people need rituals to mark passages of lifeand death. go somewhereand do something to mark the loss
Rituals mark the passage of time. Birthdays
Leaving coins on a grave - originates from Greek Mythology, paying ones way to a resting place in the under world Hades, place coin in mouth, no coin and you were left to wander and haunt in the upper world.
Coins on eyes.
coins at feet.
Burial customs of Romans:
-The soul thought to need provisions in afterlife, ground above tomb laid out as a garden (Egyptians), the spirit may wander about and enjoy.
-Cenotaph - an empty tomb for someone who died at sea.
Abacus, usually a square uppermost part of a capital..
Abbey, a church or chapel of a monastery.
Aisle, the side of a nave (q.v.) separated from the nave proper by a colonnade.
Ambulatory, passageway around the choir, often a continuation of the side aisles of the nave.
Apse,a semi-circular or polygonal vaulted space behind the altar.
Apsidiole, small apse-like chapel.
Arcade, a series of arches carried on piers or columns.
Barrel vault, semi-cylindrical vault with parallel abutments and of constant cross sections.
Basilica (1),a rectangular building with a central nave, side aisles separated by colonnades, with or without a transept, (2) Roman Catholic Church that has been accorded certain privileges by the pope.
Bay, a vaulted division of a nave, aisle, choir or transeptalong its longitudinal axis.
Blind (arch, arcade), an arch or arcade with no openings, usually as decoration on a wall.
Boss, a projecting stone at the intersection of ribs, frequently elaborately carved. Its function is to provide a net intersection of the ribs and tie them into one unit.
Buttress, a masonry member projecting from a wall, rising from the ground, and counteracting the outward thrust of the roof or vaulting. In Gothic architecture, a flying buttress is a freestanding element connected by an arch to the outer wall.
Canopy, a protective roof above statues
Campanile, term only applied to a bell tower which is detached from a church..
Capital, the head of a column.
Cathedral, the chief church of a Diocese (Roman Catholic or Episcopal) which contains the Cathedra, the seat of the Bishop.
Chancel, interchangeable with choir (q.v.), sometimes the area in front the altar.
Chevet, an apse (q.v.), typically the ambulatory (q.v.) and radiating chapels (q.v.).
Choir, area at the end of the nave which is reserved for clergy or monks (modern - singers), and which contains the altar and choir stalls.
Choir stalls, the row of stepped seats on either side of the choir, facing inwards.
Cinquefoil, a figure of five equal segments.
Clerestory, the exterior wall of a nave above the level of the aisles with windows.
Cloister, quadrilateral enclosure surrounded by covered walkways, the center of activity for the inhabitants of a monastery.
Close, the area on which the cathedral and subordinate building stand.
Columbarium, a structure of vaults lined with recesses for urns.
Concha, semi-circular niche with a semi-dome.
Corbel or Console, ornamental bracket that projects from the wall.
Crocket, an ornament consisting of a projecting piece of sculptured stone or wood. Used to decorate the sloping ridges of gablets, spires, and pinnacles. Usually carved as foliage.
Crossing,the area of a church where the nave is intersected by the transept.
Crypt, underground chamber beneath the altar in a church, usually containing a saint’s relics. It sometimes extends as far as the crossing, so that the choir and altar are sometimes considerably higher than the nave and aisle.
Engaged column, a column embedded in a wall, not free standing.
Finial, the topmost portion of a pinnacle, usually sculptured as an elaborate ornament with upright stem and cluster of crockets; seen at a distance, it resembles a cross from any angle of vision.
Galilee, a chapel or porch at the entrance to a church
Gargoyle, a pierced or tunneled stone projecting from a gutter and intended to carry rain away from wall and foundations. It is usually carved into the image of a beast or ugly creature.
Gallery, an upper story, running along the side of a church, open on one side to the interior.
Groin vault, type of vaulting caused by two equally large barrel vaults (q.v.) crossing at right angles; the angle formed by the intersecting vaults is the groin.
Intrados, the inner face of an arch or vault.
Lady chapel, a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
Lancet, a pointed arched window of one opening frequently arranged in groups of two to five.
