Art History Challenge Has People Recreating Art With Everyday Items

Art History Challenge Has People Recreating Art With Everyday Items

Betsy Wyeth - 1921 - 2020 Her world

We received this morning from the Farnsworth Art Museum and Wyeth Center - Rockland's world class  institution - a page devoted to Betsy Wyeth, Andrews's wife who has died at 98.

Watch the video Betsy's World which features her sons Nicky and James, and family friend and legendary Maine photographer Peter Ralston.

In recent years she has lived in the summer at Georges Harbor on Benner Island.  It is a magic spot where she built a house, commuted on her boat Home Run, and composed the fishing village of dreams across the narrow cut - the  Allen Island Sea Station - where in 1907 Maine marked its tercentennial with the granite Weymouth Cross on a bluff.  You can see that spot below and in this post which I put up to mark Andrew's death and attempted to capture the light for which he is famous.  I often saw James visiting Mommy, arriving via his black 40 footer Dreadnought.

In 1993, recovering from a flu, and needing a refuge we saw an ad in the Times for a house in Friendship, Maine.  I remembered sailing in Hempstead Harbor with my Dad on his friend Lou Perretti's Friendship sloop as a boy.  We rented the house and sailed aboard Gladiator (below). Fifteen years later we bought our house across the creek from the Zubers who are still sailing Gladiator - now 120 years old!

But I digress...what I didn't know is that we were entering Wyeth World.  Betsy's world, its light and sounds captured in the (now familiar) shots taken in Cushing - where we drive past their house on the way to the supermarket - the Olsen House now a museum where Andrew is buried in the local family graveyard across the road, and Southern Island which Betsy restored for James and his late wife Phyllis, remembered HERE.  Watch the video! - gwc

Betsy Wyeth (1921 - 2020)

Her room

Betsy's World from Farnsworth Art Museum on Vimeo.

Costello

I received these photos this morning from Ancestry.com.  They probably got them from Martin Robillard.  

It is the Costello family grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn. Placed by my great grandfather Thomas Costello in memory of his wife Bridget Slattery (1919 - Spanish flu?), himself (1938 - at 85 - the last arrival from Ireland i/a 1863)  Dad was 18 at the time of hisdeath and Thomas lived with them in Gerritsen Beach.

Agnes, his sister, I faintly remember or maybe just talk of her, Nana, Grandaddy, and Josephine's son Paul who died at 1 y.o.

The deed is signed by Bishop (later Archbishop) for whom the highs school in Queens was named when school moved from St. Ann's parish in Brooklyn to Jamaica.  that's why the name of their teams long a powerhouse - is the Stanners.

- GWC

Haunts of Ancient Peace - Van Morrison

Live in Berkeley - 1986

World loses New Orleans musical patriarch Ellis Marsalis Jr. to coronavirus | National Catholic Reporter

World loses New Orleans musical patriarch Ellis Marsalis Jr. to coronavirus | National Catholic Reporter:

by Jason Berry

The news on April 1 that Ellis Marsalis Jr., 85, had died of COVID-19-related pneumonia opened a river of national tributes for New Orleans' premier jazz pianist, professor and the patriarch of a musical family with remarkable aesthetic reach. Government shutdown orders prohibited the pageantry of a jazz funeral, the second line of street dancers parading to brass band melodies. Churches were closed, parading banned. 

Orleans Parish, which includes the city, ranked in the top 10 U.S. counties for per capita deaths from the coronavirus. Along Rampart Street's grassy median opposite St. Jude shrine at Our Lady of Guadalupe church, people with rosary beads stood apart, murmuring prayers to the saint for hopeless cases. 

 Marsalis had begun teaching in the 1960s at Xavier University, the nation's only historically black Roman Catholic college, founded in 1925 by St. Katharine Drexel. Stirred by the city's gloom, Xavier President C. Reynold Verret, a chemist by training, wrote a poem, "Tolling the Bell," published here with permission: 

Last night, Ellis Marsalis went away,Piano keys tug at their locks and rend their robes,And each in their seclusion weeps so silently.No second line,No coming home of acolytes,The many musician daughters and sons,Emissaries of the old man to many places,To share the gift.None may returnTo ring the bell,To celebrate,To mourn.In the emptiness of St. Peter's SquareA lonely Pope stood before GodAnd called me from afar, 9That I too may join with him in prayer, Make my return, give thanksAs thanks we must.In solitude, we remember.In cells of marble ormade of simpler things,We weep.

 Ellis Marsalis carried the spiritual imagination of the city in his music. Pianists, however, have no role in burial parades — the work of marching brass bands. When Dolores, his wife and soulmate of more than 57 years died in 2017, Ellis stood outside Mater Dolorosa Catholic Church as his musician sons — Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo, Jason — raised their horns in tribute to their mother with a large brass band assemblage playing "I'll Fly Away." All six sons had grown up going to the church. As Ellis' life ended, the brothers faced the task of burial under emergency conditions.

KEEP READING

This War Effort— - Free Press Online

from an old man in Waldoboro, Maine, the small town next to our small town. (but they have a supermarket).

This War Effort— - Free Press Online: 

I’ve been here before. I recognize this waking to unease and surfacing to realize our known world is topsy-turvy. I remember: weird years in a town with the men gone; the worried faces of mothers counting out ration stamps as they laughed off another meatless, butterless, sugarless meal; the stabbing “What if this is real?” feeling...

‘A Tragedy Is Unfolding’: Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter - The New York Times

‘A Tragedy Is Unfolding’: Inside New York’s Virus Epicenter - The New York Times: In a city ravaged by an epidemic, few places have been as hard hit as central Queens.

John Prine peeled back the mysteries of ordinariness for Chicago fans - Chicago Tribune

Commentary: John Prine peeled back the mysteries of ordinariness for Chicago fans - Chicago Tribune: Commentary: News of John Prine's coronavirus diagnosis prompted tributes from across the country. The singer died Tuesday of complications of COVID-19.

John Prine And Stephen Colbert: "That's the Way the World goes Round" - YouTube

(11) John Prine And Stephen Colbert: "That's the Way the World goes Round" - YouTube: Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Da

This movie is why I have decided I would like Cassius Costello to call me Da. It's a favorite of mine with Martin Sheen and my former acting teacher Bill Hickey. - Da