---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: charles grimes <charlesgrimes9@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:36 AM
Subject: I have been writing about Picasso and his Art since 1974.
To: charlesgrimes9@gmail.com
I have been writing about Picasso and his Art since 1974.
I wrote a senior thesis, if you will accept that concept, on the Russian Ballet Troupes ballet Parade that was first performed in 1917 even while the guns and bomb blasts of world war 1 could be heard just outside of Paris
The ballet was conceived by Jean Cocteau and the music was scored by Erik Satie (whom i was most interested in at this time). The Ballet Russes producer Diaghilev agreed to perform the piece if Cocteau could produce an artistic director.
Without hesitation the young Cocteau sought out the greatest artistic talent of the day and without fail Picasso agreed to work on the ballet and most astonishingly even agreed to travel to Rome, Italy to work on the sets, costumes and to complete the glorious post cubist curtain for the production of Parade which was to be first performed in France.
I can to this day remember the heady days I had writing this piece, the morning sessions I spent researching in the archives of the Suzzalo Library and then the late afternoon strolls I would take home with my head in the rare atmosphere of the collaboration of Satie, Picasso & Cocteau.
My memory is also complete with the remembrance of having a casual girlfriend help me prepare my photographs of the artists and the ballet for my thesis binder.
At this point in my life I over thought myself as a suave scholar of history and literature and jazz and i always assumed an air of self imposed arrogance and after my friend Laura, an advanced Art student, squeezed my hand and beckoned me forward i was willing to try anything to advance my erudition. Laura had the brilliant idea of using a heat transfer piece of equipment in the Art Dept to attach my photos to paper. She assured me she would run interference for me if anyone in the Art department complained if a History student had the audacity to use Art department equipment. After she gave me another squeeze I was willing to give this a go no matter how wrong it might be for me to use equipment I had no right to. Love in the moment confused my sense of morality.
Well shortly into our project two Creative art thugs walked up to me in the Art studio and told me to get my hands off their equipment . I paused for a moment and thought two of them one of me but then Laura returned from a quick departure and she smiled at the roguish brothers, yes they were brothers, and told them to dry up and blow off. The boys huffed and puffed but my project was finished, although in a hurried fashion, and I left with my exciting and sensual accomplish, my project under one arm and the other hand pointing to a place where we could sit and enjoy the photos and plot our next adventure together (of which, sadly, there were none as it appeared she wanted a real boyfriend and not a boy who only wanted to be in love for a few days).
But then I digress so back to Picasso and the fascinating journey of becoming a writer of history and art and how I was launched into the future.
Writing about such brilliant artists like Picasso and Satie opened me up to what I later termed as the potential of the human spirit. What each one of us can realize with our collective talents is the reason to give us hope for humanity. Once a friend of mine asked me why I bothered to spend the hours researching and writing about Picasso and I was dumbfounded. I ran home and gathered up some newspaper clippings about an installation of Paul Gauguin at a New York City museum and returned to show my friend a painting by Gauguin and said I work at my Art because Gauguin painted like this. I believe it is inherent in me to want to create because I have seen what the great masters have created. Even though I know I cannot breath the air that they did I at least am doing my best to feel that air if only in a fleeting moment.
I would like to thank my professor Reed Merrill for allowing me to have such comparative and explorative experiences writing my paper and sending me off on a lifetime journey of writing, painting and discussing the historical context of Art and especially Picasso and through the production of my paper becoming a keen observer of the power of women. Although, I am sure that Reed would have preferred it more if I had just stuck with writing about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky like he had advised me so many times.
PS. A short anecdote about Reed Merrill.
As a student I loved to visit with Reed during his office hours in the Literature Department. These visits were grand verbal jousting matches with the many witty students, the local part-time intellectuals and the King of Wit himself Professor Merrill. We would gather in his book lined office and spend hours being schooled by Reed's razor sharp intellectual banter. I loved to get there early and grab a chair and study all of the fabulous books on display. In terms of the Great Ideas of History all of the scholarship you could ever desire was right there on those shelves waiting for you to pull them down into your inquisitive hands and to start turning the pages. From medieval poetry to Mircea Eliade to the new paradigms in scientific thought on Physics a student could find no grater resource library.
However, one day after I had graduated, I went to visit Reed in his office and all of his books were gone except for one small zippered covered leather bound edition of the King James Bible. Astonished by this turn of events I looked at Reed and quizzed him. "Reed what has happened here?"
Reed leaned forward in his chair, with his rounded shoulders slumped towards me, and wryly smiled and said. "I had decided recently to devote myself to the word of The Lord but then the damn zipper stuck. I now have to re-think this new intellectual posture."
Reed then chuckled, leaned back in his leather bound office chair and started to talk about South American authors and we drifted off discussing the dusty confines of the ancient library of Jorge Luis Borge.
That was the last time I saw Professor Merrill.
