Becoming: 2021

April 8, 2022

My photographs are intimate.

The New Year
feelings of loneliness
the end of autumn.
Matsuo Basho

mbfitzmahan. Autumn in the Hudson Valley. 2020.

枯れ枝に烏の止まりけり秋の暮　芭蕉

Autumn evening
A crow perched
On a withered branch
Matsuo Basho

My photographs are intimate. They are portraits of surprise, pain, joy - moments of life. I generally take photos of people, but even my landscape photos are portraits of a delicate life.

Matsuo Basho, a 17th century haiku poet, instructed his students on how to write haiku,

In composing haiku there are two ways: “becoming” and “making.”

Basho made a distinction between these two ways of creating art, and supported “becoming” and viewed “making” as inferior, inauthentic.

Basho taught,

For a haiku poet, to learn from nature should mean to submerge himself, to perceive the delicate life and feel its feelings, out of which a poem forms itself.

mbfitzmahan. Erin in Anshin, the woods. 2021.

Makoto Ueda, a scholar on Basho, wrote that Basho believed that,

Beauty in nature is a manifestation of the supreme creative force which flows through all things in the universe, animate and inanimate.

The artist can depict this force “when the object enters his mind and dyes it in its own color, whereupon a poem emerges by itself.

Makoto Ueda, “Basho and the Poetics of “Haiku.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Smuuer, 1963), pp. 423-431. The full article is accessible at JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/427098?seq=1.

The photographs are of 2020 in the Hudson Valley, New York.
The words and photographs are by Maureen Fitzmahan.
Maureen Fitzmahan, living in the Hudson Valley, is a founding member of the Art Junket (2015-2022).

I Am Steady

*Up and down, and all around— And I am steady.* skf 2019

SKF - I Am Steady

April 8, 2022

The Murder Ballad

You put me in a shallow grave / You left me here while you walked away. (skf, I am Steady, 2019 )

skf is a member of Art Junket East.

“I wanted to write a murder ballad. I know it’s a bit dark, but I like dark.”

At first shocked, I did a bit of research and now I find myself completely addicted. A sub genre of the ballad, songs about murders have been around for a long time. Crime and murder in a song. What’s not to like? Usually passed down orally, these ballads are a murder mystery encapsulated in a short song.

Bob Dylan and Neil Young revived an interest in the murder ballad during 1960s and 70s.

For more murder ballads, you are welcome to listen to my playlist via iTunes or Spotify.

Original composition: skf

Photo and Words: Maureen Fitzmahan

Franky Lee

*I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.* (Steve Jobs, *Time Magazine,* 2001)

Frankie Lee: Platonic Solids

April 8, 2022

Geometric figures - Art with Franky Lee

The solids combine with themselves and with each other to give rise to endless complexities, which anyone who is to give a likely account of reality must survey. Plato, The Timaeus dialogues, ~360 B.C.E.

“I haven’t created anything with my hands for a very long time. When I was a kid, my mom and dad got me origami books. There were two large volumes. At the end, the most difficult origami were the modular origami.Taking one root piece, you replicated it many times and created giant three dimensional shapes. Taking the ‘Roots’ theme from the Art Junket, I took the idea that there would be one ‘root’ that shared and created many things from it.There are five Platonic solids. They are geometric figures. The faces are all equilateral. They are all equilateral triangles, squares, or pentagons.” (Frankie Lee, Member of Art Junket East, 2019)

Plato wrote about these solids in the dialogue Timaeus c.360 B.C.E. in which he associated each of the four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) with a regular solid.

Earth was associated with the cube, air with the octahedron, water with the icosahedron, and fire with the tetrahedron. There was intuitive justification for these associations: the heat of fire feels sharp and stabbing (like little tetrahedra). Air is made of the octahedron; its minuscule components are so smooth that one can barely feel it.

Water, the icosahedron, flows out of one's hand when picked up, as if it is made of tiny little balls. By contrast, a highly non-spherical solid, the hexahedron (cube) represents “earth". This clumsy little solid cause dirt to crumble and break when picked up.

