Slow Art Day

16 April, 2011 is Slow Art Day.

Slow Art Day was started to invite novices - and experts - to experience the art of looking at art slowly.

Iris is celebrating Slow Art Day 2011 by spending the morning at choir practice, something that Sitting Knitting calls Slow Music.

That's where you spend hours and days and weeks, months, and years of your life learning to play a musical instrument so that you can make your own music for entertainment.

When we prodded Iris to choose an instrument, she said that she wanted to learn how to sing. That way, her instrument is always with her when the muse strikes and she can't leave it behind accidentally. ;-)

I am starting the day off with a Bernina Club meeting with other makers. After that, I am going to round up some of the folk art I have collected and made over the years and show them to Iris, telling her what I know about the history, meaning and techniques used in each.

How are you spending Slow Art Day?

Last Week in Pictures

Bon voyage!
Recognize this stabile?
Who are those people in red jackets?

Iris was disappointed at the (finite) length of the "infinite corridor".
They didn't let us handle this particular book, but they let us leaf through other classics of the genre.
Where can I buy a Smootstick for those times when yardsticks and metersticks are too short?
Emulating a student at one of the top 10 party schools in the nation*.
* Playboy's annual survey of party schools, circa Bad Dad's days at Senior House.

Retraction/Clarification
She was not taking a swig as I had joked; she was emulating a park ranger who had shown her how to tear open a paper packet of gunpowder with her teeth and load a musket (and then fire the musket at redcoats).

Schulz' Influence

I forgot to mention that our whole family loves the bittersweet humor of the Peanuts cartoons. Iris has devoured the anthologies from our public library. She had a fair amount of patience with the museum exhibits, too. She listened intently to the audio tour about Schroeder and Beethoven. When she got home, she ran upstairs and dug out her toy piano and started to play. A few days later, she got out her old, abandoned piano lesson book and started to practice every day.

She also expressed interest in learning to play bridge. On the ferry to Alcatraz, we taught her how to play hearts. When we got home, I gave her a copy of the coloring & activity book^*, Teach Me to Play: A First Bridge Book. If I can just teach one of her friends how to play, we will have a foursome.

* Do not laugh. I learned to play using the same book. Read that and Bridge for Dummies and you can start playing.

Music I have loved

We bought Iris a shoebox type cassette player and recorder when she was a baby. Before we left on business trips, we read and recorded stories so she could hear our voices while we were away. We also have an adorable tape of her early reading efforts.

The sound quality is not great, but it it easy to operate.

Lately, she has been writing and recording her own songs with it. She also commandeered all the cassette tapes she found in the house. I was astonished one day to find her intently listening to the Brahms Double Concerto in A minor. I forgot that I even had it on tape. I recorded it off of one of my mother's albums and took it to college with me in 1984. Now my daughter says it is one of her favorite pieces of music.

Check out Clambrush's extraordinary recordings of David Oistrakh and Mstislav Rostropovich playing Brahms' Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, Op. 102 with the Moscow Philharmonic led by Kirill Kondrashin.



It's a four-part video so go to the YouTube page to see them all.

The mommy and me Suzuki violin lessons are not going so well. Neither of us have the discipline to practice daily. We will get Mark to take pictures of us playing together. Iris and her (rented) 1/4 size violin is adorable.