View allAll Photos Tagged optimistic
This Lineated woodpecker (Dryocopus lineatus) thinks his beak is tough enough to face the hard things of life--even a concrete powerline pole.
THis man is very happy and optimistic as the day begins. IT is people like him in his field who are at the greatest immediate risk...
If you come early, all the streets are filled with endless lines of people who make their lively hood through exporting goods. They will flow to work for at least an hour, nonstop with little other activity. A year ago these streets were filled with foreign buyers from all over the world. Now the streets are bare, and many wholesale shops are closed. It is such a contrast that its almost scary. Many of the migrant workers have fled by the millions home early for the Spring festival as jobs were lost. Those who remain are the most desperate. China is attempting to and must focus on emergent markets if it is going to survive this economic slowdown. After many years of double digit growth, a growth forecasted at only 5% is going to cause tremendous stress for the economy. One especially magnified by the very large income gap which has been all but forgotten in the mainstream media. Local Chinese news offers little coverage of these grim scenes in an attempt to maintain domestic consumer confidence. As demand from the west slows, this charade will not be able to last much longer. As if they had a crystal ball, China cracked down on issuing visas for the 2008 Olympic games, and enforced slowdown in many areas of its domestic market. Investors slowed down to a trickle during the games do to the tight visa policies, and now even more so due to the economic crises. This was either a smart or a lucky move. If the economy didn?t slow gradually with the beginning of the Olympics continuing with the current crises; and rather slowed down all at once as within other nations the consequences would be dire.
These workers smile for the camera optimistically. China has been through many hard periods and has always worked together. There are so many workers sitting woth nothing to do in sharp comparison to the streets which where full a year ago bustling with packages and buyers.
If you come early, all the streets are filled with endless lines of people who make their lively hood through exporting goods. They will flow to work for at least an hour, nonstop with little other activity. A year ago these streets were filled with foreign buyers from all over the world. Now the streets are bare, and many wholesale shops are closed. It is such a contrast that its almost scary. Many of the migrant workers have fled by the millions home early for the Spring festival as jobs were lost. Those who remain are the most desperate. China is attempting to and must focus on emergent markets if it is going to survive this economic slowdown. After many years of double digit growth, a growth forecasted at only 5% is going to cause tremendous stress for the economy. One especially magnified by the very large income gap which has been all but forgotten in the mainstream media. Local Chinese news offers little coverage of these grim scenes in an attempt to maintain domestic consumer confidence. As demand from the west slows, this charade will not be able to last much longer. As if they had a crystal ball, China cracked down on issuing visas for the 2008 Olympic games, and enforced slowdown in many areas of its domestic market. Investors slowed down to a trickle during the games do to the tight visa policies, and now even more so due to the economic crises. This was either a smart or a lucky move. If the economy didn?t slow gradually with the beginning of the Olympics continuing with the current crises; and rather slowed down all at once as within other nations the consequences would be dire.
Optimistic Goose 3481 got into a dance fight with Doordash Girl and Hawk Tuah Girl about the merits of Lesbian Dance Theory
Letterpress workshop held during at Strong Arm Press, Design College Australia during ICOGRADA Brisbane Design Week 2010.
An optimistic view is better than a pessimistic one. Either lead, follow or get out of the way. We need to step up and do something. Any great ideas out there...? Liars, cheaters and incompetent; no need to reply. We only have room for the honest and hard working.
The universe doesn't care even if our small world blows up... It's our world, we need to care enough to change it for the better.
Happy Saturday, everyone!
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Letterpress workshop held during at Strong Arm Press, Design College Australia during ICOGRADA Brisbane Design Week 2010.
Letterpress workshop held during at Strong Arm Press, Design College Australia during ICOGRADA Brisbane Design Week 2010.
Raoul Dufy French, 1877 - 1953
The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, 1906
East Building, Mezzanine — Gallery 217-B
It's been said that Dufy never painted a sad picture, for Dufy's particular brand of modernism was unhampered by doubt or strain. Rather, it expressed the most optimistic aspects of the 20th century with wit and style. Dufy's discovery of Fauvism in 1905 was a revelation, and helped him to free color and line from their mimetic functions; his subsequent encounter with Cubism would inform his dynamic Art Deco fabric designs, employed by such famous couturiers as Paul Poiret. By the 1920s, the artist had settled upon what would become his hallmark stenographic style, combining deft and spontaneous outlines with broad and boundless areas of vivid color. He would further adapt this style in several large-scale public works from the 1930s, as well as in a series of paintings devoted to famous classical musicians at the end of his career. Even the great modernist writer Gertrude Stein was lyrical about this quality of his art, saying succinctly: "One must meditate about pleasure. Raoul Dufy is pleasure."
