National Geographic, December 1998: "Winslow Homer", page 98 & 99
Robert D. Parish
This picture and the story behind it has been in the back of my mind
for over half a year now. I can't shake it. Please, if you know what
I am talking about, email me, and let me know what you think. Was I
the only one who cried?
Take care.
-- Robert Parish
PLEASE NOTE NEW URL: Home Page http://catsden.net/~rdp/
"Totem Animals & Therianthropy" http://catsden.net/~rdp/totem.html
"What is a shaman?
He dreams like all men do
But he remembers" (RDP, '98)
Charlie Luce -- replace nospam with decus to reply
>
>National Geographic, December 1998: "Winslow Homer", page 98 & 99.
>
>This picture and the story behind it has been in the back of my mind
>for over half a year now. I can't shake it. Please, if you know what
>I am talking about, email me, and let me know what you think. Was I
>the only one who cried?
It's a powerful scene, to be sure.
(For those who are wondering, a rather dark image can be seen at:
http://familiar.sph.umich.edu/mirror/www.cat.nyu.edu/fox/art/homer/fox_hunt.jpg.html
though it's rather hard to see the crows at upper right.)
I didn't cry, but then I identify with crows far more than with foxes...
Oddly enough, I was trying to decide whether to mention something I happened to
see yesterday: a crow nabbing a sparrow for dinner, the first time I've actually
seen a crow acting as a predator of anything larger than an insect.
Charlie "babbling, as usual" Luce
Weyfour WWWWolf (Urpo Lankinen)
> National Geographic, December 1998: "Winslow Homer", page 98 & 99.
> This picture and the story behind it has been in the back of my mind
> for over half a year now. I can't shake it. Please, if you know what
> I am talking about, email me, and let me know what you think. Was I
> the only one who cried?
Hmm? ::browses::
Ah, this picture.
::reads the caption::
My my. I saw this picture but I didn't read that caption...
::sigh::
Well, it doesn't make me cry, but I did got one very sad feeling from
that, somehow... =(
--
Weyfour WWWWolf (a.k.a. Urpo Lankinen), just another lupine technomancer
<www...@iki.fi> <URL:http://www.iki.fi/wwwwolf/> ICQ:4291042 -==(RGRNCA)==-
Robert D. Parish
>Hmm? ::browses::
>Ah, this picture.
>::reads the caption::
>My my. I saw this picture but I didn't read that caption...
>::sigh::
>Well, it doesn't make me cry, but I did got one very sad feeling from
>that, somehow... =(
It's a powerful metaphor, and an excellent example of how
anthropormorphics can speak to the human condition.
Robert D. Parish
reply) wrote:
>It's a powerful scene, to be sure.
The metaphor of being hounded by the ravens of one's doubts, fears,
and enemies is a powerful. I identify very much with that fox, and I
am harried by my share of ravens in life. Fortunately, a few of those
Ravens no longer lives in my town, and that's a great relief to me.
>I didn't cry, but then I identify with crows far more than with foxes...
I've made my peace with real life crows, and often enjoy thier antics
while on break at work. I work at a factory site that's in the center
of one of the worst areas in Louisville, close to a governement
housing project where there is a killing atleast once a month. I
admire the crows for being able to survive and prosper in such a
desolate wasteland. I should also add that the card "Crow" is one of
the cards I tend to draw in my own daily "Animal Medicine Deck"
readings.
>Oddly enough, I was trying to decide whether to mention something I happened to
>see yesterday: a crow nabbing a sparrow for dinner, the first time I've actually
>seen a crow acting as a predator of anything larger than an insect.
Such predation bother me less than the "predation" man inflicts on
animals through technology. Road kills are so wasteful, and that's
sinful in my book. Some of you know from first hand experience how
that upsets me; seeing me curl up in a ball and babbling after
witnessing a car kill a squirrel recently.
Actually, as far as the crow taking and eating the sparrow, this does
not bother me. It is part of the cycle of nature, afterall. I would
have found myself watching and learning in rapt, respectful silence,
had I been there. Was the sparrow caught in flight, or perched?
take care.
VulpesRex
On Saturday, 29 May 1999, at 02:52:15 GMT, Mr. Robert D. Parish
(aka four...@aye.net) asked the following:
> National Geographic, December 1998: "Winslow Homer", page 98 & 99.
