The finished product of my mandolin drawing.

                             A mandolin drawing in progress. 

My latest gig, with my friend Simon on mandolin

Penn Station

    I recently watched a documentary of the rise and fall of Penn station. It talked about how Alexander Cassatt brought his dream to life and built the two railways connecting Pennsylvania to New York City. It also talked about the amazing monument that was built for that railroad called Penn Station, and how it was brought to the ground in 1963.

                                                                     FUN FACT!
Did you know that when when building tunnels underneath the Hudson River, they started the tunneling on each side of the river. Then, the tunnels met in the middle. The estimation of where the tunnels would meet was off by only one sixteenth of an inch!   

Show of Shows Review

 Not to long ago, I went on a trip to visit my relatives in Maine. In Portland,there is an art museum. My family and I took a trip to visit that museum, and after looking at all of the artwork; we went to see a movie they were showing. The movie was made up of 11 different, award winning animation shorts. They called this “The Animation Show of Shows." Here, I will talk about three of those shorts. The first film tells the story of  a house's life from its own point of view. The second is about a person, who seeks variation in a world with very little variation. The final short, is about the future and what happens in it.

  One of my personal favorite shorts, “The Ballad of Holland Island House” was noticeably different from the others. Lynn Thomason uses clay art for animation. Every frame is a picture of her clay art. This tells a story of the life of a house, and how the rise of sea levels causes it to sink into the ocean. The story starts when the house is a standing tree. The tree is then used to build this house that shelters a family,but as the sea levels rise the family must abandon the house. For the short time before the house declines to the bottom of the sea the birds take shelter under its roof. The story takes place in the 1800s, so Lynn Thomason decided to use different famous paintings from that time period as scenes in her story. She uses some of the famous paintings done by artists like Winslow Homer. She also draws from Vincent Van Gogh and the way he layers the paint heavily onto the canvas which can clearly be shown through her clay artwork. The story is told from the house's point of view and it is narrated through song. The song is a haunting sea shanty that really gives you a great impression what the house is going through. So many parts of this animated short are wonderful and it clearly is a well crafted story.   

   The next animated short I will tell you about is called “Stripy.” In this story, a man works in a factory, in a big city. The city is huge and the man never sees anything exciting and new. In the factory his job is to paint four black stripes in the each side of a box. The city seems to be filled with black strips and nothing is unique. The man decides that he is going to try and change this by painting squiggly red lines on the sides of boxes. This gets him in a lot of trouble at his job, yet still he continues to paint squiggly red lines. By continuing to do this he gets more people to paint red lines instead of black strips. But soon everyone is painting red lines and that is just as bad as having everyone paint black stripes. In a pursuit for creativity he covers a box in different colors of paint. This way he can see some variation in the city that he lives in. Stripy was made by Babak and Behnoud Nekooei. They are two brothers, who live in the capital of Iran. Just like the main character of “Stripy,” they find that there is very little variation in the city that they live in. They express this well through “Stripy."

   The last short I am going to talk about, really struck me as strange at first. In this story by Don Hertzfeldt, a woman comes through a computer to talk to a young girl. She tells the young girl that in a few years she will give birth to a young clone of herself. The clone still holds all of the memories that the girl, (Emily) has. As multiple generations of clones are born they each carry the memories of multiple life times. The woman is a third generation Emily. Together, they go through the computer and third generation Emily shares memories with the original Emily. Third generation Emily talks about the work she has done throughout her life, the alien pet she adopted, the man she fell in love with and how all of the people are dying and becoming shooting stars in the night sky.  In the few days that she has left, third generation Emily takes a memory from Emily that will comfort her the her final days. This was one of the best shorts and was filled with so much information that it could have been a full movie. This short even had some funny scenes in it, that got a great reaction from the audience. I couldn't have enjoyed it more.

   I had a great visit at the museum and I saw so many great short films. There are many more animated shorts that I would have loved to talk about. I would highly suggest that you go and see some of these films, they were absolutely great.  

Do Our Eyes Grow?

I was visiting The Putney school the other day and I noticed that the calves they keep in the barn have very large eyes. I was curious if their eyes or human eyes grow, or are we born with the same size eye as when we are adults? It turns out that our eyes do grow until adulthood.  

         The finished product for my self portrait.