On this date

This date in 1939 marked the beginning of World War 2. To accord with that, here’s a picture from this past Saturday morning at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. You’re looking at Charles Umlauf‘s cast stone sculpture “War Mother,” which he created in 1939 and which now sits on a pedestal in an outdoor alcove along an edge of the museum’s central garden courtyard. At the right time in the morning, light from the unclouded sun reaches the beams of an overhead lattice and casts striking parallel shadows onto the Umlauf sculpture and adjacent walls.

In commemoration of today’s date 83 years ago I invite you to read W.H. Auden‘s poem “September 1, 1939,” with its memorable ending:

 

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

 

(I hope you don’t mind today’s change of pace from nature photography. Long before I specialized in portraying native plants I made photographs more like today’s than the ones you normally see here. That said, the earlier styles came to inform later and current ones. Ah, continuity: we still are what we were.)

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Time again to say that spring has sprung

Yesterday morning’s weather forecast predicted that by afternoon the temperature would go above 80°F, so before it got too hot we went over to the Southwest Greenway at the Mueller development in east-central Austin, where we confirmed that spring had indeed arrived. One token of that was some agarita bushes (Mahonia trifoliolata) flowering away, as you see in a broad horizontal view above and in a closer upward view in the following photograph.

The Mueller development occupies the site of the old Austin airport that closed in 1999. It’s likely that at least some of the wispy clouds we saw yesterday coincidentally came from diffused airplane contrails, so I’ve decided to follow that theme and add a non-botanical photograph from the Southwest Greenway: it shows Chris Levack’s “Wigwam.” Six years ago I semi-broke botanical ranks and showed his adjacent “Pollen Grain” sculpture.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand update

On August 13th, the New Zealand Consulate in Los Angeles featured 11 of my photographs on its Facebook page.

Now that I’m talking about New Zealand again, how could I not add one more picture? And since this is a different sort of post from the usual one, why not let that picture be out of the norm as well? What’s different is the human element: you’re looking at one of the sculptures I saw on the beach at Hokitika, which is on the west coast of the South Island. It seems that every January there’s a Driftwood & Sand Sculpture Exhibition, so when when we walked on the beach there late on the afternoon of February 16th, many of the pieces were still intact. The one shown here had a sign on it saying “Photo Booth,” but I took its picture rather than having it take mine.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Natural surfside sculpture

Here’s a naturally sculpted surfside rock at Mount Maunganui as it looked on February 25th, the day before the one that gave you the last few pictures.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman