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I have a new housemate.
It's a ten o'clock photo under living room light, but this is the watercolor I couldn't afford two Sundays ago at Consignment Galleries in Somerville. When I saw it for the first time, I thought of some boyish lead in a '30's film. It turns out to be a self-portrait of the artist, Richard de Menocal—no date that I can find, but he was born in 1919, so I am guessing either the late 1930's or the '40's when he was illustrating for The New Yorker, dressing windows for Lord & Taylor, and designing costumes for Radio City Music Hall. It had belonged for years to a gay couple who lived on the Cape, one of the proprietors told me, both doctors. I don't know if they knew de Menocal, but he was originally from Boston (graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, according to the single bio I've been able to find online—I think a library visit is in order), eventually returned to Cambridge where he died in 1995. In between, he seems to have spent a lot of time in Brazil and monasteries. I had to work out a deal with my parents in order to buy the portrait. I still feel very fortunate. The other proprietor said I was meant to have him.
As for today, I spent most of it with
derspatchel at Zoe's and then at the MFA, where we went to see "Silver, Salt, and Sunlight: Early Photography in Britain and France" and then moved on to being distracted by things like dawn and sunset by Winslow Homer and a Sparton 558-B Sled radio (for which you can find the schematics on the internet! Not like I am ever going to build a radio from 1937 with a two-band five-tube superheterodyne receiver, but I approve of knowing that I could).
And then I came home and I have a lot of work to do. That's okay.
It's a ten o'clock photo under living room light, but this is the watercolor I couldn't afford two Sundays ago at Consignment Galleries in Somerville. When I saw it for the first time, I thought of some boyish lead in a '30's film. It turns out to be a self-portrait of the artist, Richard de Menocal—no date that I can find, but he was born in 1919, so I am guessing either the late 1930's or the '40's when he was illustrating for The New Yorker, dressing windows for Lord & Taylor, and designing costumes for Radio City Music Hall. It had belonged for years to a gay couple who lived on the Cape, one of the proprietors told me, both doctors. I don't know if they knew de Menocal, but he was originally from Boston (graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, according to the single bio I've been able to find online—I think a library visit is in order), eventually returned to Cambridge where he died in 1995. In between, he seems to have spent a lot of time in Brazil and monasteries. I had to work out a deal with my parents in order to buy the portrait. I still feel very fortunate. The other proprietor said I was meant to have him.
As for today, I spent most of it with
derspatchel at Zoe's and then at the MFA, where we went to see "Silver, Salt, and Sunlight: Early Photography in Britain and France" and then moved on to being distracted by things like dawn and sunset by Winslow Homer and a Sparton 558-B Sled radio (for which you can find the schematics on the internet! Not like I am ever going to build a radio from 1937 with a two-band five-tube superheterodyne receiver, but I approve of knowing that I could).And then I came home and I have a lot of work to do. That's okay.