Of the fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, Plato said, "...the god used it for arranging the constellations in the heavens.” (Wikipedia )

The tetrahedron - 4 triangular sides.
The cube/hexahedron - 6 square sides.
The octahedron - 8 triangular sides.
The dodecahedron - 12 triangular sides.
The icosahedron - 20 triangular sides.

Leonardo da Vinci was the first to draw Platonic solids as see-through figures. He drew the figures for his math tutor, Pacioli’s for Divina Proportione. Those sixty drawings are the only drawings da Vinci published in his lifetime. Da Vinci’s studies with Pacioli led to lifetime interest in mathematics and geometric shapes.

Leonardo da Vinci. Platonic Solids. 1492.

Art and words: Frankie Lee

Frankie Lee is a member of the Art Junket East.

Photos and words: Maureen Fitzmahan

New York Art Junket

**“There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”***—Simone de Beauvoir, French intellectual (1908-86)*

Art Junket - East

April 8, 2022

"Ansel Adams begins with the extraordinary in a place like Yosemite, and then makes it even more so. Edward Weston begins with the mundane and turns it into something worthy of obsessive focus." Amy Scott, chief curator at the Autry Museum, Los Angeles, California, 2016

In 1905, Picasso asked Gertrude Stein to sit for a portrait. Picasso said, "Everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will.” (Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933.)

In February, 2019, the Art Junket welcomed New York to the Art Junket. Art Junket East is a spin-off of Art Junket West in Northern California. The first salon on the East coast was held in upstate New York near Pawling, New York.

After years of showing my photos on social media and occasionally exhibiting my photos in a coffee shop or a gallery, I have found that a much more rewarding venue is to share my photography at the quarterly salons of the Art Junket.

The salon or cafe has a long and important history in the development of art. A salon has been an incubator for innovation in art.

CHINESE SCHOLARS - Bringing together a group of artists to a private home to share ideas is an ancient Chinese concept. The Chinese scholar was the Uomo Universale (Universal Man) two thousand years before Italy produced Michelangelo. These Chinese musicians, artist, writers, and thinkers monopolized the art of painting and calligraphy in China. They gathered over tea and shared their techniques, new tools, and ideas.

SALON OF PARIS - At 27 rue de Fleurus, they came to meet Gertrude Stein, an American expat. A prickly critic, but a devotee of new ideas, Stein invited the new, unformed future greats of the art and writing world. From 1903-1946, she supplied a unique place for thinkers to come. Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were among her guests. Stein said, "Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began." (James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company, 1974)

Dressed in dark brown corduroy and seated in her overstuffed chair, Stein was a fearful sight. Terrified, the young artists shyly showed her their newest work. One of my favorite stories is that when the matron deigned to look at the paintings of Henri Cartier-Bresson, my favorite photographer, she advised him to give up painting, "Go back and work for your industrialist father." Three years later, Cartier-Bresson, stopped painting and took up photography.

F/64 GROUP OF OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA - In the 1930s, the f/64 group of photographers of California met in a friend's old barn in Oakland. The Oakland Bay Bridge wasn't built until 1933, so Ansel Adams, coming from San Francisco had to get there by ferry boat. All the photographers showed up with photos in hand.

The males of the group were a hard drinking, hard womanizing bunch. They included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston. Interestingly, though, the group was more liberal than other art groups of the era and encouraged women photographers to join them, including Imogene Cunningham and Dorothea Lange. F/64 included as many women as men. The photographers met, philosophized and they partied, drinking illegal alcohol. Ansel Adams arranged to have their work exhibited in San Francisco on November 15, 1932, at the de Young Museum.

THE ART JUNKET OF BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA - Over an espresso and a hot apple pie, my daughter and I met in a café on Solano Avenue in North Berkeley. Erin and I discussed the idea of reviving the salon concept for artists - a salon for artists who are beset with 21st century demands, yet feel a need to make art. Supported by my second daughter, Katie, the three of us recruited a few friends to come to our first salon in March 2015. Art Junket West thrives in the Bay Area meeting quarterly and exhibiting yearly to the public. Five years later, the Art Junket East met for the first time in New York in February 2019.