Temple's Longtails and Fur

    The World used to be such a big place.  Until 200 years ago, man sailed the oceans with...sails.  Before the advent of the steam engine and paddle wheel, to the modern engine and propellers on both ships and airplanes it took literally years to traverse the globe, a feat that now can be measured in hours in the air or weeks on a ship.  It was only 70 years ago "shipping containers" that could come off a trailer and be stacked on deck of a cargo ship were conceived.  Now likely everything within reach of any of us has spent time in a container.        Malcolm McLean, the inventor of the shipping container.  It enabled us to load a container, put it on a trailer, leave it loaded, take it off the trailer and onto a cargo ship going across oceans, then off the ship onto another trailer to be dragged to very near it's destination, where it would be opened and it's contents dispersed, possibly a half a globe away from point or or...

  John Signer Sargent Gassed Oil on Canvas Great Britain     WWI was a terrible time globally for humanity.  Certainly, there were remote peoples who were largely unaffected, and they were lucky.  But the for the "modern" peoples it was ghastly, and for those that fought it was worse.       Take Gassed .  The horizontal lines created by the dead and dying excoriate the human cost.  The vertical lines, the people standing, high light the strength of the human spirit.  They've been blinded, burned, and may be coughing up pieces of lung, but goddammit they're up and moving.  The drab colors used demonstrate how gloomy the situation must have been; despite their conspicuous absence, you can imagine the landscape marred by artillery, a new implement of war.  The landscape would have been devoid of foliage, shot and burned down the same as the men, all that is left would be scorched dead, writhing in pain, or...

  Rosa Bonheur Plowing in the Nivernais Oil on canvas, 1849 Musee d'Orsay, Paris      This is a fine, fine example of a painting of the "Realism" facet of the Romantic Era.  The colors and tones work together to create shadows from a central light source, that source being the sun, the shadows of the oxen, the shadows cast by the clods of soil, all fall in the same direction.  You can see the muscle rippling under the kin of the oxen.  The slightly diagonal line of the furrows they're plowing bring our focus from the lead oxen on the right, down the string of animals to the countryside, and up through the clouds where the changing hue of the blues, working with the light hue of the green further away to the darker green in the foreground, really give off a sense of depth and distance; the grass is darker and greener up close, as is the skylarker blue, where both fade in the distance.  The texture of the ox hides brings them to life, you can almost...

  The Swing Jean-Honore Fragonard 1767, oil on canvas, painted in France                         Diana Leaving the Bath                                                     Francois Boucher                                       France, 1742, oil on canvas Jules-David Cromot, Baron du Bourg , marble Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne II , French, 1704 - 1778                   As I've stated before, I'm prett...