>
> This picture and the story behind it has been in the back of my mind
> for over half a year now. I can't shake it. Please, if you know what
> I am talking about, email me, and let me know what you think. Was I
> the only one who cried?
Ah, Yes. W.H.'s Oil Painting, "The Fox Hunt".
Fo those who do not receive The NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, Mr. Parish is
referring to one particular, enigmatic painting in an article entitled
"Winslow Homer - American Original", written by Mr. Robert M. Poole,
no less than the Associate Editor of the Journal, and the second name
from the top of the masthead, below the Editor.
The occasion for the article is a retrospective show at the Metro-
politan Museum of Art in New York City. The body of the article is a
thumbnail biography of Homer, with conversations by experts on Homer
and his art, and photographs of the locations important to Homer's life
and conversations with friends and relatives. All this is liberally
and lavishly illustrated with paintings and sketches from the exhibition,
and discriptive captions which try to say just what Homer meant when he
painted the piece in question.
Robert, the first time I saw "The Fox Hunt" was on the CBS show
SUNDAY MORNING, which in 1995 did a program segment on this very ex-
hibition, when it was at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. I
don't remember the stark image of the crows from that, and the narr-
ator basically noted that Homer may have identified with the Fox's
plight. As the National Gallery sells prints of the stuff which they
own, I thought at that time that I should like one for my own wall.
On seeing the NGS article, however, my reaction was similar to yours,
at first. The color came out much better in the Journal then anywhere
else, and the crows were more noticable, but what got to me was probably
what got to you, namely the caption to the side.
For those who have not seen it:
"The Fox Hunt" is an oil painting done by Winslow Homer, and com-
pleted in March, 1893. The composition is a white, snow-covered beach,
looking out to the breakers in the distant horizon. The forground has
three elements: A stark bush with a few dried berries on the far left,
a Red Fox struggling through the snow, up to his belly, towards the
berry bush, and two crows in the upper right of the painting swooping
down to harrass and drive him on. The Fox is seen from the left side,
and he faces away from the artist.
Homer has signed his name in the extreme lower left, and he has
done it in such a way that only the upper half of the signature is seen,
half buried in the snow, literally putting his name in the same perilous
straits as the Fox.
The caption reads as follows:
Hunter becomes prey in one of Homer's great nature paintings,
"Fox Hunt". Crows, pushed to desperation by a hard winter,
drive a fox through deep snow on the Maine coast, tiring it
to the point of exhaustion and death.
Homer identifies with the fox - he buries his signature deep
in the snow, so that his name struggles like the doomed ani-
mal. Homer's works, at first glance so simple, gradually re-
veal such layers of irony, surprise twists, and new meaning
- all reasons his art endures.
While publications such as NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC have hired writers
to just write captions to go with the illustrations, it is quite likely
that Mr. Poole wrote this himself. But while the crows _do_ look like
the Angels of Death, the fate of the Fox is not at all clear in the
painting - and Homer's personal identification with the Fox is, with
out some other evidence, something of a leap. So how did Mr. Poole
(or whomever wrote the caption) come to this conclusion?
Winslow Homer was an intensely private man. He did not like
biographers. He wrote no commentaries. What is known of him rests
primarily in letters to family and a few friends, and to dealers who
handled his business, and to a few favored customers. He did corres-
pond with contemporaries, who all seem to have respected his wishes
about privacy.
One of the sources in Mr. Poole's article is Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr,
who made a book for The Library of American Art, published by Harry
N. Abrams, Inc. (fine purveyors of coffee-table books), in association
with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Cikovsky cites in his bibliography:
William Howe Downes, THE LIFE AND WORKS OF WINSLOW HOMER, 1911.
He got out the first biography on Homer, which is considered by
one historian as "an old-fashioned work, a plodding compilation
of facts and quotations", but still a fundamental base source to
start from.
Lloyd Goodrich, WINSLOW HOMER, 1944. _The_ definitive, standard
work on Homer. And out of print.
Albert Ten Eych Gardner, WINSLOW HOMER, AMERICAN ARTIST: HIS WORLD
AND HIS WORK, 1961. Who makes the argument, contrary to convention,
that Homer is strongly influenced by foreign art styles.
Cikovsky cites many others, but the only sources available to me
from the Burbank Library (besides Citovsky) were Gardner and Jean Gould,
WINSLOW HOMER, A PORTRAIT, 1962.
