Visited the Boston MFA Yesterday Morning

Yesterday was one of my (mostly) off Fridays at KMC. Lorna and I headed into Boston to visit the museum of fine arts and see what they had that was new.

Visiting a museum is always a good way to reset from the stress of life (and while I enjoy my work it can certainly wear at times). This trip was a mix as we started with the ‘Matisse in the Studio’ exhibit and roamed through some of the permanent collection first.

      

The ‘make way for ducklings’ exhibit was wonderful. The early sketches were very interesting to see and we had not been aware of some of the wonderful children’s books McCloskey created.

They had a series of images from Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man with some amazing textures on the final images. They also showcased Time of Wonder a wonderfully poetic children’s book.

 

Finding our final stop for the morning took us through a variety of other areas including some modern pieces

I didn’t bring my SLR along so the shots are a little less crisp than usual.

Our final stop was a display of photographs taken in the Lodz Ghetto by Henryk Ross. It was a sobering end to an otherwise uplifting day. The terrible things that humans are capable of doing to other humans, prominently on display.

On reflection, the most soul destroying aspect is that this has continued happening since the 1940s in so many places before and since…Rwanda, Armenia, Kosovo, Cambodia, China and more…

We focus on the huge scale of the Nazi genocides and that is important but this sort of things keeps happening on larger and smaller scales for many different reasons.

 

 

 

 

The end of a long slow winter…

It has been busy on the work front but not particularly productive on the interesting home stuff front. Got to get that changing now that spring is kind-of here.

I did get my raspberry-pi boards loaded into cases and set up.  I’ve gotten one running a web-cam and taking snaps to a local web browser. I may look at pushing this up to my site at some point to play with…would be kind of cool to be able to drop a camera somewhere and push the result up to the site. Also potentially interesting to play with time-lapse sequences at some point…need a reasonable way to string batches of jpeg images together to make a video for that though.

Need to get pandamallet.com configured and start putting images up there (and any other art-like stuff I can think of). Currently it is just sitting there with the default wordpress content showing. I’d like to use it for more artistic stuff with my main blog being just this sort of chatter and my career blog getting the technical stuff.

Still waiting for my M3D Pro 3D printer to arrive. Not sure all of the things I’ll do with it, but I suspect my first bit of work for it will be to print plastics for a RepRap. Much easier to experiment with a printer I’ve put together myself than to mess with a commercial product. In the longer run, a laser cutter would be very interesting…on balance I can more readily think of 2D cut outs that would be immediately interesting than 3D shapes…particularly when the shapes are a bit rough as I expect the M3D printer to generate.