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I think I could stand to have a balcony like this in my house, don't you think? I've decided I rather like white carving on sky blue, with an outline of gold. Especially when the landscape round about looks like this:



Yesterday we went to the Fränkische Schweiz, to a tiny town called Gößweinstein. A famous German rococo artist (Balthasar Neumann) decorated the church there. The whole area is full of cliffs and strange limestone rocks protruding out of the ground, and forests and a river at the bottom (the Wiesent, or the Buffalo, which is amusing to me, since I grew up in the Ozarks near the Buffalo River, and the landscape is similar. Except for the castles, of course.) The weather was lovely, too. I came home feeling optimistic about my WIP (except that that meant staying up too late, which means today I'm wasted).

More pictures here.

Art

I'm trying to brainstorm interesting (and non-romantic) settings for Important Conversations between characters in my WIP, but I'm too tired to think. Plus, I've seen a lot of nice visuals this week while finding things to show visiting relatives. So this is just a little post on art that I like that nobody else seems to know. (And just so you know, I like Van Gogh and O'Keefe and all, too. But these never get mentioned in US art surveys.)

What I like in art: color! Light, faces, places of the mind, and things that tell a story. DON'T look down on illustration around me, please. I've seen original illuminated manuscripts, and illustration is nothing to get sniffy about. Lines. This post focuses on realistic, but non-representational color can do it for me just as well. 

What I don't like: black/gray/green/vomit/booger-colored paintings. Sorry.

Also, I started college as a studio art major and did actually get a minor in Russian. So some of these are the intersection of both of those. Enjoy! (And maybe if you're having writer's block some of these will spark an idea.)

Russian:
Ilya Repin. Rest. Portrait of Vera Repina, Artist's Wife. Love the colors
Ilya Repin. The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV. Love the faces on these guys!
Ilya Repin. Tsarevna Sophia Alexeevna in the Novodevitchy Convent.  I think she was Peter the Great's older sister, the one who DIDN'T want him to become Czar. Looks grumpy, doesn't she?
Nesterov, something about the hermit and St. Bartholomew?
Arkhipov. I mentioned color, didn't I?
Shishkin, who did lots of paintings of trees
Savrasov, The Rooks have Returned. Famous picture of spring
Vasnetsov, Bogatyri. Love the fairy-tale illustration look
Kramskoy, Stranger. This is what is usually viewed as a picture of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's famous er, anti-heroine.
Andrei Ryabushkin: Seventeenth Century Women in Church.
Kandinsky, Song of the Volga. One of the more representational of his works. We have a nice, completely abstract one in Michigan.
Chagall, Me and My Village. Okay, you know this one, but I like it anyway
Soviet literacy poster This means: -Young lady! Learn your letters! -But mom, if you knew how to read, you could help me!

NC Wyeth, Cranes. I don't believe these are cranes, though. They look like great white herons to me. I just wrote a 105K novel with herons, I should know.
NC Wyeth, illustration. Don't you see NC Wyeth clouds sometimes?

Jeanne Leighton Lundberg Clarke, Entertaining Favorite Ladies II. This embodies lots of things I think about.

Lascaux, deer. I LOVE ice age art!
Lascaux, horses