What I Saw in D.C.

I go to Washington, D.C. whenever I need a few days of R&R. Very good and long-time friends live in or near the District. They even have things like back yards, and we drive to restaurants. It's a great change from Manhattan, which seems to be getting louder and more crowded every day. Those of you familiar with Monet will recognize that the picture at the left is not from D.C. It was a present from my friend Suzanne Langsdorf, with whom I stayed during my visit. She calls it "Glorious Giverny." (Click on image to enlarge.) She colorized the photo, which she took last year on a trip to France, with colored pencils and printed it on an Epson color printer. The result gave me much to think about in connection with my recent posts on Goethe's ideas on art and nature.

Suzanne likes to get up very close to interesting patterns and snap. Then she goes home and gets down to work. Here she is at the Phillips Collection. The detail below is what she was interested in.

We also saw a cool series of photos at the Phillips by Allan deSouza, who, emulating The Migration Series of Jacob Lawrence (also on display at the Phillips), has created "The World Series." It has nothing to do with baseball, but deals, as per the Phillips brochure, "with the phenomenological aspects of reality expressed through sense experience and revealing the uncertainty of the historicizing process itself." Got that?

DeSouza mixes images of airport terminals, runways, waiting rooms, street signs, etc., depicting transit. People, however, are generally absent. Irony is not in absence, as can be seen in the above.