Not getting much sculpting done lately. I was in Madison WI. for Thanksgiving . Made a point to see again something I really like at the Chazen Museum. But someone should bother to dust it off once in a while. It is furry on the shoulders with dust. Shame.

Leonard Baskin (American, 1922-2000) Laureate Standing, 1957 Cherrywood, 36 x 10 x 10 in.

Saw some good David Smith, Barbra Hepworth, and Deborah Butterfield, which reminded me that abstraction is not chaos, rather, it is rational. People sometimes confuse expressionism of a melodramatic type with abstraction.

Also stopped in Chicago and saw Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor. It is bogglingly great. It works on so many levels. People can engage with it depending on whatever they are prepared for. It could be a funhouse piece for some, and be an Op Art illusionism for others, just depends.

There, to the south of Bengal, on the east coast, a miraculous thing happened when, according to legend, a log of wood was seen floating in the sea and a mythical king ordered a carpenter to make it into an image of God.  The carpenter stipulated that he be left working behind closed doors for twenty-one days. The king opened the door prematurely; the carpenter, who was God himself, vanished. Though the image remained incomplete, it was installed in the temple. The image of Jagannatha, Lord of the World – in his temple of the twelfth century in Puri, an imposing structure built in the Great Tradition and of lavish sophistication – is a log of wood Just that and nothing else. Large eyes are painted on it and arm stumps branch out.  (Binayak, Mishra “Folklore and Pauranic Tradition about the Origin of God Jagannatha” Indian Historical Quarterly XIII (1937) 600-609)

My Dad retired 20 years ago and took up painting as a hobby. He occasionally sends me pictures of what he is doing.

This one post, The world’s creepiest painting, gets more comments that the rest of my blog. So, here are more paintings by George De Genaro.