falling in love again

Lovely everyone, I’m sorry. I’m sorry it’s been so long since I updated here. A lot of you can probably relate: we’re the lucky ones who are still employed, but with the layoffs cutting our friends and colleagues, we find we’re doing the jobs of two or three. Work takes over every day of the week. We are grateful to be working—truly, we are—but we’re called to show our gratitude with many little sacrifices.

		It’s been hard for me to make time here, and worse, hard to see the beauty in the city all around. But as I was leaving work on Saturday at about 5:30 pm (I am grateful. I am grateful.) I discovered this mysterious palm grove sprouting up right downtown.
		I’m sure in a week or two it will be completed, contextualized—a McDonalds playland? something equally, complacently artificial, and therefore, paradoxically, on this bustling street, natural—but for now, it’s intriguing and beguiling and utterly surreal. Hooray for a green plexiglass kick in the ass, jolting me out of my self-absorbtion, reminding me that, even exhausted and downtrodden, I can still choose to be someone open and aware, someone who sees life and magic—because it is, it still is all around.

birds of puerto rico, rockwell avenue

Right about now, we could use some tropics. Don’t you think? No more slush. No more snow. Nothing grey, just for a little while. Feathers, and sun-flushed colors, and the feeling of flight. Just for a little while.

american bison, humboldt park

Lions and bison and bulls—oh, my.

The lions: Sculptor Edward Kemeys (1843-1907) is best known in this city by his twin lion statues, trademark guardians of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The bison: Kemeys produced the two above, for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park. After the fair they were placed overlooking the entrance to Garfield Park, on the city’s west side.

The bulls: Humboldt Park’s formal gardens, meanwhile, were guarded by two other statues also created for the world’s fair: a pair of bulls by sculptors French & Potter. In 1915, the bulls were taken from their display and exchanged for the bison of Garfield Park, which still stand in their place.

Oh, my. Why the switch? No documentation remains to explain it. But I love these craggy buffalo, love their vast weight which you can sense from just a touch, and the rich-veined metal of their hide.

I think of bison as stolid, massive animals. Bronze statues, too: defined to my mind by their massy wholeness, their solid single-pieced scale. Yet these two are defined by details, by hairs and sinews. Energy sparks from their frantic-furred haunches, and runs into the earth down legs lean as bone. They are all movement, a million little directions. Not single, whole and weighty, not unmoving. Not at all.

In my last post about Humboldt Park, a handful of photos after a morning there, I was struck by how every photo shared a sense of texture. A raveling net of stems, a chapped lake, a thousand crackling leaves. And these bison have it too, the whole park’s wildfire energy, its crackle and flicker and restlessness. I love that, unlike a museum, the park is a place where I can walk right up to these sculptures and touch them, warm or cold as the air around us, and rippling with this unquiet history.

lions, dearborn street

horse, lasalle street

Fascinating questions about the horse, as submitted to WikiAnswers:

When we talk about a horse we say that it has what?

Someone is being rude to your horse what should you do?

How to ride a horse and why?

What horse isn’t heavy?

How would you describe a horse?

Is a seahorse a horse?

Can you take your horse to a restaurant?

Can you eat a horse?

You are being blackmail for more money for the upkeep for your Horse I have this Horse these stables. they are demanding more money off us. but they are ill treating my horse?

What breed of horse is the Headless Horseman’s horse?

A black horse or a white horse hotter in the sun?

You want a horse but your mom wont let you cuz its to expencive you really want one and some times you want one so bad that you cry What should you do you already go to horse camps so dont recomend th?

Is there a horse game where you can be a wild horse or just a horse?

When take your horse to the field what shall you use?

tiger swallowtail, western playlot park

i’m coveting…

…these watercolors from English wildlife artist Tim Hayward.

His website has additional work, most in a traditional wildlife portraiture style, but it’s the paintings in these collections— Pedestals and Pedestals II —that inspire me most.

The paintings’ luminous backgrounds shed a hushed and exquisite stillness on fragments of architectural detail, while animals leap and balance and burst into flight. Exotic avians like the flamingo and the lyrebird, backyard icons like the squirrel and rabbit—each is caught in a moment’s immobility, a lightning-flash intersection between their scurry toward nonexistence and the slower journey of even our most enduring works in the same direction. They’re quirky and reflective, elegiac and joyful in profound balance. My kind of memento mori.

(All images from Jonathan Cooper Gallery. Tim Hayward’s own website here.)