raw canvas / so many areas were left unfinished

Paul Cézanne, The Bathers

Donald M. Anderson, Elements of Design. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961—

Toward the end of his career [Paul] Cézanne often found that raw canvas provided the proper tone for some passages. Max Weber, the distinguished American painter, relates that when Henri Rousseau, the primitive genius, saw such a passage in Cézanne’s The Bathers, he remarked, “Too bad he left so many places unfinished. I wish I had it in my studio, I could finish it nicely.”

Oops / John Sloan & Adelbert Ames, Jr. riposte

still image from online Ames video trilogy

Oops. Soon after posting that quote about the friendship of Adelbert Ames Jr. (born aristocrat) and artist and socialist John Sloan (born democrat), about how opposite they were, I ran across new information. Herbert Faulkner West’s account may have made it sound as if the social status of Ames, in comparison to Sloan, was completely one-sided. But soon after we found that Sloan had moved to Hanover NH in part because his cousin, John Sloan Dickey, was the president of Dartmouth College during the 1950s and 1960s. That may have tipped the scales a tad, although not completely.

John Sloan / simple, modest & absolutely no airs

John Sloan, Cover illustration (1914)

Herbert Faulkner West, John Sloan's Last Summer. Iowa City IA: Prairie Press, 1952—

I was talking one day with Adelbert Ames, Jr., of the Hanover Institute, researcher, painter and experimenter in color, whose background was about as dissimilar to Sloan’s as could be imagined—Ames who went to Andover and Harvard; Sloan who went for a while to Philadelphia public schools and then graduated to newspaper offices in the same city. One the born aristocrat; the other the born democrat. Yet both got on wonderfully together, and Mr. Ames said to me one day about Sloan: “You can see what a really great man is like—simple, modest, and absolutely no airs whatever.”

John Sloan (1891)

 

Writer Ruth Suckow / Cedar Falls Connection

The success of the Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibition is non-stop. It continues to travel throughout the state, to libraries, history centers, and other public venues. It has now been booked for exhibits through all of 2025. That’s pretty amazing.

It is currently on exhibit at the Cedar Falls Public Library (Cedar Falls IA), where it will remain on view through Sunday, August 4. Above is a view of a detail of the installation from a video on the website of the Waterloo Courier. In addition, just two days from now, there will be a program (free and open to the public) titled Iowa Writer Ruth Suckow: The Cedar Falls Connection, on Monday (July 8) at 6 pm at the library in the upstairs meeting room.

cliff-hanging illusions as used in early films

Above Advertisement for a Hal Roach 1923 film comedy starring Harold Lloyd, called Safety Last. It shows him hanging precariously from a high-rise window ledge, with a distant busy street below. But in fact that’s not the case. As shown in the diagram below (from E.G. Lutz, The Motion Picture Cameraman), it is all an ingenious camera trick, albeit one that looks utterly real. 

Lloyd posed for various scenes like this, such a below, in which he seems to be suspended from the clockface on a building. When movement is added, both that of the actor and those on the street, it is even more convincing.

Comparable tricks were later used by American artist and optical physiologist Adelbert (Del) Ames II in developing the Ames Demonstrations in Perception, which we have discussed at length in a triad of online videos, titled The Man Who Made Distorted Rooms.