Sent from my iPhone
From: charles grimes <charlesgrimes9@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:36 AM
Subject: I have been writing about Picasso and his Art since 1974.
To: charlesgrimes9@gmail.com
I have been writing about Picasso and his Art since 1974.
I wrote a senior thesis, if you will accept that concept, on the Russian Ballet Troupes ballet Parade that was first performed in 1917 even while the guns and bomb blasts of world war 1 could be heard just outside of Paris
The ballet was conceived by Jean Cocteau and the music was scored by Erik Satie (whom i was most interested in at this time). The Ballet Russes producer Diaghilev agreed to perform the piece if Cocteau could produce an artistic director.
Without hesitation the young Cocteau sought out the greatest artistic talent of the day and without fail Picasso agreed to work on the ballet and most astonishingly even agreed to travel to Rome, Italy to work on the sets, costumes and to complete the glorious post cubist curtain for the production of Parade which was to be first performed in France.
I can to this day remember the heady days I had writing this piece, the morning sessions I spent researching in the archives of the Suzzalo Library and then the late afternoon strolls I would take home with my head in the rare atmosphere of the collaboration of Satie, Picasso & Cocteau.
My memory is also complete with the remembrance of having a casual girlfriend help me prepare my photographs of the artists and the ballet for my thesis binder.
At this point in my life I over thought myself as a suave scholar of history and literature and jazz and i always assumed an air of self imposed arrogance and after my friend Laura, an advanced Art student, squeezed my hand and beckoned me forward i was willing to try anything to advance my erudition. Laura had the brilliant idea of using a heat transfer piece of equipment in the Art Dept to attach my photos to paper. She assured me she would run interference for me if anyone in the Art department complained if a History student had the audacity to use Art department equipment. After she gave me another squeeze I was willing to give this a go no matter how wrong it might be for me to use equipment I had no right to. Love in the moment confused my sense of morality.
Well shortly into our project two Creative art thugs walked up to me in the Art studio and told me to get my hands off their equipment . I paused for a moment and thought two of them one of me but then Laura returned from a quick departure and she smiled at the roguish brothers, yes they were brothers, and told them to dry up and blow off. The boys huffed and puffed but my project was finished, although in a hurried fashion, and I left with my exciting and sensual accomplish, my project under one arm and the other hand pointing to a place where we could sit and enjoy the photos and plot our next adventure together (of which, sadly, there were none as it appeared she wanted a real boyfriend and not a boy who only wanted to be in love for a few days).
But then I digress so back to Picasso and the fascinating journey of becoming a writer of history and art and how I was launched into the future.
Writing about such brilliant artists like Picasso and Satie opened me up to what I later termed as the potential of the human spirit. What each one of us can realize with our collective talents is the reason to give us hope for humanity. Once a friend of mine asked me why I bothered to spend the hours researching and writing about Picasso and I was dumbfounded. I ran home and gathered up some newspaper clippings about an installation of Paul Gauguin at a New York City museum and returned to show my friend a painting by Gauguin and said I work at my Art because Gauguin painted like this. I believe it is inherent in me to want to create because I have seen what the great masters have created. Even though I know I cannot breath the air that they did I at least am doing my best to feel that air if only in a fleeting moment.
I would like to thank my professor Reed Merrill for allowing me to have such comparative and explorative experiences writing my paper and sending me off on a lifetime journey of writing, painting and discussing the historical context of Art and especially Picasso and through the production of my paper becoming a keen observer of the power of women. Although, I am sure that Reed would have preferred it more if I had just stuck with writing about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky like he had advised me so many times.
PS. A short anecdote about Reed Merrill.
As a student I loved to visit with Reed during his office hours in the Literature Department. These visits were grand verbal jousting matches with the many witty students, the local part-time intellectuals and the King of Wit himself Professor Merrill. We would gather in his book lined office and spend hours being schooled by Reed's razor sharp intellectual banter. I loved to get there early and grab a chair and study all of the fabulous books on display. In terms of the Great Ideas of History all of the scholarship you could ever desire was right there on those shelves waiting for you to pull them down into your inquisitive hands and to start turning the pages. From medieval poetry to Mircea Eliade to the new paradigms in scientific thought on Physics a student could find no grater resource library.
However, one day after I had graduated, I went to visit Reed in his office and all of his books were gone except for one small zippered covered leather bound edition of the King James Bible. Astonished by this turn of events I looked at Reed and quizzed him. "Reed what has happened here?"
Reed leaned forward in his chair, with his rounded shoulders slumped towards me, and wryly smiled and said. "I had decided recently to devote myself to the word of The Lord but then the damn zipper stuck. I now have to re-think this new intellectual posture."
Reed then chuckled, leaned back in his leather bound office chair and started to talk about South American authors and we drifted off discussing the dusty confines of the ancient library of Jorge Luis Borge.
That was the last time I saw Professor Merrill.
Sent from my iPhone
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