Ten hopeful signs of spring

1. January glacier recedes from memory

2. Cadbury crème eggs display at the register in CVS

3. Snowdrops poking out of the thawing dirt

4. Evil army of Marshmallow Peeps invades local stores

5. Parking ticket on your windshield

6. Proliferation of Canadian geese

7. Welcome back skunks and raccoons!

8. Resident parking stickers on sale at City Hall
9. Wall of flip-flops at Old Navy

And last but not least…

10. PASTA BEACH now open for the season!!

Wine Tasting

A friend of mine, Dave, had a wine tasting at his house this weekend. What fun!

The owner of a small vineyard in Massachusetts, he produces and sells his wine under
the label of Alfalfa Farms. But the wine we tasted at the party is labeled under Wild Goose Point and Unkin and Funkin.



The benefits of wine are well-documented by now and taken in moderation provide all kinds of health benefits. And the plants are so beautiful – he has a couple of vines in his yard and now some of us neighbors want them in our yards, too.



With a son-in-law, Luke, who also produces his own wine, I have plenty of opportunities to taste different wines. Luke and his family have been producing wine for generations but they haven’t labeled theirs yet. Unkin and Funkin will be hard to beat.



Another great thing to do is visit Sakonnet Vineyards in Little Compton, just south of Tiverton, and in 3 seasons you can sit outdoors and enjoy lunch and sample the wines produced there. It is truly special and something I love to do. The atmosphere is wonderful.

You don’t really need an excuse to gather friends and neighbors together but a wine tasting is lots of fun and you get to hear what other people think of various flavors and characteristics.

My favorite? Unkin and Funkin Pinot Noir.

The art of empty houses

Susan Gustavson’s recent post about modern & contemporary art reminded me all over again what it is that I love best about art: how it compels you to see the everyday in a completely new light. All art does this to some extent, but contemporary art – because it lacks much of the pre-conceived intellectual baggage of “historical” art - can be particularly good at surprising you into it. The wonderful thing is that the experience then becomes a ball rolling down hill, and everything starts to look startling and new.

When I first started studying art history, I spent a lot of time looking at art & at art images, and that way of seeing – the looking at art way - soon began to bleed into my regular life. I’d be walking around town not thinking about much of anything, and all of a sudden the Platonic ideas behind the everyday forms would come screaming out at me. The essential truth of a row of rooftops would suddenly be revealed; they were an endless series of intersecting triangles. A random assortment of buildings would be reduced to nothing more than great big blocks of color. A branch bending over a sidewalk would bisect a familiar scene, turning regular houses and driveways into components of an elaborate diagonal composition, and the clouds overhead were perpetually morphing into fantastically complex shapes, like the designs on Persian tiles. It got to the point where the vision switch became so intrusive that I actually wondered if I was going crazy, but eventually I just stopped worrying about it. And after awhile my perceptions adjusted and I settled down. But I miss it, miss the intensity and freshness of that kind of seeing.

So I’m a fan of anything that can temporarily restore it to me, which is why I found myself driving to the MFA up in Boston last month to see the Rachel Whiteread show. For those who are unfamiliar with her, Rachel Whiteread is a British sculptor who uses what is usually regarded as negative space – often in an architectural context - as her subject matter. Sounds complicated, but it isn’t. Simply put, she makes plaster casts of empty space. An early piece of hers, “House, consisted of her filling a derelict London building with cement and then stripping away the shell of the building, leaving a solid concrete cast of the empty space inside. Empty space became densely full, dense matter disappeared, reality was seen backwards, as if in a mirror. Much of what she does involves the space found within boxes, containers, architectural space. How often do we see the empty space we spend our lives inhabiting? For those of us who are realtors, how often do we seriously reflect upon the nature of the empty spaces we sell, or think about the voids that constitute our primary product?

Her installation that I went to at the MFA differed from her usual work in that the empty spaces stayed empty. What she did was to take hundreds of old dollhouses and fill them with light. The interior of every house was completely empty, save for the light, which became in effect a kind of sculptural soft cast of the interior voids. House after house, all glowing, all empty, piled on empty wooden packing crates, hillsides, towns, cities of them. Solid empty space made visible. I’ll never look at a street of empty houses in the same way again. And that, I think, is a good thing.

Who Gets To Call IT Art

One thing that most people agree on is that the best art of any era reflects exactly what is going on in society at that time. The best music, paintings, dance and film have a way of always being in the moment and synchronized with each other even when the individual artists are working independently of each other and do not know each other.

Looking back over history, it is easy to reconstruct this phenomonon, even though things do not happen in the exact order of our art history books. There is always overlap and things get a little messy but for the most part, art defines each era precisely right across all art forms. Could you imagine Philip Glass' music being created at any other time other than in the late 20th century? The repetitive nature of his music is just like the repetition in an Andy Warhol print.


I was thinking about where we are these days. Without the benefit of hindsight, it is more difficult to define. But if you look back since the Abstract Expressionists morphed into Pop Art (going from humorless and angst -ridden to downright amusing - think Jackson Pollock to Andy Warhol), what have we done?

TV, in- your- face billboards and neon signs have given us a different persepctive than, say Rembrandt had. Remember Barbara Kruger's biting images superimposed with type? Kind of like an advertisement, but not. Lots of people said, Oh, I could have done that. But the fact is, they didn't do it. She did. No one would deny that she is a great artist.



When the color copier was first introduced, some photographers started to use it to make art. It seemed like a natural progression for them, to use new technology. Now some of those prints can be found in most museums. Certainly, blogging is a way of expressing oneself. But could it be called art? Who gets to say, this is art, this is not? There was a panel discussion among IT users and artists in London. It is very interesting. It is a hot topic among curators and art editors now.

I think we all tend to think the artists of the past were more impressive, more talented, greater somehow than those living in our own times. But I bet there are young artists out there right now, on the cutting edge, who are making art on the internet with words and images and whatever else moves them to create. Art does not necessarily equal pretty. It is an expression of the moment in whatever medium the artist chooses.


Have you heard of Twittering? Well, there is going to be a Twestival on February 12 so you can take part, if you like. It is like blogging only faster, shorter and more immediate. Where the heck will this all lead? What is next? I can't wait to find out.