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REMEMBER
GO TOO FAR
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Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) was a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and philosopher, described as the ″James Dean of philosophy″. Throughout his life, Camus spoke out against and actively opposed Totalitarianism in its many forms. Early on, Camus was active within the French Resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, even directing the famous Resistance journal, Combat. On the French collaboration with Nazi occupiers he wrote: “Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people.”
Camus presents the reader with dualisms such as happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. He emphasizes the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality; for Camus, this is cause for a greater appreciation for life and happiness. In Le Mythe, dualism becomes a paradox: we value our own lives in spite of our mortality and in spite of the universe’s silence. While we can live with a dualism (I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come), we cannot live with the paradox (I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless). In Le Mythe, Camus investigates our experience of the Absurd and asks how we live with it. Our life must have meaning for us to value it. If we accept that life has no meaning and therefore no value, should we kill ourselves?
NEVER WHEN THEN
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“Space is a distance between objects. Time is a measure of the duration of motion of objects in space. Space and Motion are always “now” – never when or then. Therefore, “time travel” can only be memory of “when”, or a hypothetical extention of “then”, of motion of objects or energy through space.” ~ Lawrence R. Spencer
GIRL WITH A PEARLESCENT CAMERA
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This picture is a modern spoof on the world famous painting by the 16th century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. The girl in the legendary painting (as well as in several other of his paintings) is his second daughter, Elizabeth! Vermeer never hired models — he painted only family and friends. It doesn’t take a cosmetic surgeon to compare the features of the women in the majority of his paintings to observe that the same women are being painted in their own home, again and again in different poses, settings, lighting and clothing. Most of his paintings feature his wife, Catharina, who was not only his constant accomplice in creating a family, she was his foremost ally in his life as an artist!
The painting named (by others), “Girl with a pearl earring”, as well as “The girl with a red hat”, and “The girl with a flute”, and others, are all of his second daughter, Elizabeth, who was a teenager when they were painted. He used her as the model for a series of very small “tronie” or facial portraits, which were popular at the time.
These miniature “head shots” were especially well suited to the use of the camera obscura to create what we know now to have a photographic quality, rendering the light and perspective differently than the unaided lens of the human eye perceives it.
To learn all of the details about the women who posed for Johannes Vermeer in all of his famous paintings, read the book VERMEER: PORTRAITS OF A LIFETIME, by Lawrence R. Spencer.
DOWNLOAD THIS BOOK FROM iTUNES
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/vermeer/id443800993?mt=11