Park park
BLOG
So I'm sitting at the park at 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday. In a nutshell, I have a ton of work to do, but I really would prefer to do it at the coffee shop with a large infusion of caffeine. They don't open until 7:30 a.m, however, so I have to wait. I figured the park would be a nice place to spend my time...I don't get nearly enough contact with nature these days. So far this morning, the lake is pretty much owned by two incredibly loud geese, and two ducks (one male and one female...hmmm, is it spring yet?) who keep yelling at the geese. It also looks like the big willow tree has actually broken off at the base of its trunk, and fallen into the lake. How sad! We once released a turtle under that tree. (He showed up in our driveway one day, and we thought that a big park with a lake sounded like a better turtle habitat than a subdivision. So we took him out here and I put him in the grass. With an air of great determination, he stomped his way straight to the waterfront and launched himself in. The last I saw of him was his little turtle head poking up out of the water.)
David is very nearly through his first Phonics book, which has been quite an undertaking. It's probably about 300 pages. He has two more tests to take in it and then we get to move to the next book. He started this one in September, and at that time he couldn't read at all, or write any of his letters. Now he can write (it's messy and a bit shaky, but he can write) and he's reading things like, "Where did the mud come from?" His tests are also requiring him to spell tiny words, like "hat," "six," "bit," and "cot." That's a lot of improvement in six months.
One of the homeschool lists that I sub to had a deal for something called "GeeGuides." Never heard of them, but they had a sample online. This one happened to be about art, which David really couldn't care less about. (Dad's fault. Apparently it's genetic.) Still, they did a pretty good job. This particular sample was about paint itself, and the advent of putting paint in tubes and what that meant to the artsists of the day. Before that time, if you were an artist, you mixed all your own paint. This meant you had to find a pigment, which isn't nearly as simple as it sounds. Clay was dried out, crushed, washed and burnt to make orange and brown pigments. Bones were burnt and crushed to make black. White pigment was especially fun...they discovered (and I want to know WHO decided to try this one first) that if you packed a chunk of lead in manure and bathed it in vinegar, a white crust would form over the lead. They broke this off and crushed it to make white, with the mild side effect that the paint was actually poisonous. (There's speculation that this kind of lead poisoning is what caused Goya to go deaf, especially since he often applied paint to the canvas with this bare hands.) Deep, rich purple was apparently very hard to get...the secretions from a particular snail rendered the best purples, and you needed something obscene like several thousand squished, ground snails to make a few brushfuls of purple. It was insanely hard and ridiculously expensive...and one of the reasons why purple became a color associated with royalty...mainly it was only the royals who could afford to have their portraits painted with purple. Ditto for aquamarine blue. The blue came from a crushed gemstone, and an ounce of the gemstone cost more than an ounce of gold. Thus only the most revered religious figures were painted with aquamarine blue. Like the virgin Mary. (Ever notice how often Mary is depicted in a bright blue head covering? Do you suppose this was influenced by the economics of paint-making during the renaissance?)
Artists would then take the pigments and mix them with a binder...anything sticky that would hold the color onto the canvas...which included anything from spit to egg yolks to oil.
Since you were busy mixing and boiling and crushing (mercury was also used for a few colors), you were pretty much confined to your studio. You couldn't let your paint dry out, and were judicious with every stroke. But the real revolution came when metal paint tubes were introduced, and suddenly two major things happened....(1) artists could get their hands on paint reasonably easily and (2) they could paint ANYWHERE THEY WANTED TO. Hence why so many impressionist paintings were landscapes and outdoor scenes. Suddenly the artists were free to take along a portable studio, which had never happened before. You could also see a lot of the individual brush strokes in the paint. (Go look at a Picasso sometime.) This was no accident, it represented a luxurious, almost wanton use of paint which just hadn't been economical before. These guys were pretty much just reveling in their new freedom.
I bet you were just itching to know that.
I took the kids swimming yesterday and tried quite hard to drown them both. They'll tell you it's true. David's old and tall enough to pretty much leave to his own devices in the shallow water, but Lauren has to be watched like a hawk. She has no fear of anything, so she went walking off in the pool and suddenly found herself literally in over her head, thrashing and bobbing around and gasping. Sigh. After I'd fished her out she was scared, but only for about 2.3 seconds. Then she wanted to run off and do more stuff. :-/ We stayed for about two hours, then went home to make blueberry pancakes for dinner. (You've gotta love Lent!)
Apparently Doug's getting a Blackberry phone from his work, so we're supposed to go off today and look at the T-Mobile selection of Blackberry phones. I think he should skip the Blackberry and go straight for the direct brain implant. It would save him loads of time, and perhaps he could upgrade his memory while he's at it. Heck, he'd even have a reason for not listening to me. "Sorry, dear, I was reading my email." That's OK, I'm still lusting after the iPhone.
Oh, and speaking of which, it looks like CS3 is ready to launch any old time now, with the universal binary. (Pant, drool.) I still oh-so-very-much want my Mac, but my work account still doesn't have enough cash for such a thing. (Sob!)
Hmmm. Speaking of that type of thing, I think I'll go pay some bills.
