Idea

Francesco di Giorgio Martini
Design for Windlass mounted on Boats
to raise a Column from the Sea
ca. 1475-80
drawing
(manuscript leaf: Opusculum de Architectura)
British Museum

Francesco di Giorgio Martini
Design for Underwater Harbor Defense
ca. 1475-80
drawing
(manuscript leaf: Opusculum de Architectura)
British Museum

Lambert-Sigisbert Adam
Proposed Design for the Trevi Fountain in Rome
1731
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Guillaume-Thomas Taraval
Design for Festival Architecture
before 1750
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Mauro Antonio Tesi after Stefano della Bella
Designs for Vases and Urns
ca. 1750
etching
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Mauro Antonio Tesi
Elevation of a Catafalque for a General
before 1766
drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

attributed to Mauro Antonio Tesi
Quadratura Design
before 1766
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Mauro Antonio Tesi
Design for temporary Holy Week Altar
before 1766
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Louis-Gustave Taraval
Design for Church Façade
with Allegorical Figure of Faith
ca. 1768
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Louis-Gustave Taraval
Design for Classical Temple
ca. 1780
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Joseph Chinard
Sketch Design for Clock Case with Couple flanking Stele
before 1813
terracotta
Musée du Louvre

Johann Heinrich Ramberg
Design for Britannia over Doorway
1813
(ink and watercolor on paper)
British Museum

Ferdinand Hodler
Woodcutter
ca. 1908-1910
drawing
(design study for Swiss banknote) 
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Duncan Grant
The Queen of Sheba
(design for dinner plate)
ca. 1922
watercolor on paper
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

William Hunt Diederich
Design for Stair-Rail with Greyhounds
ca. 1923
drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

David Smith
Untitled (study for sculpture)
1961
spray enamel over stencil on paper
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

David Smith
Untitled (study for sculpture)
1963
tempera and spraypaint over stencil on paper
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Epitaph

Here I –

               What does

the name matter?

from –

            Who cares?

of good family –

Oh? Then scum –

and decent habits –

or the profligate

meet with worse?

am laid in earth:

               this stone

tells my story.

And who listens?

– from the Greek Anthology, translated by Andrew Miller

David Smith (1906-1965)

David Smith
Untitled (Study for Sculpture)
ca. 1937-38
ink and watercolor on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

David Smith
Classic Figure III
1945
bronze
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

David Smith
Untitled
1946
tempera on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

David Smith
The Forest
1950
painted steel on wooden base
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

David Smith
Untitled
1951
tempera on paper
Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC

David Smith
Untitled
1951
tempera on paper
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

David Smith
Stainless Window
1951
stainless steel
Menil Collection, Houston

David Smith
Untitled
1952
lithograph
Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC

David Smith
Tanktotem I
1952
steel
Art Institute of Chicago

David Smith
Agricola IX
1952
steel
Tate Modern, London

David Smith
Europa and Calf
1956-57
bronze
Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC

David Smith
Untitled
1957
ink on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

David Smith
Untitled (Study for Sculpture)
1960
spray-paint over stencil on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

David Smith
4-28-61
1961
painted steel
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

David Smith
Untitled (Study for Cubi VII)
1963
spray-paint over stencil on paper
Art Institute of Chicago

David Smith
Cubi VII
1963
stainless steel
Art Institute of Chicago

David Smith
Cubi XIX
1964
stainless steel
Tate Modern, London

from From the Cupola

Midnight      I dream I dream      The slow moon eludes

one stilled cloud      Din of shimmerings      From across the Sound

what may have begun as no more

than a willow's sleepwalking outline quickens detaches

comes to itself in the cupola

panics from pane to pane and then impulsively

surrendering fluttering by now the sixteenfold

wings of the cherubim unclipped by faith or reason

stands there my dream made whole

over whose walls again

a red vine black in moonlight crawls

made habitable      Each cell of the concrete

fills with sweet light      The wave breaks

into tears      Come if it's you      Step down

to where I      Stop      For at your touch the dream

cracks the angel tenses flees

– James Merrill (1966)

Street Mask

Embellished architecture at the foot of a staircase in Berlin, preserved photographically here.