*************************************************************
DISCLAIMER: Where you see an ellipsis (...), I have clipped stuff
to save space. I have tried to keep the meaning of the biographers
intact. Again, edit by ellipsis is mine. Any misinterpretation caused
by this snippage is due to my judgemental error, and not the quoted
source.
*************************************************************
William Howe Downes wrote reviews on art, favorable to Homer, inc-
luding one on "The Fox Hunt". But he pressed Homer for details of his
life, so as to get out his biography, with correspondence which became
more pressing when Homer appeared to be fatally afflicted. According
to Jean Gould:
William Downes, who was eager to write a biography of the
"greatest American painter", persisted in his requests for
data, and Winslow wrote to him defiantly:
No doubt, as you say, a man is known by his works.
That I have heard at many a funeral. And no doubt in
your thoughts it occured to you in thinking of me.
Others are thinking the same thing. One is the Mutual
Life Insurance Company, in which I have an annuity.
But I will beat you both. I have all your letters,
and will answer all your questions in time, _if_you_
_live_long_enough_.
- Winslow Homer -
August, 1910
You can probably guess at just what great insights Homer felt like
revealing to Mr. Downes. Winslow Homer was in great pain when he wrote
that; he died in September, 1910.
Regarding "The Fox Hunt", Jean Gould has this to say:
...Winslow had concieved the idea for a canvas of far greater
magnitude, physically, philosophically, and aesthetically, than
any he had ever done.
During the bitter cold weather flocks of crows, starved for
food, would be driven to attack - and often kill - their ancient
enemy, the fox. It was a gripping sight, if strange subject
matter for an artist...
To get a feeling of starkness, he used the utmost care in his
selection: against a vast white waste he presented a lone red
fox, trying to escape from the two crows swooping down on his
head. At the left of the fox three twigs of dried berries stood
out in delicate tracery against the snow. That was all. But
each of these sparing choices was eloquent, meaningful in its
own way...
Ms. Gould then goes on to describe Homer borrowing a fox pelt from
an animal shot by a neighbor, and stretching it over a cask in the
snow, to get the right color in the natural light. She recounts the
story of the Station Master suggesting studying the crows at the train
station. She continues:
...In March of 1893 he had written to (his dealer); "'The
Fox Hunt' is finished, and I will send it early in the week.
I shall not give a price on it until it has been seen, & I
should like your advice about it. It is quite an unusual and
_very_beautiful_picture_." Here he drew a little sketch of a
bald-headed man hiding a lamp under a basket and captioned,
"W.H., hiding his light under a bushel." He continued the
letter, "Price should be no object to anyone wishing it.
When I see the prices that portraits bring - from $3000 to
$6000 - and considering the skill required in arranging and
painting a scene in outdoor light, I do not see why I should
not get a good price for this."
He sensed that he had created a masterpiece in a work that
was the epitome of naturalism and yet was almost abstract in
its paring down of detail to the barest essentials. However,
"The Fox Hunt" found no immediate buyer in New York or Boston,
although it was highly praised in the TRANSCRIPT by WIlliam
Downes, and Winslow was for a time dispirited...
According to Jean Gould, "The Fox Hunt" was later shown at the 1894
exhibit of the esteemed Pennsylvania Academy, which bought the painting
for $1200. It bears the distinction of being the very first represent-
ation of Winslow Homer for a public collection, and it is still in the
possession of the Pensylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Up until that
sale, no museum or public gallery had made a Winslow Homer part of its
permanent collection.
I am not happy with the Gould biography. She makes some statements
about Winslow's thoughts and feelings, without citing any source quotes
for her conclusions. Biographers who get "into the head" of their sub-
jects as though they were characters in a novel leave me suspicious as
to just how they would ever know that he felt "that way" about anything,
and what his motivations may be. In fact, there is no bibliography in
her book at all.
----------------------------------
Albert Ten Eyck Gardner attmpts, among other things, to make the
argument that Homer was strongly influenced by French and English
styles after a sojourn in Paris and in the English coastal town of
Tynemouth. But he also tries to argue about Japanese influence,
particularly Hokusai. There is some startling compositional simil-
arities in "Kissing The Moon" and Hokusai's "The Great Wave Off
Kanagawa", for example.
