Ca’ d’ Zan

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Ca’ d’ Zan was the palatial home of John Ringling in Sarasota Florida. Created as a love letter to his wife Mabel, the mansion was designed in the Venetian Gothic style of the palazzos that ring the Venice canals. Ca’ d’Zan means, “House of John”, in the dialect of their beloved Venice.

The Ringlings had been traveling throughout Europe for nearly 25 years, acquiring circus acts and art. They both greatly admired the architectural style of Venice’s Ducal Palace, Ca’ d’Oro and the Grunwald Hotel. When they decided to build a home in Sarasota, Florida, where they had been winter residents for a number of years, The Ringlings took these palazzi as their inspiration – and Sarasota Bay as their Grand Canal.

Pam, her house guest and I traveled to Sarasota over the July 4th weekend and the one thing I definitely wanted to do was revisit the Ringling Museum. Before exploring the museums we first waled to Ca’ d’ Zan. I had sketched Ca’ d’ Zan before but decided to sketch it again from a different angle while they explored inside. When I opened my art bag, I was shocked to discover I had left my case of pencils and brushed back at the bed and breakfast. I went through every pocked and crevice of the bag and found one tiny stub of a colored pencil. I sharpened it by plucking away wood around the remaining “lead” and got to work. There was just enough of the stump left to complete the sketch but I didn’t have a brush to paint with, so I lived with the line work and painted it later back in the studio.

When John Ringling died in December of 1936 he bequeathed his estate to the people of Florida, but legal wrangling with his creditors went on for a decade until the property finally passed unencumbered to the state. During this time Ca’ d’Zan remained closed. Finally, in 1946 it was reopened to the public.

But the care that older buildings require was neglected due to a lack of funds, and by the late 90’s, Ca’ d’Zan was in such a state of disrepair it was used as the location for Miss Havisham’s decrepit mansion in the 1996 Hollywood remake of Charles Dickens’ classic Great Expectations. Later in 1996 renovations began and today it is back to its former glory.

I was seated in a spot where people left the mansion after their tours inside. At first I pulled my mask up each time a group passed but then I just left the mask in place so I didn’t have to focus on pulling it on and off.

Crealde Panorama 1

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After five days of COVID-19 quarantine, I was cleared to go back to teaching classes in person at Crealde. I tested negative for the virus and returned to the campus several days later. It was a nice morning so we sketched outside. I managed to completely forget my art supply bag, so instead I found a pencil in the summer camp supplies and sketched on a bit of table top paper. I didn’t have watercolors so I was only able to do line art.

The point of this class was to have students do a series of nine small thumbnail drawings to fill  page. With the layout I suggested three thumbnail drawings would line up across three stacked lines. I decided to simply stitch three thumbnails together to create panoramas. I scanned the drawings back at my home studio and then finished them off as digital paintings.

My first piece of advice is always to stay in the shade since the Florida Sun can be brutal. Most of the students stayed on the back patio area which is covered. As the sketches progressed it gradually grew hotter. There are ceiling fans in the rafters of the back patio but I couldn’t figure out where the switch was. Several texts to colleagues finally uncovered the secret, the switch was in the art studio next to my classroom. The fans made a huge difference.

Some students however ventured out to other parts of the campus and one misjudged how much shade she had. I  think she ended up in the direct sunlight and she returned to the classroom to finish her sketches in the air conditioning.

One student hunted down all the female nude sculptures around the property. I had never realized just how many nudes there were. As an urban sketcher it is very seldom that I will be sketching a nude. People tend to wear clothes at events in public. Yet the nude seems to be the predominant subject among the sculptures on property.

All of my students are women in this session at Crealde. That leaves me wondering why men don’t seem to have an interest in sketching. It is a real mystery.

Birth Place

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As an exercise with my online students, I asked them to find their home via Google Street View and do a sketch of it using one point perspective.I found the home at 239 Larch Avenue in Dumont, New Jersey where I had been born. I lived in this home until I was ten years old. The house had been vastly renovated by 2022. A second story was added above the garage and the second story dormer was replaced with a much higher roof line creating a very boring looking cube of a home.

