Category: Uncategorized

There is no why to suffering, only a how.

How did it affect you? How did it change your outlook, your character, your purpose? What did it do your plans and your incentive to go on? Did it tarnish your spirit? Psychotherapy, in its attempt to address one’s personal distress, often works with the victim to move away from asking the proverbial question of trauma. And many seek treatment because they know they ought to cease asking it, but can’t.

Acknowledging the near complete uncertainty of one’s life entails relinquishing the delusion of control, the belief that he can predict and control the various calamities waiting behind the door of possibility. In his understanding, much of his suffering is personal, engendered by those who wish to harm him and a cruel universe having him atop its hit-list. So, if he does find himself sitting in an inconsequential room with an…

In the first of these two articles looking at what our ancestors wore on the beach, I had reached 1890 with just a glimpse of lower leg and arm from the wild young things as they paraded themselves in the sun. Otherwise, adults only bared the absolute minimum, most even wearing hats. The only members of the family who could, in the right place, get away with anything less were children, and even they were often well covered up.

William Merritt Chase, A Sunny Day at Shinnecock Bay (1892), oil on canvas, 46.99 x 60.33 cm, Private collection. WikiArt.

The citizens of New York often went to the beaches of Long Island, NY, although here William Merritt Chase has travelled far from the crowds, out among the Hamptons, where the more affluent were building their holiday mansions. Chase was a key figure in American art in the late nineteenth century:…

Read More

Dr. Richard Stemp 193 – about this painting

Paul Gauguin at wikiwand

See More

Paul Gauguin at Christie’s

Paul Gauguin at wikimedia

Happy Sunday! 🙂

~Sunnyside

On a visit to Oxford recently, I stayed at Wycliffe Hall as a Bed and Breakfast guest. Wycliffe Hall is on the Banbury Road in North Oxford. It offers theological training to women and men who wish to become ordained or lay ministers in the Church of England. The hall was established in 1877, on the current site, and is named for John Wycliffe, bible translator and master of Balliol College in the 14th century.

I sketched the chapel which was added in 1896, designed by architect George Wallace.

There are amazing trees in this part of Oxford. The houses are large, but the trees are larger. I had my breakfast outdoors in the garden at Wycliffe Hall, looking at a gigantic London Plane. The view from my bedroom was filled with beech tree.

“Standing at the intersection of Impressionism and Realism, Potthast embraced the bustle of places such as Coney Island, Far Rockaway and Brighton Beach, the more populist haunts. Like the Realists, Potthast focused on energetic compositions rather than the kind of languid gentility often portrayed by the Impressionists; yet, like the Impressionists, he painted in a palette of high color and lightness. With artistic bravura and a painterly surface, Potthast renders Water Lilies with a masterly sense of composition as the figures’ clothes flutter in the ocean breeze. As in the present work, according to Diane Smith-Hurd, Potthast’s painting is “at its best with subtleties of color in reflected light, as well as color in…