Happy Thanksgiving!"





vintage Gurley holiday candles

more at my Flickr photo stream (and feel free to browse around)


Thought I should post this today, as everyone will probably be too full of turkey to surf the web tomorrow.




Oh, and Beer! (see previous post for explanation)

Fossils in Shadowboxes



One Trilobite, 360 Kilobytes

The Internet as One Vast Cabinet of Wonders


Crickets

I had a very privileged childhood. By that, I don’t mean that my parents were affluent, had influence or power, or were in any social sense important. On the other hand, I had an undoubtedly rich time growing up. My parents insulated me from a lot of the news and confusion of the ‘60s. (Unlike others my age that I have known, I have no idea where I was when JFK, or even RFK were shot, but I can remember Studebakers as new cars.)

The real richness was my parents’ love of all things printed and bound.

The old farmhouse that I grew up in was filled with books. These increased in number every year, covering history, biography, the classics, fiction, art, myth, and literature (as well as some of the more obscure areas of spiritualism, my Mom’s contribution). My kids now get to read from the “First Book” series that I had as a kid, which are copyrighted in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. As a kid, I got to read stuff that had been written and printed in the middle of the 19th Century. With the collections of different stuff, the craft projects, tools, and other fascinating sundries, the house I grew up in was something of a wall to wall Cabinet of Curiosities.

Now my wife and I share the same bibliophilic passions as my parents. We have been given (or given stewardship over) a good number of the 6000 plus books that were in the farmhouse. I had been accumulating art books and magazines for some time before our marriage, and my wife has been doing her level best to catch up. We have well over 1200 books easy to hand, and at least 1500 more in storage.

And now there’s that Internet thingie. I love books, there are usually three or four going at the same time. There are a few art and history books that get taken out and referred to at least once a month. But when I need info, especially visual info, where better to go than to the web, the greatest Wunderkammer of all time. You can search for images in overwhelming numbers. Are you doing research on Chartres Cathedral? A simple Google image search finds 41,000 images. Search under just the one word, “cathedral” and Google comes back with approximately 5,600,000 images!

Or, if like me, you like to collect things from the natural world, a search for “Coyote Skull” brings back about 91,300 images. Searching for a skull to put into your very own cabinet of curiosity? Searching “Coyote Skull Retail” brings back over 66,000 sites, but you may want to further qualify your search terms. As of my typing this, there are nearly twenty different human x-ray images for sale on eBay (over a dozen of them in eBay Stores). In fact, on eBay, you can find things like crocodile teeth, meteorites, or the disarticulated skeleton of various small mammals. Building your own Wunderkammer is just a PayPal account away....

Then there are the photo sharing sites. My two favorite are Pbase and Flickr. You can search for something and get caught up forever chasing link after link, as one photographer or artist may have another fascinating person making a comment, or as part of the first one’s contact list. I’ve already blogged about Len Cowgill. There is another artist who deals with assemblage (amongst other things), GODLOVESDEATH. Then there are people like Steffe in Sweden, who photo-documented an old Oxel tree in a field at Välsta for a year and he still periodically posts new photos of this lonely hardwood. And speaking of finding everything on the web, I found a former professor of mine on Flickr, with whom I had lost touch for over twenty years, Karen Marlene Larson, with her absolutely gorgeous photos, interesting essays, and all her faithful commenters.


Marionette by Karen Marlene Larsen

Searching amongst the public Flickr photo pools for “Cabinet of Curiosities” yields five different groups (actually, the search pulls up eight, but the last three really aren’t on topic… ed.) with up to 7000 images between them (depending on how many images are in more than one of the groups.) My favorite by far is Wunderkammer, which I am a part of.


Extinct Birds

Curiosity Cabinet- Handmade Specimens is also amazing, especially the artifice and imagination involved.

There are also many pools for images from museums around the world, two of which are At the museum and The Global Museum with tens of thousands of images between them.


Sexual Dimorphism in Insects

In fact, even The Library of Congress and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have a presence on Flickr, though the latter’s photostream is rather thin. A list of museum photo groups on Flickr (probably not exhaustive) can be found here.

Flickr is just one small part of the internet. I haven’t even had a chance to touch upon the many talented people who aggregate the unusual, the beautiful and the rare, like David Thompson’s Ephemera posts, Bioephemera, Shorpy Vintage Photos, BibliOdessey, Lines and Colors, or the Art Renewal Center.

So, go and play inside the largest Wunderkammer ever!

…Not that I have to tell you.