After sketching what the home looked like in 2022, I went back to old family photos and tried to piece together my memory of the home from when I was ten years old. I showed that sketch to my brothers and sisters and their feedback helped me refine the sketch. I had put two dormers on the second floor but there was only one dormer. I also thought the home was a pretty warm color, but it was actually a military steel grey.

I did remember the bright red front door correctly but a photo helped me put on the screen door with the letter T surrounded by metal scroll work. I first was taught to tie my own shoes on those front steps. My shoes still come untied no matter how hard I tie them. A family photo had a random ladder leaning up against the garage, so I included it. By brother figures my dad must have been cleaning the gutters. I was shocked by how manicured all the hedges were back when we lived there. My dad must have been out there with clippers every weekend. I don’t ever recall the lawn being mowed but that must have been happening while I played inside.

 

 

Grant School Dumont, New Jersey

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I am teaching online students how to draw using two point perspective. I have decided to combine these tutorials along with the idea of sketching building from my past and my families past. Since my students and I are not on location, I encourage them to look up a building in their hometown on Google maps and then find a street view of the building to work from.

I attended Grant School 100 Grant Avenue in Dumont, New Jersey, from kindergarten through 1971 when my family moved to Tenafly New Jersey. I recall getting in trouble in kindergarten for refusing to take nap time. Some of my earliest art work was exhibited on the fence in front of the school. I used to sketch the Mercury space capsule over and over again as a child. I knew how to draw every knit bolt an rivet on the capsule.  It is a shame none of those space capsule sketches survived.

I remember it being a big deal when I was finally able to ride my bike to school.

The school is named for General Ulysses S. Grant who led the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War in 1865 and thereafter briefly served as Secretary of War. Later, as president, Grant was an effective civil rights executive who created the Justice Department and worked to protect African Americans during Reconstruction.

Ground Floor Re-Construction

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As an online assignment with my students, I had them take a google map view of their home and create a floor plan. In my case I re-created the floor plan of the home I was born in and left when I was 10 years old. Old family photos and corrections by my siblings helped me get some things right. The Thorspecken family at 239 Larch Avenue, Dumont, Bergen, New Jersey from 1955 to 1971. I was in the home for 10 years.

It is surprising how selective my memories are. I vividly recall how the TV home entertainment center looked. My father built it from scratch. I remember watching him solder electronic circuit boards. One of my earliest memories is of of lying on the floor and watching the funereal for President John F. Kennedy. I would have only been 2 years old but it is a vivid memory. However, when I saw a picture of a Hawaiian tropical pattern on a living room couch, it didn’t register as being real. My sister said it was covered with slip covers, but I remember those being clear plastic because they stuck to bare skin in a very uncomfortable way.

I found a baby picture of myself bare butted on the kitchen table, so it was easy to reconstruct that room. My sister had one picture of the back dining room. That room was also used as a nursery since it was close to the master bedroom. Family tradition is that I almost died in the nursery since I got a horrible case of Scarlet Fever when I was a baby. I have had feverish visions ever since.

The layout of the master bedroom is the biggest mystery. I only have one memory of that room. My mother had cancer and was often away in NYC for treatment. She was on the rebound and home for a week.  I remember lying in bed with her as a 10 year old and watching Dark Shadows. Today, I am binge watching Dark Shadows and I am wondering if I will recognize the episodes I watched with my mother around April or early May of 1971. It was a dark show for a 10 year old to watch but I have always had a taste for the macabre.

BA5 Father of…

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So what variants will follow BA 5? Most folks seem to be of the mindset that things can never get worst than the last horrific wave of COVID-19. We are now in the midst of the BA 5 wave and more people around me are infected than at any time in the pandemic. To date there have been 1,051,912 deaths due to COVID-19 in America with between 500 and 600 people dying every day. This has become the new normal that Americans seem content to shrug off while going unmasked and gathering in large superspreader groups.