Dufy was born in Le Havre on France's channel coast, and throughout his career he depicted scenes of boating, beach-going, and other maritime leisure activities in his art. In The Regatta, we see a group of nattily dressed spectators (including men and women in straw hats and brown and white linen suits; a figure at right wears a purple bathing costume) lining the beach. The figures gaze towards a sea full of sailboats and sculls packed with rowers, as French flags flutter in the breeze. Dufy employed the broad brushstrokes, bold outlines, and vibrant and expressive colors of Fauvism, which he adopted after seeing Matisse's groundbreaking canvas, Luxe, Calme, et Volupté, exhibited at the 1905 Salon des Indépendantes. The Regatta thus demonstrates what Dufy came to see as the "new mechanism for art": not the faithful rendering of external, objective reality but rather the "miracle of imagination at play in line and color."
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www.nga.gov/about/welcome-to-the-east-building.html
The East Building opened in 1978 in response to the changing needs of the National Gallery, mainly to house a growing collection of modern and contemporary art. The building itself is a modern masterpiece. The site's trapezoidal shape prompted architect I.M. Pei's dramatic approach: two interlocking spaces shaped like triangles provide room for a library, galleries, auditoriums, and administrative offices. Inside the ax-blade-like southwest corner, a colorful, 76-foot-long Alexander Calder mobile dominates the sunlight atrium. Visitors can view a dynamic 500-piece collection of photography, paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and media arts in thought-provoking chronological, thematic, and stylistic arrangements.
Highlights include galleries devoted to Mark Rothko's giant, glowing canvases; Barnett Newman's 14 stark black, gray, and white canvas paintings from The Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966; and several colorful and whimsical Alexander Calder mobiles and sculptures. You can't miss Katharina Fritsch's Hahn/Cock, 2013, a tall blue rooster that appears to stand guard over the street and federal buildings from the roof terrace, which also offers views of the Capitol. The upper-level gallery showcases modern art from 1910 to 1980, including masterpieces by Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Sam Gilliam, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. Ground-level galleries are devoted to American art from 1900 to 1950, including pieces by George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and Alfred Stieglitz. The concourse level is reserved for rotating special exhibitions.
The East Building Shop is on the concourse level, and the Terrace Café looks out over the atrium from the upper level.
www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/03/national-gallery-...
"The structure asks for its visitors to gradually make their way up from the bottom, moving from the Gallery’s earliest acquisitions like the paintings of French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard to its contemporary work, such as Janine Antoni’s much fussed over “Lick and Lather,” a series of busts composed of chocolate and soap. The bottom floors offer a more traditional viewing experience: small taupe-colored rooms leading to more small taupe-colored rooms. As one moves upward, however, the spaces open up, offering more dramatic and artful exhibition rooms. The largest single aspect of the I.M. Pei-designed building’s renovation has been the addition of a roof terrace flanked by a reimagination two of the three original “tower” rooms of Pei’s design.
On one side is a space dedicated to sculptor Alexander Calder, with gently spinning mobiles of all shapes and sizes delicately cascading from the ceiling. The subtle movements of the fine wire pieces mimic the effect of a slight breeze through wind chimes—it’s both relaxing and slightly mesmerizing, especially when we’re used to art that stands stock still. Delight is a relatively rare emotion to emerge in a museum, making it all the more compelling.
But it’s the tower space on the other side—a divided hexagonal room—that caused several visitors to gasp as I surveyed it. On one side of the division (the room you enter from the roof terrace) hang Barnett Newman’s fourteen “Stations of the Cross,” the human-sized renderings of secular suffering and pain conceived in conversation with the Bible story. Entirely black and white, with just a tinge of red in the final painting, the series wraps around the viewer, fully encapsulating you in the small but meaningful differentiations between paintings. Hung as a series, the paintings gain a narrative they might otherwise have lost.
The light edging around either side of the room’s division invite the viewer to move from Newman’s chiaroscuric works, which require you to move from painting to painting searching for the scene in each, to a mirror image of that space covered in Mark Rothko’s giant, glowing canvases, which require the viewer to step back and attempt to take in the sight of so much hazy, vivid color all at once. The dichotomy is stark, and yet the paintings all work together somehow, rather than one set repelling the other.
With light filtering through the glass ceiling above, the tower room does feel like a crescendo of sorts, but not in the way many museums’ most famous or valuable pieces often do. The room isn’t dedicated to ensuring that visitors snake their way into the belly of the museum, to first be captured and then let out through the gift shop. Instead, it’s a reminder that in a space dedicated to honoring the modern and the contemporary that the evolution of art remains just as integral as any singular Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol or Donald Judd aluminum box. There’s still a story in abstract art."
www.washingtonian.com/2016/09/28/national-gallery-art-eas...
When life throws you a lemon, make lemonade, but when life throws a lot of lemonade, please duck quickly... it burns your eyes.
Dedicated to all my Satyam friends who are going through a very tough, unimaginable pressure that no one in the history of Indian industry should go through.
"Expect the Best, but be prepared for the worst" - my friends... Good times are not too far when there are bad times !!