Lantern tower, a tower with windows shedding light into the crossing (q.v.).
Lunette, a semi-circular space above doors and windows, sometimes framed and decorated.
Misericord, In the choir stalls of medieval church, a bracket (often grotesquely or humorously carved) beneath a hinged seat which, when the seat was tipped up, gave some support to a person standing during a lengthy service.
Narthex, the single-story porch of a church
Nave, the area of a church between the façade and crossing or choir, specifically, the central area between the aisles.
Niche, a recess in the face of a wall or pier, prepared to receive a statue.
Oculus, a small circular opening admitting light at the top of a dome.
Pier, a mass of masonry supporting an arch or vault and distinct from a column, A clustered pier is composed of a number of small columns.
Pinnacle, a turrent tapering upward to the top, its gracefulness enhanced by crockets (q.v.),and top stone called a finial (q.v.).
Pulpitum,a screen dividing the choir from the nave. Often called Rood Screen.
Predella, the step or platform on which an altar is placed.
Portal, a major entrance to church, emphasized by sculpture and decoration.
Quatrefoil, a figure used in window tracery, shaped to form a cross or four equal segments of a circle.
Radiating chapels, chapels leading off from the ambulatory, and arranged in a semi-circular fashion.
Reredos,the wall or screen at the back of an altar, either in carved stone, wood or metal.
Retrochoir, in some cathedrals, the portion of the chancel (q.v.) behind the high altar at the extreme east end.
Respond, long narrow column or engaged column, mainly in Gothic architecture, which supports the arches and ribs of groan vaults or the profiles of arcade arches.
Reliquary, a casket containing one or more relics.
Rib, a structural molding of a vault.
Rood Beam, a large beam set transversely across a church from north to south on which stands a crucifix.
Rood screen,the screen dividing the choir from the nave.
Rose Window, a round window, with tracery (q.v.) dividing it into sections, called petals.
Sanctuary, the part of the church which contains the high altar.
Sedilla, seats in the sanctuary (q.v.) near the altar, usually three in number for clergy.
Shaft, the main part of a column, from its base to its capital.
Spandrel, the triangular space between the outer curve of an arch and an enclosing frame of mouldings, often richly carved with foliage.
Tracery, a term for the variations of mullions in Gothic windows and for geometric systems on wall panels and doors.
Transept, section of a church a right angles to the nave and in front of the choir.
Trefoil, either a carved three-leaved ornament, or a three lobed opening in tracery (q.v.).
A collaborative installation with 32 artists from six different states. Manifesting creative communities with ritual objects, using Nkisi Nkondi as a point of departure. Participating artists: Sarah Rockett, Tammi Kefauver Brazee, Peter Strange Yumi, John Ichabod Babcock, Regina Benson, Carol Browning, Lydia Brokaw, Jaime Carrejo, Amber Cobb, Patricia Coronel, Nicholas Croghan, Suzanne Faris, Ashley Frazier, Sarah Goldenber-White, Laura Grossett, Anne Hallam, Kendall Harper, Anna Hultin, Tressa Jones, Marius Lehene, Dawn S. McFadden, Denise Bearden, Laura Mongiovi, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, Jennifer Pettus, Veronica Reeves, Kimberly Ritchie, Stefani M. Rossi, Ajean Ryan, Doug Sink, Ashley Williams, Christy Wolfe and Denise Bearden.
The three images below show the two pieces I contributed to the project.
Each measures approx. 15" in length. Materials are cotton, ink, thread and mechanical pencil.
Devlin's work for theater appeals to me because of the collaborative nature of set design. The idea of many coming together to share ideas that result in a sensory experience is very appealing to me. The final solutions are experiences that are expressive and meaningful.
The below quote is interesting to me because it addresses synaesthesia.
"Where do plays happen? What are we looking at when we sit in the theatre? For Devlin, it’s about entering a state that reconfigures the senses. “Mike Figgis once said to me, ‘Film is an illusion. You think you are watching it, but in fact you are hearing it. It’s the music that is driving your emotional response to the pictures you are seeing.’ When it works, there’s a synaesthesia in theatre that somehow allows you to hear pictures when you’re watching ‘The Tempest’, and see music when you listen to the Verwandlungsmusik of ‘Parsifal’.” - source is Es Devlin's Magic Circles, Intelligent Life. Link here.