A year ago Omicron was an unknown variant. It seemed to come out of nowhere, being a completely unique branch of the COVID-19 family tree. The BA variants are off shoots of Omicron. The hope was that each new variant would become less virulent and less infectious. The opposite has become the truth. BA 5 is the most infectious variant of COVID-19 to date and more importantly it is highly effective at evading people’s immunity from previous infection and vaccinations.

I am fully vaccinated and have both booster shots. That means nothing in terms of protection from infection. It does protect against serious infection and possible death from the virus. President Joe Biden is also fully vaccinated with both boosters. Despite this he has tested positive for COVID-19 on July 21, 2022. Biden tried to stay shielded by testing staff regularly before meetings and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said they still wear masks and stay 6 feet away from him during meetings. I however have seen plenty of public appearances in which he was unmasked including his meetings with Saudi princes. When asked where Biden may have been infected, the press secretary deflected saying that was not an important consideration. Like the past president, denying and deflecting seems to be the way the White House staff deal with the virus.

Some talking heads hope that future variants of COVID will become less infectious, but hope is not a way to conduct public health measures. I had hoped that when cases and hospitalizations rose then politicians would adjust and re-instate masking and social distancing requirements. Politicians lack the balls to roll with the punches and thus COVID is continuing to win the fight.

Rajendram Rajnarayanan, PhD, an assistant dean of research and associate professor at Arkansas State University, who has been tracking BA 2.75 which was first found in India and will likely peak in  September 2022, in America  “Right now, BA.2.75. seems to be the fastest of them all” he said. As of July 17, 2022 he had tracked just 14 cases in seven states: California, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. By now people should understand how exponential growth of a virus works, but then again ignorance is bliss for most.

Oldenburg

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Claes Oldenburg, best known for sculpting everyday objects like spoons and bowling pins into monumental public sculptures that loom large as buildings. Oldenburg died July 18, 2022 at the age of 93 from complications from a fall. He once proposed replacing the Washington Monument near the Capitol building with a huge pair of scissors.

During the Civil War, on July 11–12, 1864, Confederate General Jubal A. Early launched an attack on Fort Stevens, in what is now Northwest Washington, DC. Union reinforcements arrived in the nick of time to save D.C. from Confederate invasion.

On January 6, 2021 a mob of insurrectionists invaded the capitol building to stop the certification of the results of the presidential election and an attempt by Donald Trump to try and overturn the election. Insurrectionists who had been chanting “Hang Mike Pence” came amazingly close to the vice president of the United States.

The pandemic had kept Americans cooped up at home where they devoured super spreading conspiracy theories on the internet. Trump downplayed the coronavirus pandemic and promoting the unfounded claim that the US presidential election had been stolen from him. Conspiracy theorists took the bait and devoured it. Q Anon also claims that a powerful cabal of Democrats and elites are trafficking and abusing children and Trump is the only salvation. To this day, they still believe he won the election, and that the U.S. Space Force will hand the next presidential election to Trump.

In 1923 Hitler launched a coup from a beer hall in Munich. From there the marched on Berlin to overthrow the German democratic government. The coup was crushed and Hitler went to jail for a short time. He realized he had to take over the government from the inside and that is what he did in the years leading up to World War II.

Trump hasn’t learned his lesson from this despot. His coup was a desperate authoritarian attempt to stay in power. Trump lacks Hitlers cunning. He is a weak excuse for a despot but the dim witted still believe his every lie.

COVID Variant Pile Up

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Rather than becoming a seasonal virus, variants of COVID-19 like BA 4 and BA 5 are piling up one one another, with one variant quickly rising on the heals of another. You can be sure another variant will follow ion the heals of BA 5.  BA 5 is rampant right now in America and in England. Long COVID is as rampant with BA 5 as it was in previous variants like Delta. With so many people getting re-infected with BA 5, the chances of Long COVID symptoms are a growing concern.

