What I See and September Group Shot

Good Evening -

I had to be at work at 7 a.m., so there was no way a blog was going to happen this morning. Now, after leaving work a little early, some ice cream, a quick nap, and a walk through the neighborhood for some fish and chips with my honey, I'm ready to write a bit.

The image you see is of a bit of public art that I walk by every day coming and going from work. I know very little about this giant blue bear outside the convention center, but find myself smiling every time I see it.

There's something about it's gigantic body in a relaxed pose peeking in on the conference happenings that seems so delightful and irreverent and untypical public art.

That and we joke about my partner being built like a bear, so there's a bit of tenderness to my smile when I pass it in the morning and evening.

As a former educator, I feel the need to have ourselves a teachable moment here and see what we can find out together about the sculpture. Let's open our Google to "bear sculpture Denver convention center" and see what we find...

So - I don't know if you clicked on the same link I did, but I learned that the artist is a professor at DU who is engaged in a lot of public art pieces, the piece is called "I See What You Mean" (because "Big Blue Bear" wouldn't be nearly intriguing and clever enough...like Whistler calling the portrait of his mother "Arrangement in Grey and Black" only without the purposeful irreverence to art pomp and circumstance that James had), and that it was assembled on site in pieces (a la the attached video).

I skimmed most of the accompanying article because it got into lots of art crit terms. As someone still paying off her Bachelor's degree in Art History and Humanities, one might think that I'd be all into such terms, but I tend to find them distracting anymore. I tend to hear "blah, blah, see what I know, let's forget about the art and listen to how much I know" now when I read such bits - not all art critiques, but most.

I think I've moved to Whitman's stance on the learned astronomer when it comes to such things. I'm at a place anymore in which I just want to say to those who want to lob out the big words and abstract notions about art, "Shh, honey. Let's just look at the piece and talk about what it means to us personally. No-one's going to grade you on this or find you wildly impressive or wickedly insightful, so just relax and say what you think."

What I think is that the big blue bear is pretty fantastic and I'm looking forward to a weekend when I can walk down with my bear and get her picture next to this most fantastic piece of public art.

Here's to that. Here's to weekends free for walking and picture taking. Here's to public art. Here's to irreverence and play and dropping the heavy lexicons to just enjoy and experience and feel.

Here we have (finally) the September Virgens. Wow - it was a long month and I (clearly) still haven't found a good Virgen picture taking spot in our new place where the lighting is bright enough but not so specific that it washes out some of the Virgens.

In the 30 days represented above, we both followed Denver job leads, went up on separate days for interviews and home finding, secured jobs and a new home, packed up, wrapped up our jobs at the university, scheduled a 24' truck and started saying "goodbye" (or, my preferred Italian phrase of "ci vediamo presto" - we'll see each other soon). That's a heck of a 30 days.