The blog and I are going on vaccation for the week to Chicago. So while I’m drowning myself in Itallian Beef sandwiches and ice cold pop, please take this time to pass along this blog to one friend. Remember, sharing is caring.
Also–littering–what’s the deal with that?
xoxo
Gossip Girl
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“Broadway Boogie-Woogie,” a seminal modernist work by painter Piet Mondrian, has been interpreted by many as an attempt to capture the alienated and conflicted grid-like structure of urban life. On a literal level, one can imagine the painting as a portrait of city traffic as seen from the top of a skyscraper. Notice, for example, how in the upper-right hand corner, the blue box appears to have just cut off the red box without so much as a turn signal or, god forbid, a hand wave because who cares about the safety of your fellow drivers when you can save precious seconds by driving like a complete jackass. Yeah, that’s right blue box, you hear what I just said? Yeah, well f@ck you and your goddamn new blue paint job. Want to know about paint jobs, I hear your mother gives great paint jobs if you know what I mean? Ooooooh, you didn’t like that did you? Well, why don’t you step out of that mother fu@cking car and get ready to have your goddamn cubist-piece-of-shit-inkblot of a box fu@ked in the fu@cking #%*ed@# and &za!#@-hole by the bottom of my fu@cking red boot! Oh, that’s right, roll up your window and drive away you pansy-ass bitch. Not so tough now are you? Are you??? @%%&*###!!!
In any case, the painting is very popular.
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Monet is perhaps best known for being one of the key leaders of Impressionism, which in 19th century French, was slang for near sighted. In one of his most famous sequences, “Haystacks,” Monet depicted haystacks in different lights and conditions, proving a long held theory of physics that no matter the external variables, a stack of haystacks will remain boring. Monet was known as a “lover of life,” so much so that he was often found making-out with carbon-based vegetation. Notice in the above painting “Downtown Buffalo, New York,” how the haystack on the right is larger than the haystack on the left, creating the “impression” that if you had to live in one of these haystacks, the one on the left would be more comfortable, but the one on the right will probably appreciate in value quicker.
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“Starry Night,” is often considered the legendary painter Van Gogh’s masterpiece, and why not. Just look at all those stars in the sky! I mean, you can really tell that he’s painting a night sky filled with stars as the title of the painting implies, and that’s so important in painting. Too often the title is something incomprehensible like “Red #7,” and then it’s like—uh, what the hell is this a painting of? Not so here. You can really see the night, indicated by dark colors, and the sky, indicated by the yellow things up in the upper part of the painting, which I have interpreted as stars. It’s open to interpretation of course, but I’d say the shapes below are meant to represent houses. Again, it’s a painting and there is no wrong answer when interpreting painting, but one can imagine that Van Gogh wanted us to look at this painting and say, “I can totally relate to this! I’ve been outside at night before too!” The one criticism is that it can be a little confusing to see where the sky ends and the ground begins and whether the landscape his mountains, or water or what. Some of the images aren’t exactly clear, but Van Gogh was probably busy so you can’t expect all the details to be right. When you consider he didn’t even have a computer, you realize how talented a painter he really was.