Garner says this about "The Fox Hunt":
One painting in which the japanese mode of design is perhaps
most conspicuous is the mysterious _Fox_Hunt_, in the collection
of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It is
said that in deep winter hungry crows have been known to follow
a fox making his way with difficulty through heavy snow until he
reaches a stage of exhaustion, when the birds can safely attack
him. This rather gruesome tale reminds one of the ghostly legends
of the japanese fox demons. The picture can easily be transformed
into a perfect japanese screen by dividing the composition into
three vertical panels.
Personally, I wouldn't agree. But if you take your NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC, and some 3 x 5 cards, you will find that you can matte
out all but the upper left corner, for a seascape detail, or all but
the two crows, or play with just the Fox and the Berries.
-----------------------------------
Nicolai Cikovsky's book may be the smoking gun here. He spends a
couple of paragraphs describing Darwin's evolutionary mechanism,
natural selection, as the simplified "survival of the fittest" - and
then explains how that idea was latched onto and twisted to fit or
justify various acts, both individual and collective, as "Social
Darwinism", and how this idea eventually was applied to art as the
"Darwinian" school. He makes a case for Winslow Homer using this
technique to show a "mordant commentary" of the times.
He states:
Homer's Andirondack paintings are not his only "Darwinian"
ones. _Fox_Hunt_ is another. It is one of Homer's very
greatest works of any period, and his largest. Searching for
food - the meagre sprig of berries to which it slogs desper-
ately through the deep snow of a hard Maine winter - the fox is
suddenly attacked by crows who, in an inversion of the usual
natural order, have become predatory from hunger. _Fox_Hunt_
is an intensly haunting image of the struggle of survival in
its most primal form. Yet Homer described it as a "_very_
_beautiful_ picture". Borrowing without dissemblance from
the formal strategies of Japanese art, he cast his violent
subject in the most delicately subtle pictoral form. What
Homer had in mind by this contrast between his subject and its
aesthetic dress we do not know. If he intended a kind of alle-
gory of civilisation and savagery, that is consistant with the
sort of ironic allusions that other aspects of this painting
make more clearly: Its title, for example, that invokes the
"civilised" sport of fox hunting to describe a primordial
Darwinian struggle and thereby suggests their equivalence; or
his signature at the lower left, echoing the position of the
fox and like it sinking helplessly into the snow, by which
Homer cleverly identifies himself with the fox's plight.
The Andirondack paintings to which Mr. Cikovsky refers are but
briefly referred to in the NGS article; they are not illustrated
here, and I don't know if they were actually part of the retro-
spective. But I can see why they may have been skimmed over;
these would also make you cry. They would make any true sportsman
cry.
Citovsky writes:
...But in the Andirondacks there were not only those who
fished and hunted for sport. Deer were killed for meat or
for trophies by commercial hunters, and many of Homer's most
powerfully moving paintings, in watercolor and oil, depict
almost step by step the savage method of "hounding" deer to
death by using dogs to drive them into water where they could
easily be drowned or shot by hunters who awaited them in
boats...An Aroused conscience dislodged him from his usual
posture of ironic detatchment and impelled him to make the
most touching, angry, overtly critical paintings of his life.
Among them:
"An October Day". 1889 watercolor, of a pristine lake. In the
forground, a young buck swimming furiously toward the viewer; a
hunter in a rowboat, pulling toward the deer. A hound on the far
shore. A very beautiful painting, if you aren't aware of what you
are seeing.
"The End of the Hunt". 1892 watercolor, again on a lake. The
hunt is over; the carcass of a buck is in the boat; Two hunters,
one rowing, the other pulling the dogs out of the lake.
"A Good Shot". 1892 watercolor. Citovsky's caption:
Cast in the convention of sporting images that
celebrate feats of hunting, like this "good shot",
Homer's moving depiction of a deer at the instant
of its death is more profoundly an almost epiphanic
experience of mortality.
This one is not so bad. It evokes the culminating instant of a
deerhunt as most of us today imagine it; The buck is shot in
mid-bound, crossing a river.
"Deer Drinking". 1892 watercolor. A doe stands in water,
taking a drink. She straddles a fallen tree trunk.
"Fallen Deer". 1892 watercolor. Same pool of water. Same
tree trunk. Possibly the same deer, except that she is dead.
She is draped over the trunk, twisted carcass with her nose
in the water. Sort of a "Before and After".
