Fred Lyon and Paul Strand.
Rembrandt’s drawing of a child learning to walk
David Hockney, on why it’s his favorite drawing:
There’s a drawing by Rembrandt, I think it’s the greatest drawing ever done. It’s in the British Museum and it’s of a family teaching a child to walk, so it’s a universal thing, everybody has experienced this or seen it happen. Everybody. I used to print out Rembrandt drawings big and give them to people and say: “If you find a better drawing send it to me.”
And::
“I used to say to people, ‘I have a reproduction of the best drawing ever made in my pocket’ and I would pull it out and I would convince them, within a minute, that it was the best. It is a Rembrant from the British Museum of a little family teaching a little girl to walk. Everybody at home has a picture like that. The Rembrant, for me, tells me about who you are. I’m looking at the marks and I can feel his arm. That wouldn’t be possible with a photograph – it would be a performance. Rembrant was not intervening in any way, meaning it is the greatest work of art. You don’t see it at first. It is a virtuoso drawing but it doesn’t shout out.”
When I look at these marks, I know a Chinese master of the seventeenth century would recognise instantly that this drawing was the work of a master. Very few people could get near this… The tenderness this drawing shows is not possible with photography.
a way of writing →
There is a genre of writing to which I am particularly devoted, but whose name I do not know. I can only give examples. I think it may have been invented by William Hazlitt, in “The Fight”. Another wonderful instance is Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” — the essay, not the book that…
Oakesdale skyline.
Oakesdale, Whitman County, WA, November 2013.
Fred Lyon's San Francisco Portfolio →
I had to pick five favorites:
Marine, Gustave Courbet, 1866. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Wallace Grain & Pea Company, Palouse, WA, September 2014.
Grass, March to September.
UP train 62 running from Ayer Jct WA To Moscow ID has just left the Pullman WA depot on a sunny day in 1952. Bruce Butler photo. The train is crossing Kamiaken Street.
“The best essays come from the moment in which people really need to work something out.”
Bull.
Sun dog.
Brothers watching a crop duster, near Fallon, WA, June 2014.
Holy shit.
Garbanzos coated in bright red fertilizer, Fallon, WA, April 2014.
In April on the Palouse, you might look south and see a staggering sunny day, then turn around north to dark, threatening skies. The winter wheat by this time is vivid and green, but the fields still awaiting garbanzos and lentils remain in cake-brown furrows. You can still smell winter when the clouds pass over you and the wind hits your chest, but when they float past, the sun makes you sweat and pull off your jacket.
Morro Bay, California, December, 2013.
Christendom is dead! Long live the micro-Christendoms! →
“So in many ways, being a friend is much easier than trying to save the world. And yet, it’s also much harder. Your life will get messier. You’ll have to struggle with how best to help your friend and those decisions can be heart-breaking at times. Volunteering a few hours at the food pantry or sponsoring a child in Africa is a whole lot easier and cleaner than making friends and opening up your life to the needs, demands and sin of others. To say nothing of how your needs, wants and sins will affect them.”
“So the number of babies killed in the USA through abortion in four months is about the same number of Americans killed during the whole of the Second World War.”
One of several staggering statements in Augusto Zimmerman's Feminism and Gendercide of Unwanted Girls. Here are a couple more:
None of the early feminists believed that abortion was a woman’s right. On the contrary, they believed that women’s equality would end abortion for good. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), whose “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) is credited with initiating the struggle towards women’s suffrage in the United States, explains in a letter to a supporter, in 1873: “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
…
Because of sex-selection abortions, a survey of a dozen villages in India has found that out of a total population of ten thousand, only fifty were girls. In neighbouring China two-thirds of all children born are males because of selective abortion against female babies. In the countryside, the ratio of boys to girls is four to one. One academic source has suggested that there could be a ratio of 168 males for every 100 girls in Danzhou. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, by the year 2020 there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in China. One in five young Chinese men will be unable to find a bride.