The following are percentages of of total laboratory confirmed infections in triple vaccinated people who are complaining of symptoms after 12 to 16 weeks after infection.

Delta, 5%, BA 1, 4.5%, BA 2, 4.2% Unfortunately vaccines are not offering very good protection against long COVID.

We are in the midst of a huge BA 5 surge right now. President Biden is infected as are a number of Democrats who attended a Democratic Convention in Tampa Florida. My household just had a positive case of COVID and we managed to contain it under quarantine. BA 5 spread all over the world at an incredible rate while most people went about life as if there were no pandemic.

No political has the balls to suggest re-imposing masking, or social distancing requirements. They all fear the backlash. Instead mild “suggestions” are offered. “In the face of BA.5, the Administration is encouraging Americans to use at-home tests before attending large, indoor gatherings, traveling, or visiting indoors with immunocompromised individuals.”

Last Day of Quarentine

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The first three day after someone is infected by COVID-19 they are the most infectious. While the patient has symptoms, they are still infectious. A person is considered infectious for 10 days after the onset of symptoms, or they test positive. Today is the last of five days that our house guest will be quarantined in the guest bedroom. Tonight everyone in the house will take a COVID home test and hopefully we will all test negative. For the past 5 days I have been wearing a KN-95 mask held in place by the cloth mask Pam made for me in the first weeks of the pandemic. The home made cloth mask has certainly gotten plenty of use. We have taken every caution imaginable to keep the virus contained to a confined space. Our house guest is young, and an athlete, so thankfully symptoms have been mild. Hopefully the illness has run it’s course.

I got my second booster shot several months ago because I wanted to be ready for a possible BA5 surge. You would think that would protect me for any possible infection, but I recently read an article that the BA5 variant can re-infect you despite any previous infection, or like myself, recent vaccination. The article pointed out that a vaccination might only protect against infection for as little as 28 days. Oddly enough, that 28 day grace period ran out two days ago. The vaccine does however protect against serious illness and or possible death.

So this family is a test study in the efficacy of wearing masks and quarantining. The quarantine wasn’t text book perfect since the guest bedroom didn’t have an attached bathroom. But our patient was good about staying masked when going to the bathroom. Last night our patient lounged outside on the back porch in the hammock. As an added precaution, I kept windows closed in the bedroom I was sleeping in, since the windows open out to the back patio. I also realized that I could close the air duct in the bedroom which cut down potentially virus filled air circulation. A towel was also shoved up under the gap below the door. People who get infected with COVID-19 can be sick for 3 days to a month.

It will be so nice to finally relax a bit if we all test negative. During the next 5 days of a recovery period, Our house guest will once again be able to go to work and wander freely. We will stay masked whenever we are in the same room, and we will still eat in our separate rooms for an additional 5 days, so the isolation period is really only half over. It will truly be a miracle if we have dodged this close call with COVID.

We all tested negative.

Monochrome Thumbnails

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At my Sunday morning Crealde Urban Sketching class I often have the students to a page of monochrome thumbnails drawings. Most students get caught up in trying to mix just the right color when doing watercolors over thir sketch and this exercise helps them realize that how dark and light the washes are is of far greater importance.

This sketch was done back in 2020 when masks were still required at Crealde. I continue to wear my KN95 mask both indoors and outdoors when at Crealde. With this latest series of classes just one student also wore a mask. As BA5 cases rose this last week two more students chose to wear masks in class.

With summer fast approaching it is becoming harder to justify holding every class outside. I had one student outside who sat with no cover when the sun was behind a cloud. After 15 minutes she was in the blazing sunlight and barely able to see the brilliant white page she was working on. I encouraged her to seek cover and keep the people she had sketched and incorporate a different background. She pulled it off very successfully.

Most of my sketches done on location inn Orlando have been inside air conditioned venues, precisely because of the heat. Last weekend we sketched indoors and it was amazing to see how different everyone’s sketch was.