Citovsky's caption:
Although he often worked in series Homer seldom
used the narrative device of pendant images as he did
in these watercolors to express with the greatest
possible explicitness his outrage at the brutal killing
of deer in the Andirondacks by professional hunters.
On the rear of "Fallen Deer" he wrote, "A miserable
[illegible] Pot hunter."
"Hound and Hunter". 1892 Oil on canvas. Man in a boat, grasping
the horn of a barely visible, almost submerged buck. The hunter is
looking not at the deer, but at his dog in the water, approaching the
boat to be pulled out of the lake.
To quote from Gardner (NOTE: here the ellipses are _his_):
The painting _Hound_and_Hunter_ shows a hound swimming
in the water; a man lying prone in a small boat reaches over
the bow to grasp the antlers of a swimming deer. This some-
what mysterious subject is a curious document that illus-
trates the brutal and unsportsmanly method by which hundreds
of deer were slaughtered in the Andirondacks in the days
before any effort was made to protect the wildlife of the
forests. A well-known New York sportsman and angler,
William C. Prime, who fished the Andirondack waters in the
1860's and '70's describes this kind of a deer hunt as fol-
lows: "The Andirondack woods abound in deer. It is an easy
matter to kill a half-dozen a day...but I am compelled to
say that some Andirondack hunters would not be admitted into
the society sportsman hunters...for this reason; they butcher
the deer here instead of shooting them in a fair way...the
principal part of the hunting here consists in driving the
deer into the lakes, and drowning them in the most abom-
inable manner." This is the subject of our picture, this
hunter's dog has started the deer and chased it into the
water, the thug in the boat catches the almost helpless
animal by the horns and pushes its head under water and
holds it there until the unfortunate animal drowns. Our
author continues: "This, on my word, is the manner in which
nine deer out of ten that are killed in the Andirondacks
are murdered."
To quote Cikovsky:
To soften somewhat the apparent brutality of his subject,
which he described simply as "A man deer and dog on the water",
Homer insisted that the hunter was not drowning the deer, as
he seems to be doing, but tying an already dead deer to the
boat. "The critics may think that that deer is alive but he
is not - otherwise the boat & man would be knocked high &
dry," he explained to the collector Thomas B. Clarke. "I can
shut the deers eyes, & put pennies on them if that would make
it better understood."
Personal comment: This reminds me of the signature line Locandez
used to use, about the lion chasing the wildebeest in order to give it
a potato.
Homer was apparently noted for answering inquiries concerning the
"meaning" of his paintings by pointing out that they capture but an
instant in time, and that the story will turn out to suit the con-
cern of the potential customer. The NGS article touches on this
point, by partially quoting his response to a question about "The
Gulf Stream". Citovsky provides the full response:
In response to a request from his dealer, Knoedler, for an
explanation of _The_Gulf_Stream_, Homer wrote facetiously (in
August, 1902):
"[I] regret very much that I have painted a picture
that requires any description - The subject of this
picture is comprised in _its_title_ & I will refer these
inquisitive School ma'ams to Lieut. Maury [author of
_The_Physical_Geography_of_the_Sea_] - I have crossed
the Gulf Stream _ten_ times and I should know something
about it. The boat & sharks are outside matters; mat-
ters of very little consequence - _they_have_been_blown_
_out_to_sea_by_a_hurricane_. You can tell they ladies
that the unfortunate negro who is now so dazed & par-
boiled will be rescued & returned to his friends and
home & ever after live happily-"
Such answers may have satisfied Homer's low tolerance for
fools, but they did not clear up future opportunities for inter-
pretive trouble. Citovsky lists in his bibliography, under
the section Recent Articles and Essays, the following citation:
Biome, Albert. "Blacks in Shark-Infested Waters: Visual
Encodings of Racism in Copley and Homer," Smithsonian
Studies in American Art, 3 (Winter 1989), 19-47.
But I digress...
Citovski continues:
...by increasinggly mirroring his feelings and drawing
recollectively on his experiences, Homer's art also became
inward and private in ways that it had never been before.
In the _Fox_Hunt_, for example, by the mimicry of his sig-
nature, the literal sign of his identity, Homer introduces
himself into his painting and identifies himself with the
desperation of the fox. And in paintings of the 1890's
like _Fox_Hunt_, or, still more insistently, the Andirondack
oils and watercolors, death - the immanence (An October Day),
imminence (Deer Drinking), and stark immediacy (A Good Shot)
of mortality - became an important presence in Homer's art.
