know who all the other painters were in the world in order to go that big. Wasn't Rothko alive? He might have had an inkling about what color really is.

But all that nonsense aside, the colors in these Chagalls are crazy good, with that curious quality in all great painting of magic, not flying goats magic, but magic leaving one wondering how strong colors like that could possibly work so clearly and richly together and alone! And yet, in this Firebird show I equally enjoyed something about Chagall's crazy drawing fecundity. I wish I could draw like that, that is, kind of terribly, but have it always work perfectly. He has all these mad lines like he can't decide on one, and he's not afraid of ridiculous cartoonishness of hands and feet and faces, but again, it weirdly comes together. Wasn't all this the stuff they warned me in art school drawing classes that we should never do?

Chagall had a pretty funny quote about Picasso. He said "What a genius that Picasso. It's a pity he doesn't paint." I like that quote. I too wish Picasso painted a bit more, you know, stuff. But what can you do, somewhere in the middle of that century painting started coming apart and it was so great at first, but then maybe it was impossible to put it back together again.

Anyway, I took a bunch of pictures of some Chagall Firebird works and, well, no reason to do anything to them but show you and let you have your own reaction. Here they are:

Light of day

 

As I am doing a lot of drawing and layering of pictures, I am accumulating many images that haven't found a place here yet. But in looking them over I did come to the stunning realization that

NOT EVERYTHING I WORK ON HAS TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY!

So with that in mind, I'll leave off a few thousand things I was thinking of showing you and go with just these:

A few days ago I came up with a Tolstoy inspired title for my post and felt strongly enough about it to put it on my shirt, at least fictionally. Then I spent quite awhile making it into this self portrait drawing:

Here we have a picture from Tokyo, of a train crossing near the house we were staying at just beyond the edge of a fabulous park.

We loved that place we stayed at despite it being FILLED WITH SPIDERS! Which speaks to its other qualities. We often came home late at night (for us), down a canal path and across these train tracks. We were in the biggest city in the world, but it felt like a lonely country railroad crossing:

And finally (and with that word I will be axing hours of prepared material for you!), there is this drawing I made or worked up out of an already much worked up image from the Kyoto Botanical Gardens, one of my favorite places in Japan.

Coffee in Kyoto

 

What I meant to say yesterday, when I was talking about wandering the world for half a year, before I got sidetracked into a bit of...

comedy,

is that if, of all the places we have been and visited and eaten and drinked at in this last half year, if there was one that I wish we could take with us, and have with us next door forever, it would be a modest coffee shop in our neighborhood of Kyoto.

It isn't easy to say why.

Located in the most absolutely quiet backstreets of a neighborhood, a few steps from the backside entrance of a genuinely insignifigant, though perfectly charming little shrine, Kononeki had limited hours so we learned to plan our week around it somewhat. Featuring a simple design of small tables, a couple of them even just for one person, plenty of wood, an open counter kitchen area, and a few shopping selections, Kononeki served mainly coffee. And toast.

These were very good.

And if anything else were available or on the menu, you'd really better get them.

No, I mean it. They will be better than you think.

No, even with my warning, they will still be better than you think. Like, functionally you won't be able to imagine it.

It is not your limitation.

It's just.... Kononeki.

The proprietress is very nice too.

I have drawn a picture for you. It makes me wistful:

Looking for fun stuff on the Internet

In the half year since we left our home of more than 30 years, ventured across the world, and landed in France, we have seen a few things.

No, no, I'm not bragging. I know. So have you. You have seen tons of cool stuff.

Yes, I would love to hear about it!

In fact, I am simply dying to hear about it! All this social media stuff is poisonous. These horrible giant Internet mega sites are killing us. Put your blog address here and I am ready for the ride of my life!!!

You, you don't have a blog?

Sigh.

 

Magnolias in France

 

When I first started adding photography to clerkmanifesto, a curious road that currently seems to be leading me more and more into drawing and painting, the earliest inspirations were flowers. And among the first great blooms in Spring, when I started, were the Magnolias.

Every year after that first, I would take pictures of the Magnolias. Their bloom happened so fast and felt so early, often with snow still on the ground, that they felt extra special, and every stage of their flowering and fecundity delighted me. I loved their twisted little buds, the dazzlement of their lush blooms against the cold blue midwestern skies, and their multicolored decays. They were always gone too before I felt like I was repeating myself.

And then I moved to France.

And I figured most things would be different.

Things are different.

For instance, the flowers never never never stop around here. There are things blooming exactly the same, and in the same place, as they were blooming when we first moved to this city three months ago. And some of these flowers are so showy! I know them from expensive bouquets and dreams of jungles, but here they just... are. Waiting around with a smile on their face, in the dirt.

So I wasn't really thinking there would be Magnolias.

But there are Magnolias!

They don't stand out as much, but they're just as pretty.