Scenes from "Les Troyens" by Berlioz. Designer Es Devlin creates a spectacular, fire-spewing Trojan horse.
Set design for Chimerica. Source for images above and text below is Behance. Link here.
Lucy Kirkwoods new play explores the changing relationship between China and America through the eyes of a photographer who took one of the iconic "Tank Man" photographs in Tiannimen Square in 1989.
The set is a rotating white cube made up of multiple sliding panels creating doors, widows, openings, rooms, fish stall, appartments, strip clubs, newspaper offices and many other locations. The video design is a series of photographs, as if taken by the shows protagonist, mapped on to this cube. The images not olve move us from location to location but across continents and forwards and backwards in time.
Press:
"Es Devlin's superb design - an ingenious cube that revolves through time and space, drenched in Finn Ross's excellent projections of black-and-white contact sheets, each marked with a red editorial pen as a pertinent reminder that no photograph is unmediated." - The Indipendent
"Kirkwood deals with the ethics and practice of photojournalism; and this is dazzlingly reflected in Es Devlin's design, in which blown up, contact-sheet images are projected on to a revolving cube" - The Guardian *****
"superb use of photographic projections, often resembling the contact prints of news photographs. This is a stage show with the jump-cut fluidity of a film." The Telegraph
" The set, a little like an oversized camera, is a giant rotating cube with sliding apertures; on to its sides are projected video images, by Finn Ross, that conjure scenes from both Beijing and the Big Apple with filmic detail and elegance, along with scores of reportage-style pictures on contact sheets – the kind of photographs from which the world creates its narratives and its history." The Arts Desk
I showed with artist Lauren Hill, whose work I greatly admire for it's ability to communicate powerful messages with delicate and precise marks. Below is the press release for our two-person show. Below the press release I posted a few images of Lauren's work - images are not full size so please go to her website, laurenhillart.com to check out larger images and more of Lauren's work.
Quiet Desire, Lauren Hill and Laura Mongiovi
AUGUST 2014
Florida School of the Arts presents sculptures by Laura Mongiovi and Lauren Hill
As part of the visiting artist series, Florida School of the Arts will present a gallery exhibition for artists Laura Mongiovi and Lauren Hill. The exhibit will open with a reception on Thursday, August 28 at 7:00 p.m. in the Fine Arts Gallery located on St. Johns River State College’s Palatka campus. The exhibit will be on display through October 16. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and during Main Stage performances. Gallery exhibits are free and open to the public.
According to the artists, the works in the exhibition, entitled Quiet Desire, provide the viewer with moments of contemplation and solitary discovery. Hill and Mongiovi explore the notion of desire as a motivating force in a sensory and intellectual experience. “Fleeting moments of personal perception inspire the artists to create works that communicate ideas about curiosity and longing,” said Mongiovi.
Lauren Hill is an adjunct visual arts professor at Flagler College, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing. She received her Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from the University of Florida. She has exhibited in galleries throughout Florida as well as in Tallahassee and North Carolina.
Hill’s Flagler colleague, Laura Mongiovi, received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida State University and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her works have been exhibited throughout the continental United States.
Florida School of the Arts is part of the academic and administrative structure of SJR State and awards the two-year associate degree in the following areas of study: fine art, graphic design, dance (ballet and contemporary), production/design, acting and musical theatre. The School serves the entire state of Florida. Admission is based on an audition or portfolio review, an interview with the faculty and admission to SJR State.
Students produce and perform in approximately four visual arts exhibitions and 10 performances each year. For more information about Florida School of the Arts call (386) 312-4300 or visit online atfloarts.org.