And Finally - Citovski captions the image of "The Fox Hunt"
in his own book with that BOSTON TRANSCRIPT review, written by
William Downes:
"The subject is very novel, and requires a word of
explanation as to the fact in natural history of which
it is a dramatic illustration," the _Boston_Transcript_
wrote. "In the depths of winter, when the ground is for
long intervals covered with snow along the coast of Maine,
it is observed that a flock of half-starved crows will
have the temerity to attack a fox, relying on the advan-
tage of numbers, the weakened condition of the fox and
the deep snow, which makes it the more difficult for the
victim to defend himself." "There is something very
impressive and very solemn about this stern and frigid
landscape," the writer added, "and it is a fit scene for
the impending tragedy that threatens the fox." Of this
novel, dramatic, and tragic subject Homer painted his
largest picture, and the first to enter a public collec-
tion when purchased by the Penssylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts in 1894.
So there you have it. William Downes, sounding very much like today's
hack film reviewers hyping a hollywood flick with gushing enthusiasm that
was probably penned in a studio PR department, first relates this story.
I rather doubt that Winslow Homer ever witnessed such a scene, and he
never claimed to. Mr. Downes appears to have needed something intelligent
to say about the subject, and turned it into a commonplace occurance for
the foxes of coastal Maine. It grows from there.
So what we know is this. Winslow Homer, an artist most commonly
thought of as a master of seascapes, painted this piece in a moment
of inspired enthusiasm. It is, in fact, the largest painting (38"
x 68") that he ever made. He expected it to do well as a commercial
piece. He is disappointed.
The real mystery is why he thought it had such great commercial value.
And, of course, why exactly did he sign his name in _just_that_way_.
He did something notably exotic with his signature in only one other
piece, "Shooting The Rapids", watercolor over pencil, 1902. Here he
'bent' the signature to follow the crest of a rill in the rapids. What
meaning this has is unkown to me, but no one has ascribed a bond between
Homer and the water to it.
Homer has the painting entered and exhibited in Pittsburg, at the
Carnegie Institute, and at Philadelphia, at the Pennsylvania Academy,
where it is sold for a mere $1200. By now, the painting is famous, if
looked on as something of a haunting mystery.
In 1900, Homer enters the prestigious Paris Exposition. He enters
only four paintings - "Coast of Maine", "The Lookout", "Summer Night",
and "The Fox Hunt", which he has arranged to borrow from the Pennsylvania
Academy. On the strenghts of these four paintings, he receives a gold
medal, and "Summer Night" is purchased by the Luxembourg.
He is not one of these driven artists, he paints simply as a business.
He paints so long as he may make money at it. But he recieved several
gold medals and cash prizes, and was proud of his success, both tech-
nically and professionally. The Paris medal was particularly important
to him; at his death, his brother, moving him gently, found it in the
pocket of his nightshirt.
Homer left no pithy or ascerbic comments regarding "The Fox Hunt"
behind. He was confident at the time he conceived of it. It is the
only painting of that nature which he made, and it fascinates his
biographers, more so than the more famous "The Gulf Coast", or his
seascapes, or his Civil War illos, or anything else. There is very
little to say about it, however, because it just doesn't fit in
with the rest of his work, explain though they may.
To answer your question, Robert, it leaves me feeling a little
unsettled. I feel for the fox, and perhaps, even for Homer.
But in the end, art commentary says as much (if not more) about the
commentator then about the subject of comment.
And I'm afraid that rule would apply to this amateur, who really
knows little of this Art racket (which is the line I tell people at
the art auctions at Furry Cons), as well.
*******************************************
Epilog: Homer's Civil War sketches remind me of the sketches which
Steven A. Gallacci has done of his Reenactment engagements. Perhaps
Mr. Gallacci has made a study of the Homer scetches, but I prefer to
think that this is a testament to how well he observes, and how faith-
fully his unit is able to reenact a 19th century battle scene. In
a perfect scenario, they would match, even if Mr. Gallacci had never
seen a Winslow Homer illo.
Incidentally - Mr Gallacci entered an acrylic into the art show at
CF9. It was entitled "The Fox Hunt". The subject is an Anthro Fox,
wearing a green overcoat and Blue scarf, walking through the deep snow.