Christmas Diamonds

It rained all morning again on the day after Christmas – but then cleared about mid-day. When I went out to buy milk the sunlight was doing all it could to compel full attention. Above, the emergence of Spencer Alley onto 16th Street in the suddenly bright Mission – a neighborhood that is as deserted as the proverbial tomb for the moment, but will be thick with young people again in time for New Year's Eve.  

The small truck below was parked on 15th Street between Guerrero and Valencia. It claimed attention because of the unauthorized diamonds (product of felony vandalism) spray-painted in blue with black outlines. Mentally, I could not avoid regarding these (and, I fear, endorsing them) as the Christmas Diamonds – because they so clearly revealed the same illicit hand as the Thanksgiving Diamond (a solitary silver job that regular reader/viewers are sure to remember from a parallel walk over closer to Folsom about a month ago). Though dating of these artifacts is notoriously difficult, I provisionally assign the more recent date to the blue diamonds, on the grounds that they represent an increasingly bold intervention.  

I played camera focus games (after all that crazy, wobbly work I tried to do indoors in the evening on Christmas) to reassure myself  that the camera could still be talked into performing cleverly – under the right conditions. Above, through a distracting set of vertical iron bars, BEAUTY SALON in red caps remains sharp while the camera's left eye wanders several blocks down the street.

Which all went well enough, but soon a different and more serious problem came up. The splendid and almost freakish sparkling sunlight that had drawn me outside in the first place simply withdrew itself and disappeared. This happened at the same moment I noticed BEDBUG HOTEL below.

BEDBUG HOTEL

SLUMLORD OWNED 

WE HAVE MICE

The whole time I was photographing this otherwise unnoticeable building I expected Slumlord to come rushing out waving a baseball bat – but that never occurred. Nothing occurred. The holiday desertion of everywhere was too complete.

So I went home again through the suddenly cold and dark streets to complete whatever work I could do on that surrealistic collection of Christmas pictures.

Mission Stencil with Poem

Stricken Proverbs


A full vessel is inaudible.

                    *

Every cliff has a glass edge,
every chasm a covering cloud.
Every lining has a hidden needle.

                    *

Many a sickle rakes the stubble.

                    *

A rip in space needs a stitch in time.

                    *

Time's flies wait to feast on no man.

                    *

Art longs for the brevity of life.

                    *

Never a nail in the blacksmith's forge,
nor a pen in the poet's pocket.

                    *

Home is where the heart can't live.

                    *

All Rome leads to are roads.

                    *

For the deep well: a long cord and a light bucket.

                    *

Where there's a will, there's a wall.


– by Jamie McKendrick (seen earlier here translating Valerio Magrelli)

Honor the Game

At dawn on Sunday the streets in the Mission were wet and the sky looked dangerous, though no rain was actually falling when I went out.

A few days earlier I had seen the soldered numerals below at the entrance to an old apartment building off Folsom, but had no camera with me. Documenting them was, in my opinion, well worth an early morning expedition. And of course I found other things, too.

The painted images below are from an eye-level mural ornamenting one long windowless wall of a Mexican restaurant in the same neighborhood (one of the borderlands between the Mission and SOMA). 

It did not rain. The sky (as below) began to clear, in fact, and the sun even became partly visible. Looking up, I vainly longed for the illustrated book given to me some years back by my daughter about identifying categories of clouds (especially those streamer-like ones making faint vertical stripes in the picture's upper left corner) but as usual I was not carrying it when needed. 

HONOR THE GAME reads the lettering on the retaining wall. The view above happens to be of the playing field at Mission High, but all high schools have similar admonitions painted in big letters somewhere or other. Even as a child I was so put off by their hortatory tone that I always instantaneously rejected the message, whatever its merits. And my reflex remains exactly the same, all these decades later. Unevolved.