So I'm sitting at the park at 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday. In a nutshell, I have a ton of work to do, but I really would prefer to do it at the coffee shop with a large infusion of caffeine. They don't open until 7:30 a.m, however, so I have to wait. I figured the park would be a nice place to spend my time...I don't get nearly enough contact with nature these days. So far this morning, the lake is pretty much owned by two incredibly loud geese, and two ducks (one male and one female...hmmm, is it spring yet?) who keep yelling at the geese. It also looks like the big willow tree has actually broken off at the base of its trunk, and fallen into the lake. How sad! We once released a turtle under that tree. (He showed up in our driveway one day, and we thought that a big park with a lake sounded like a better turtle habitat than a subdivision. So we took him out here and I put him in the grass. With an air of great determination, he stomped his way straight to the waterfront and launched himself in. The last I saw of him was his little turtle head poking up out of the water.)
David is very nearly through his first Phonics book, which has been quite an undertaking. It's probably about 300 pages. He has two more tests to take in it and then we get to move to the next book. He started this one in September, and at that time he couldn't read at all, or write any of his letters. Now he can write (it's messy and a bit shaky, but he can write) and he's reading things like, "Where did the mud come from?" His tests are also requiring him to spell tiny words, like "hat," "six," "bit," and "cot." That's a lot of improvement in six months.
One of the homeschool lists that I sub to had a deal for something called "GeeGuides." Never heard of them, but they had a sample online. This one happened to be about art, which David really couldn't care less about. (Dad's fault. Apparently it's genetic.) Still, they did a pretty good job. This particular sample was about paint itself, and the advent of putting paint in tubes and what that meant to the artsists of the day. Before that time, if you were an artist, you mixed all your own paint. This meant you had to find a pigment, which isn't nearly as simple as it sounds. Clay was dried out, crushed, washed and burnt to make orange and brown pigments. Bones were burnt and crushed to make black. White pigment was especially fun...they discovered (and I want to know WHO decided to try this one first) that if you packed a chunk of lead in manure and bathed it in vinegar, a white crust would form over the lead. They broke this off and crushed it to make white, with the mild side effect that the paint was actually poisonous. (There's speculation that this kind of lead poisoning is what caused Goya to go deaf, especially since he often applied paint to the canvas with this bare hands.) Deep, rich purple was apparently very hard to get...the secretions from a particular snail rendered the best purples, and you needed something obscene like several thousand squished, ground snails to make a few brushfuls of purple. It was insanely hard and ridiculously expensive...and one of the reasons why purple became a color associated with royalty...mainly it was only the royals who could afford to have their portraits painted with purple. Ditto for aquamarine blue. The blue came from a crushed gemstone, and an ounce of the gemstone cost more than an ounce of gold. Thus only the most revered religious figures were painted with aquamarine blue. Like the virgin Mary. (Ever notice how often Mary is depicted in a bright blue head covering? Do you suppose this was influenced by the economics of paint-making during the renaissance?)
Artists would then take the pigments and mix them with a binder...anything sticky that would hold the color onto the canvas...which included anything from spit to egg yolks to oil.
Since you were busy mixing and boiling and crushing (mercury was also used for a few colors), you were pretty much confined to your studio. You couldn't let your paint dry out, and were judicious with every stroke. But the real revolution came when metal paint tubes were introduced, and suddenly two major things happened....(1) artists could get their hands on paint reasonably easily and (2) they could paint ANYWHERE THEY WANTED TO. Hence why so many impressionist paintings were landscapes and outdoor scenes. Suddenly the artists were free to take along a portable studio, which had never happened before. You could also see a lot of the individual brush strokes in the paint. (Go look at a Picasso sometime.) This was no accident, it represented a luxurious, almost wanton use of paint which just hadn't been economical before. These guys were pretty much just reveling in their new freedom.
I bet you were just itching to know that.
I took the kids swimming yesterday and tried quite hard to drown them both. They'll tell you it's true. David's old and tall enough to pretty much leave to his own devices in the shallow water, but Lauren has to be watched like a hawk. She has no fear of anything, so she went walking off in the pool and suddenly found herself literally in over her head, thrashing and bobbing around and gasping. Sigh. After I'd fished her out she was scared, but only for about 2.3 seconds. Then she wanted to run off and do more stuff. :-/ We stayed for about two hours, then went home to make blueberry pancakes for dinner. (You've gotta love Lent!)
Apparently Doug's getting a Blackberry phone from his work, so we're supposed to go off today and look at the T-Mobile selection of Blackberry phones. I think he should skip the Blackberry and go straight for the direct brain implant. It would save him loads of time, and perhaps he could upgrade his memory while he's at it. Heck, he'd even have a reason for not listening to me. "Sorry, dear, I was reading my email." That's OK, I'm still lusting after the iPhone.
Oh, and speaking of which, it looks like CS3 is ready to launch any old time now, with the universal binary. (Pant, drool.) I still oh-so-very-much want my Mac, but my work account still doesn't have enough cash for such a thing. (Sob!)
Hmmm. Speaking of that type of thing, I think I'll go pay some bills.
posted by Kelly at
6:43 AM
1 Comments:
Um... I can just picture these artists, newly liberated with their paints, going totally insane.
When we were little kids, we'd dig up big hunks of white "chalk" from the ground and use them to mark our hopscotch squares on the sidewalk. Wonder if that could have been used to make white paint. Probably not. Bet the Indians who were roaming the plains back then would have used it if possible.
Interesting info.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home