Happy Valentine's Day



Postmarked Feb 14 1912
Printed in Germany





Postmarked Feb 9 1909
Printed in Bavaria



...and may all your desires for heart carrying swifts and anthropomorphic cats be fulfilled.

I've blogged on this before

...but as Walking the Berkshires has a new carnival, called "Cabinet of Curiosities" I thought it time to post this again. Besides, my Cabinet has changed a bit since moving my studio.



One part of it is contained in a miss-matched set of barrister book shelves, with a drop front desk halfway up. My parents had bought these at a junk shop before I was born. (Of course, now they are antiques.)

On the upper shelf, you can see on the left a glass jar with the finger-bones of a coyote, which I found along with its skull and much of it's skeleton in the woods. The skull is to the right (on top of the remains of a pull toy that had belonged to my mom, and may be from the 20's or before). On the second shelf, on the right, is a small jar of knucklebones from the same unfortunate beast, and one of its thigh bones is on top of a cast metal level that has passed down through the family from my great uncle. The books on the second shelf are all antiques from the library of the house I grew up in.

There are even two Halloween skull candles from when I was a little kid (some forty and more years ago).

This is the type of stuff I try to surround myself with in my office/studio.

For more notes, and related pictures, go here.

UPDATE: My wife pointed out an omission on my part. On the top shelf, right hand corner, in back, is a small Bell jar containing my ponytail from a couple of years ago.

I have long hair, it's in a jar in my office!

Treasures of Yellowstone National Park













These are some of the images from a souvenir book by Haynes Inc. Yellowstone Park, Wyoming (according to the back cover) that my Great Grandfather Andrew picked up on his trip west to see his brother Alfred in San Fransisco sometime in the '20s. I'd had the book for a while, but hadn't looked at it, expecting the typical black and white illustrations of the time. Instead, it had eighteen gorgeous lithographs, on a linen textured paper. Except for a small stain on the cover, the book is in excellent shape, and looks as though it has hardly been handled.

More 'Found' Images

One of the treasures every family has is the stack of old photos in a drawer in the livingroom/bedroom/where ever. Our photo pile is exceptionally large, as my Mom was the only child of her generation from her dad's side of the family. As a result, the typical splitting up of photo albums and framed stuff never happened, and two (maybe three) generations of collected photos went directly to her. Over the last few months, I have been slowly scanning in stacks of this family history, which is the main reason I went to the expense of a new scanner, capable of slides, and a new external 320 gig hard drive. Between family stuff, old book illustrations, my artwork, and family pictures of my wife and kids, there are now 2486 images on my Flickr site. This has barely scratched the surface. (If you are not a member of Flickr, you can find my stuff by searching for "Jerub Baal" from the main page.)

One of the neat little finds was a box of images from the New York World's Fair of 1964. These are official slides that were sold as souvenirs. I am thinking of passing them on to one of those digital research repositories on the web. For now, here are a couple of the most beautiful shots. If anyone is a legitimate historian of New York City, or World's Fairs, or the 1960's culture or the like feel free to contact me for additional information.

Electric Power and Light pavilion



the Fountain of the Planets at dusk



the Unisphere and courts



the Eastman Kodak pavilion by night

I have been having a lot of fun with Flickr, our new camera (a Kodak EasyShare C533) and my new scanner (an Epson Perfection 4990 Pro).

The latest project has been to photograph and download illustrations from some old books I got my hands on recently.

The following are from "Gems of Art" which apears to be an annual of 'the Magazine of Art.' Judging from the dates of attribute for the engravings, and a bio of a recently deceased (at that time) artist, I would place the date of publication somewhere in mid 1891.

Here are some samples from the over 375 illustrations.

Shots of some older Matchbox toys.






Everything here (except the silver Greyhound bus) is from the early-to-mid 'sixties, some of them possibly even from the very late 'fifties.

Matchbox Cars

Old Campainers

Three Brits

Premonitions of Alan Rickman

Blue and Purple


I'm thinking through a painting series based on my old matchbox cars to fit in and alternate with this series

Vintage Mazda Lamp Advertisements







These are printed on heavy card stock, I think they were part of a calendar.

Please note that these may still be subject to copyright by the estate of Maxfield Parrish (and its agents) or GE or both.

Vintage Postcards

Cathedrale de Strasbourg


Le Choeur

Colonne des Anges

Ecclesia

La Synagogue

Horloge astronomique de la Cathedrale

Le Grand Portail

Vintage Swedish Postcards
















































































These are some of the many vintage postcards from my Mom's side (the Swedish side) of the family. There are seventy-four in all, dating from between 1900 and the 1930's