He is walking towards the viewer. And he is carrying an assault rifle,
slung over his shoulder. There isn't a crow in sight. The subject is
a character from his graphic story, "Birthright," which I have been
unable to find.
_This_ one hangs on _My_ wall.
VulpesRex,
who now thinks he knows why all them damn crows follow after him when he
takes his dog for a walk - and wonders what the denizens of AFF would
think of this thread.
posted at 11:30pm PDT, 5/30/99
--
For the Right which needs assistance; / Masthead slogan of
For the Wrong which needs resistance; / the English Version of
For the Future in the Distance, / the Panama Blue Star Daily,
And the Good that I may do! / Panama, RdeP
Charlie Luce -- replace nospam with decus to reply
>
>Actually, as far as the crow taking and eating the sparrow, this does
>not bother me. It is part of the cycle of nature, afterall. I would
>have found myself watching and learning in rapt, respectful silence,
>had I been there. Was the sparrow caught in flight, or perched?
In flight, but very low -- the crow dove on a group of sparrows on the
ground, pursued them as they took off, and took one down as the group
banked around (and right in front of where I was sitting in our truck).
It was a nice bit of flying, I must say -- the aerobatic abilities of
crows always amaze me.
Charlie "still counting crows" Luce
Robert D. Parish
VulpesRex, for a remarkable and enlightening posting. Neither the
fate of the fox surrounded by crows, or the man adrift at sea
surrounded by sharks is unambiguous. This does add to the power of
the visual metaphors.
VulpesRex <71611...@CompuServe.COM> writes:
> To answer your question, Robert, it leaves me feeling a little
>unsettled. I feel for the fox, and perhaps, even for Homer.
The fox is a metaphor for something many of us have experienced. The
painting seems deep, it seems to carry the weight of experience behind
it. Not a physical fox and crows... but a psychological one.
I cope with depression. Winson Churchill refered to his own bouts of
depression as "the black dog". Perhaps Homer did to, and that's what
the crows were. I dunno.
> But in the end, art commentary says as much (if not more) about the
>commentator then about the subject of comment.
> And I'm afraid that rule would apply to this amateur, who really
>knows little of this Art racket (which is the line I tell people at
>the art auctions at Furry Cons), as well.
I think the comments about possible oriental influences in "The Fox
Hunt" are interesting to me. I've been fascinatated by Asian art and
culture since I travelled in the Orient in the 1980's, serving in the
US Navy. I do love the way he used elements sparingly in this work.
I did not think of it at the time, but it does have elements in common
with oriental aesthetics. It seems like a grim, visual haiku. But I
lack the knowledge needed and cannot judge visual art beyond how it
touches me. I am fairly knowledgable about music (for an autodidact),
and even there, venturing specualtion about influences is something I
am leary to do.
A work of art can be a monologue, self expression .... but great works
can be a catalyst for a dialogue. By talking about art, music,
literature, or anything else, we are indeed talking about who we are,
and what our value are. This is certainly a good thing. This is also
a reason why the arts are so vital to civilized society. The Right
may ridicule such culture as being "Ivory Tower" and want to replace
it with thier Biblical weltanshuung, a fusion of the Old Testament
epics and Westerns of Hollywood's "Golden Age". And the Left may
assail it as being the work of "dead white European males" (as if this
makes it trash), and want to replace it with more PC topics.
In both cases, what is desired is the control the dialogue, to control
the thinking that comes out of it. Better an anarchy of amatuers,
each striving for thier own truth in thier own way, than a tyranny of
an "official" truth. Regarding the simularities and contradictions in
the books you cite, I think that when writers in different books agree
with each other to much, that may be a bad sign.
Thanks for going well beyond the scope of the Geographic article, and
including information about the "Andirondack" paintings. They do seem
rather remarkable for the time they were done, but the turn of the
century was a remarkable time, with a foot in two worlds at once. I
wonder what people will make of our era, one hundred years hence?
>who now thinks he knows why all them damn crows follow after him when he
>takes his dog for a walk - and wonders what the denizens of AFF would
>think of this thread.
IMHO, it's a good thread, here at least. Also IMHO: no open forum
should ever be a popularity contest, or it's openess is lessened. No
posting should ever be made with an eye towards social standing in the
community who participates in the forum. Post what you feel you
should say, not what others wish you would say. They can write from
themselves, afterall. Who else could write for you? Okay, I'm off
the soap box now!
Thanks again, and take care!