Three Things: The Early Morning Edition
Lately I’ve been waking and working in the wee hours of the morning. Watching the rest of the world wake up brings out the storyteller in me. How about you?
Ivan Pesic, Early Morning. Photograph. Via Saatchi Art.
Igor Vitomirov, On the Road. Photograph. Via Saatchi Art.
Uta Barth, … and of time. (00.6), 2000. Photographs.
Three Things: The Empty Room Edition
This week I’m imagining an empty room. Perhaps there is evidence left over from a previous occupant, perhaps not. Regardless, it is now empty. Now what?
Chelsea James, Pink Bathroom, 2009. Oil on panel. www.chelseajames.com
Edward Gorey, Untitled, from The West Wing. Pen and ink illustration. Published by Simon and Schuster, New York, 1963.
Uta Barth, Ground #70, 1996. Photograph.
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Hey you! Have you submitted your work-in-progress yet for this month’s online Open Mic? You’ve got today and tomorrow to submit before the pieces get workshopped on Wednesday!
Fairfield Porter’s Iced Coffee, shown below, makes me think of lazy mornings; weekend mornings when you have nothing you must do, and nowhere to be. So I’ve decided to make a morning out of it. Our morning begins with waking up to the sun setting the curtains aglow, followed by a trip to the kitchen for… toast? A croissant? Coffee, certainly. And then it’s onward to the three-season porch, coffee in tow, to settle into the morning’s newspaper, and a good book.
Uta Barth, … and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.8), 2011. Photograph.
Bert Teunissen, Wernswig #1, 19/7/2005 9:36, 2005. Photograph. www.bertteunissen.com
Fairfield Porter, Iced Coffee, 1966. Oil on canvas. G.U.C. Collection, Chicago.
P.S. Next Monday will be one such morning for me (and hopefully for you, too). Three Things won’t appear next week due to the Memorial Day holiday, to return the following week on Monday, June 4.
On sunny but chilly winter days, sometimes there’s nothing better than curling up in a south-facing room and tracking the sunbeams as they move across the walls and floor. The slow, deliberate movement from one end to the other at times takes on a meditative quality, a reminder of the passage of time; and at other times it seems as if the sun is performing a sweeping, slow-motion scan, taking a daily inventory of each room’s contents. Or perhaps these phantom windows of light that are projected onto our walls are portals to some other place, the key to which we have yet to discover?
This week I have three such rooms, three such sunlit walls. How will they serve in your piece?
Uta Barth, Untitled (aot 4) from …and of time, 2000. Diptych color photographs.
Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room, 1963. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
Vilhelm Hammershoi, Interior Strandgade, circa 1900. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
