More Vicarious Travel: the Appalachian String Band Festival

My friend Mary Helen, one of Sav's three extraordinary midwives, recently returned from Clifftop, West Virginia, where she and her friend Claudio, Harmony School teacher extraordinaire, attended the Appalachian String Band Festival. She posted some photos on facebook.

These pictures remind me of one of my first trips to Indiana, long before I came here to live, on an upcycled (read "rickety") school bus filled with musicians. We came down for Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Festival in Bean Blossom. Rod, John, and Sally Bellville, Mary DuShane, Cal Hand, Dakota Dave Hull, Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson were on the bus – I think I was the only non-musician. It was fun to be among that roving band of fiddlers and banjo pickers, who played music day and night, incessantly testing new and old-timey tunes. Bill Monroe appeared on the modest Bean Blossom stage dressed from head to toe in white, beneficent and magnificent among the mud-spattered folks (there were a few downpours) whose makeshift homesteads populated the campgrounds. At one point I needed to get away from the bee-buzzing constant sound of the music, so I took a walk in a field of daisies and Queen Anne's Lace, marveling at the natural beauty of Brown County, Indiana. Little did I know I would someday live just down the road in Bloomington.

Here are some pictures of Clifftop taken by Natalie Garrett Wurtz. The Jesus bumper sticker was a favorite at the festival ("most photographed") and I now have the William Holman Hunt images of Christ in my mind, trying to imagine if it really could be true that Jesus would be slap happy. (I have to doubt it.)

Richard's Roadkill Eatery: a joke perhaps, but also a testament to the uneasy transition from a culture that relied on food that was trapped or hunted, the old-fashioned way, and the situation today, when vehicles are a major weapon of animal destruction.

The photo of musicians Tim Litchfield, Chris Persson, Jeslyn Vaughan, Summer Gentry Case, Missy West, Kellyn Sanderson gives an impression of a session at Clifftop. Looks as if it is a beautiful thing.

Rod Bellville, Cal Hand, Andy Kozak, Gary Schwatrz and Bill Hinkley are still making music together, or at least they are in this YouTube video of the tune "Beaumont Clearwater" from 2002. I wonder if they ever meet up with their cohort at Clifftop?

Reading between Digital and Analog: Henry Wentworth Monk

The Sin and Salvation exhibit (reviewed here at Minnesota Public Radio) shows how radical and quirky the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was, a loose band of painters who posed a challenge to the conventions of Titian-style portraiture. They made highly decorative works, often designing their own frames, complete with lines of text and sculptural elements. To fully enter these works, viewers are expected to read them, interpreting religious and poetic symbols and connecting complex narrative threads.

One of my favorite paintings is this one, a portrait of Henry Wentworth Monk. He's a man with alarming facial hair, like Hunt himself (in this self portrait). Hunt holds the Bible in one hand, and the Times (London?) in the other. It's a great depiction of how an individual situates himself between two very different forms of discourse. The Biblical messages are analog, requiring hermeneutic interpretation. The daily news is the digital mode, contingent on events taking place over time, unfolding in the historical present. The mind finds "itself" negotiating between the two, reading them in relation to and against one another. I like the way Hunt stares somewhat fanatically straight ahead, the blue globes in the glass window behind suggesting the spinning planets of his messianic vision.

These red-bearded men of the Brotherhood (and its circle) are like a certain kind of rare animal, now endangered or extinct, I think.

Sin and Salvation: William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision

I went with my parents to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts last weekend, where we saw the extraordinary exhibit "Sin and Salvation: William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision."

This artist had a thing for hair, and for what he called "stunner" women with flowing tresses, including the two sisters he married, Fanny, and then Edith, Waugh. He made a portrait, too, of his disapproving mother-in-law, Mrs. George Waugh – her curls are tamed.

Check out the wild unleashed storm cloud of hair on the Lady of Shalot, Hunt's last major painting, before he went blind. He was also known for his renderings of sheep's wool, velvet, peacock feathers, and all manner of tactile textiles. Hunt was one of the first of the hyper-realists, with a religious agenda, a symbolic frame of reference, and an intense sense of color. There's a sensuous dimension to his work, all roiled up in imagined scenes from Biblical history. Every inch of each canvas offers microscopic renderings, making it difficult to apprehend the whole.

My favorite image was a small unfinished portrait of an elaborately rendered woman's face, with just the red sketch of a bonnet around it. It offered a bit of breathing room and emptiness – two features that are otherwise missing in Hunt's work.