blue is not always serene

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,

rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head

propped on 'The Meaning of Meaning'.

He catwalks down our corridor.

Azure day

makes my agonized blue window bleaker.

Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.

Absence! My heart grows tense

as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.

(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

from Waking in the Blue, by Robert Lowell

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blue window

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still life -- the library

François Foisse, Still Life - The Library, c. 1741.
Oil on canvas. 24 1/4 x 30 3/8 in
from The Wadsworth Atheneum

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more blue :-)

Self-portrait with blue guitar, David Hockney

"Literature has been a mainspring of some of his most important and interesting pictures: in the 1960s he made a series of etchings inspired by Cavafy’s poems, and one of his most complex self-portraits, Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar (1977) came out of etchings he produced to illustrate Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’. This wonderfully self-referential portrait shows how many levels Hockney’s work can have: the Stevens poem itself was inspired by Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (1903), and the layers of inspiration are represented here by the realistic blue curtain which is pulled aside to reveal the artist, working at a table to produce a Picasso-esque outline of a blue guitar, while sitting on a cartoon-like outline of a chair, poised inside a child’s outline of a house, watched over by his own signature tulips and a bust of Dora Maar."

J. Flanders

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the blue curtain

Adriaen van der Spelt (Dutch, 1630-1673)
Frans van Mieris (Dutch, 1635-1681)

Trompe-l'Oeil Still Life with a Flower Garland and a Curtain, 1658

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viennese window (iii)

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viennese window (ii)

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viennese window

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church window

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window-gazing

What are we to do with these spring days that are now fast coming on? Early this morning the sky was gray, but if you go to the window now you are surprised and lean your cheek against the latch of the casement.

The sun is already setting, but down below you see it lighting up the face of the little girl who strolls along looking about her, and at the same time you see her eclipsed by the shadow of the man behind overtaking her.

And then the man has passed by and the little girl's face is quite bright.




Kafka, Absent-minded Window-gazing
(short-story from the collection "Contemplation", Kafka's first-published book)


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memory (ii)

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memory

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