Reason #341 Why I Love To Blog -- June 25, 2016

Okay, on the telly right now: the Blu-Ray "Ultimate Collector's Edition, Woodstock, 3 Days of Peace and Music, The Director's Cut." It's the first time I've seen this particular cut. I have watched the "original" DVD many, many times, but that was years ago. I just got the Blu-Ray "ultimate collector's edition" a few weeks ago. I waited until I had the evening entirely free before opening it.

I am not a bit disappointed. So much more than the DVD.

Anyway, back to the 341st reason why I love to blog.

This past week I read the following in the London Review of Books:

The last time a painting from the Hudson River School – the loose grouping of 19th-century American artists who evoked the placid rural villages and forested tourist destinations upriver from New York City – made the news was in 2005, when the New York Public Library, strapped for cash, sold Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits (1849), for $35 million, to the Walmart heiress Alice Walton for her Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. The controversy surrounding the sale, with the usual hand-wringing about cultural patrimony versus institutional needs, obscured the fact that few members of the general public had heard of Durand, or, indeed, of the two ‘kindred spirits’ – the British-born painter Thomas Cole and the Romantic poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant – whom he depicted contemplating a lushly idealised Catskills landscape of bluffs and waterfalls, their names inscribed like those of lovers on a nearby birch tree.

Cole and Durand are reunited in an intimate exhibition of 25 Hudson River School paintings at the Driscoll Babcock Galleries on West 25th Street in Chelsea (until 25 June). Cole’s miniature, sepia-hued View of the Thames (1845) looks back nostalgically to his native country, contrasting – by implication – riparian England with the sublimely rugged Hudson he had begun to paint in 1825, the year the Erie Canal opened in upstate New York to the seemingly opposed interests of commercial development and nature-seeking tourists. Durand’s small and intense Catskill Mountains near Shandaken (c.1856) seems to say – a little hopefully – that this blue-tinged range, river and majestic tree will always be there for us.

Read it again: see if you can see what caught my eye.

Yup, because of the blog I learned a new word some years ago: riparian. I've posted several notes about that word, but this is the post that has generated the most hits: http://themilliondollarway.blogspot.com/2013/12/riparian-justice-north-dakota-is-low.html.

Had it not been for the blog, I doubt I ever would have "discovered" the word. I mentioned that to my older granddaughter tonight, on the way home from the water polo tournament, and although we haven't talked about that particular biome for a year or so, our granddaughter remembered the word.

By the way, there's another word in that "cut and paste" above that I've discussed with our older granddaughter: sublimely. Heavenly.