Kate Maury, a dear friend and former colleague of mine from when I taught at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, was a guest artist at Flagler College. Kate met with our students, gave a public talk about her work and did a hand building demo. Kate and I share common ideas about adornment and discovery. Kate's work is rich with texture and infused with ideas of ritual and desire. Below are a few images of Kate's work. You can find much more on her website, katemaury.com
Historic pigments in the Straus Center collection
at Harvard Art Museums, which is reopening this Sunday
(photograph by Zak Jensen,
all images courtesy Harvard Art Museums)
When the Harvard Art Museums reopen this Sunday after a six-year expansion project, historic pigments foundational to the field of art conservation in the United States will be on public view. A new display will showcase the Forbes Pigment Collection as part of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies.
The laboratory, as WBUR reported this week, is a component of the merger of Harvard’s three art museums — Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler — into one complex. Through glass walls visitors can see scientific conservation in process, which goes back to the Fogg’s founding in 1927 and pioneer conservationist and director Edward Waldo Forbes. While collecting art around the world for the new museum, Forbes got intrigued by how paintings were made, and why some deteriorated. Gradually and then obsessively he amassed a collection of painting pigments, many of which are displayed in their original glass containers on a wall of the Straus Center.
“It was put together by Edward Forbes in an attempt to understand the material nature of works of art, and that approach to understanding art had not been taken before,” Senior Conservation Scientist Narayan Khandekar told Hyperallergic over the phone. “It was the beginning of the scientific approach for conservation in the United States.”
Edward Waldo Forbes & Paul J. Sachs with bust of Victor Hugo (1944) (photograph by George Woodruff, courtesy Harvard Art Museums Archives)
Later Forbes hired scientist Rutherford John Gettens, who examined the chemistry of pigments and innovated tools like a microsampler for taking art specimens. Now conservators can examine how a color has changed over time — like pararealgar, that was originally red and reacted with light into yellow — and the original components of art through the pigment library.
Only a small part of the collection was on view in the original building. Now they’re assembled in white cabinets based on the color wheel, with yellow at the center going out to blue and purple and beyond. Khandekar noted the pigments are often standards for historic colors (an online database of them is used by conservators across the globe). For example, one of the yellows was integral to recent research on a Georges Seurat work.
“It was before he was painting with all these little dots, and in it, we found these pigments, these tiny bright yellow needles,” Khandekar explained. “I said that it looked like Indian yellow and we had a sample of it and we were able to compare it, and it was the same.” That Indian yellow, while available in 19th century France and used by Seurat for its intense color, was banned by the British government as it was made from the dried urine of cows fed just mango leaves, and deemed cruel to the animals.
Alongside the thousands of pigment samples are materials used to make them, like the semi-precious stone ground up for the vibrantly blue lapis lazuli, and scientists at the center are still adding contemporary pigments to the collection. There are also other components of the materials of art, like binding media and geological samples related to classical sculpture. And it’s just one aspect of the rebranded museum opening up its history and resources after the years of closure. “It’s part of the museum becoming a more transparent institution,” Khandekar said.
Narayan Khandekar, senior conservation scientist at the
Harvard Art Museums, installs the pigment collection in the
Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies (
photograph by Antoinette Hocbo)
Historic pigments at the Straus Center
(photograph by Peter Vanderwarker)
The pigments in the collection come from all over the world, a
and some are stored in their original delicate glass containers
(photograph by Zak Jensen)
The Harvard Art Museums, during renovation and expansion,
showing the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies (photograph by Zak Jensen)
Harvard Art Museums (32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts) reopen this Sunday, November 16.
When I was 8 and on holiday in France with my parents, we went to Chartres Cathedral, just south of Paris. My father took me by the hand as we both stared at the blue glass casting reflections all over the limestone in the great medieval church.
FROM THIS STORY
“That blue was made 800 years ago,” he said. “And we can’t make it like that any more.”
From that moment on I was fascinated—obsessed you could say—by colors. Not just by what effect they have on the eye (though for me any encounter with a new piece of art is almost always about the colors first), but also by their history and, of course, how they were and are made. For, as I learned, colors are amazing and complex things. Even the purest and brightest natural colors like madder-root orange are actually blends of many colors when viewed under the microscope: yellow, red, even blue and white. Chemical colors (so much less delightful!) often are just one.
I recently spent five weeks at the Getty Museum, walking the galleries with a large magnifying glass in hand and talking to experts about the different paints and processes. The Brilliant History of Color in Art, the book I just wrote with the Museum, follows paints and dyes and pigments through time, from the manganese black used in the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux in France to the tiny dots of light, pixels, that create color on our computer screens.
My quest for color has landed me in all sorts of adventures. I traveled to eastern Iran for the two weeks in November when the landscape is purple with saffron crocuses harvested for their scented
red stigmas. I went twice to Afghanistan during wartime, the second time reaching the remote mountains where for 6,000 years people have mined the lapis lazuli stone that gives the astonishing purplish blue of Titian’s skies and the Virgin Mary’s robes.
Saint George and the Dragon, about 1450–55, Master of Guillebert de Mets. Tempera colors, gold leaf paint, and ink on parchment, 7 5/8 x 5 1/2 in. (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 2, fol. 18v, gold )
Over the years I’ve seen my share of medieval stained glass windows in churches, cathedrals, and museums. I’ve even found and picked up tiny colored shards of glass on the ground outside churches in my native England. These shards had been lying in the dirt since the dark days of what we rather kindly call the Reformation of the 1530s, when some of the country’s most beautiful sacred art objects were smashed in obedience to King Henry VIII.
But I’d never done more than touch a fragment of stained glass until a few weeks ago, when I visited the Stained Glass Studio at Canterbury Cathedral in Kent in southern England. Conservators at the Cathedral had taken down this pane featuring the Biblical figure of Methuselah in his 12th-century glory, along with 42 other depictions of Christ’s ancestors as part of extensive cathedral renovations. This work became necessary when the glass in the southeast transept window started to fall out after weathering 800 years of wind and rain. Five of these over-life-sized glass figures were in a glorious exhibition at the Getty Center in 2013.
Installation view of stained glass windows from Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury and St. Albans (at the Getty Center, September 20, 2013 to February 2, 2014). (Stained glass courtesy Dean and Chapter of Canterbury)
I used to think “stained glass” got its name because it’s so colorful. But I learned during the early years of my research that, instead, it is because some colored glass panes are overpainted with a metallic stain to depict faces, fabric folds, and other details, and then baked in a kiln. The staining can be damaged by the slightest touch.
Not all colored glass is truly stained, however. “Do you want to touch one of the unpainted pieces?” asked Leonie Seliger, head of the stained glass conservation department, pointing to panes in which the color comes from the glass itself, not from the painstaking, and vulnerable, surface stain.
I tentatively reached out my fingers to a piece of glass––a blue one, of course. I closed my eyes. The surface was like a smooth wave. Imagine touching a distant landscape of rolling hills and tracing your finger across the horizon. At a distance the glass looked flat, but it was far from it.
She showed me the replacement handblown glass she had prepared for restoration, organized in stacks by color. The sheets were flat.
“We’ve been desperately trying to find someone who can handblow glass unevenly,” she said. “But they’re all too good. We haven’t found anyone yet.”
Yet it is this uneven surface, and the impurities that were mixed with the coloring elements—cobalt for blue, manganese for purple, gold for pure red—that make the shimmers that have captivated me for years, going back to that day at Chartres.
The stories of colors burst with improbable details. Vivid red comes from cochineal, extracted from South American bugs whose brilliant red pigment was once so valuable that people danced in the streets when they arrived twice a year into the port of Seville. Lead white—now banned for toxicity in the U.S.—was derived from lead corroded through contact with acid and manure. Prussian blue was created by accident when an alchemist tried to make red. And all the “coaltar” colors with
which most of our clothes are dyed today were discovered by a teenager who made a mistake in his chemistry homework.
There is a common thread in the whole history of color in art, as I saw in those cathedral windows that first started me on this lifelong journey: the vital role played by imperfection, accident, and vulnerability in the striving for perfection. The windows of Chartres were made 800 years ago by itinerant craftsmen who traveled from cathedral to cathedral, living close to forests to have ample supplies of wood, and who no doubt told stories as they made their bumpy glass, full of dust motes and bits of leaves—imperfections that make it all the more glorious.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-colors-you-see-art-museum-cant-be-replicated-today-180953332/#oKVRE7UYJwWRudKq.99 Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter Source link here.