A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
– Ansel Adams
The sense of the presence of the eternal world in Adams’s photographs is achieved not only by his constant choice of sublime moments and viewpoints, but also by his legendary technical brilliance, which transforms an ordinary scene into a luminescent, fully realized, precious object.
~ Jonathan Green, American Photography
The job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. – Ken Kesey
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. ~Pablo Picasso
Within every block of wood and stone, there dwells a spirit, waiting to be released. ~ Hap Hagood
Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience — to appreciate the fact that life is complex.
- M. Scott Peck
A museum visitor relaxes in a furniture installation titled; “Phantasy landscape” designed by designer and architect Verner Panton of Denmark whose works are currently on display at the National Museum of Singapore, Monday, June 8, 2009 in Singapore. (WONG MAYE-E/AP) – Freep Photos of the Week
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
~ Salvador Dali
The Lobster telephone, a painted plaster sculpture from 1936, will be showcased at the opening of the “Liquid Desire” Salvador Dali exhibit in Melbourne, Australia, Wednesday. The exhibit will showcase more than 200 works by Spanish artists. (Mark Dadswell/Getty Images) – WSJ Pictures of the Day
Explore Dali’s life and work from his Catalan upbringing to his surrealistic, Freudian influenced depictions of an interior world that many preferred to turn away from.
For this was Governor Wentworth, driving down
To Little Harbor, just beyond the town,
Where his Great House stood looking out to sea,
A goodly place, where it was good to be.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Bennington Wentworth, royal governor of New Hampshire from 1741-1767, built the Wentworth-Coolidge Mansion on peaceful Little Harbor in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. During Wentworth’s long tenure as governor, he acquired lands throughout New Hampshire and Vermont, pushing the frontier Westward and expanding his own family’s wealth at the same time. Though a Conservative and Loyalist by nature, Wentworth’s personal ambitions often conflicted with those of the local assembly. When refused an official residence in the town of Porstmouth, he decided to build his home instead on Little Harbor.
Noted for his imperious nature, Wentworth was the last in a long pre-Revolutionary line of governors, surrounded by servants and accustomed to privilege. Despite his extravagances, he was well loved in his community, affectionately dubbed “Uncle Benning,” appreciated for his accomplishments and excused for his excesses. He would scandalize that community in 1760 by marrying Martha Hilton, his housekeeper and a woman 35 years his junior, upsetting the clearly established social order and denying many waiting hands an inheritance they felt was their due.
Martha would live in the Wentworth-Coolidge home for 35 years, both reviled and romanticised in her time. Longfellow immortalized her in his famous poem Lady Wentworth, a florid, not particularly realistic depiction of her romance with Bennington. In her own community, she would come to be, if not accepted, at least tolerated. She outlived her husband by 30 years, marrying his cousin a year after Bennington’s death in 1870 and passing the home and family wealth on to her daughter.
The mansion itself, an odd assortment of additions and angles, is nestled on Little Harbor, an estuary of the Piscatiqua river in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Over the years, it has been expanded and elaborated upon by a number of owners. In 1886, J. Templeman Coolidge of Boston bought the house as a summer home, establishing an artistic colony that would see such illustrious visiters as: John Singer Sargent, Edmund Tarbell, and Isabella Stewart Gardner. The Coolidge Center for the Arts is an outgrowth of his vision, featuring art from a number of distinguished galleries. Eventually the Wentworth-Coolidge mansion was passed on to the State of New Hampshire where it is lovingly maintained today.
Did you know? The first lilacs in the state of New Hampshire were brought to America by Bennington Wentworth and planted on the Wentworth-Coolidge estate. Their descendants live on today and are celebrated each year at the Lilac Festival.
The light I express is the light of the community ~ Ernie Barnes
Ernie Barnes reflected the pain and warmth of his roots in the segregationist South in the tangled fever of his subjects, an impassioned and exclusive community that we can only peer in at from a distance. Often labeled a Neo-Mannerist painter, his style like that of his precursors was characterized by elongated, often exaggerated figures. The vigor and fluidity of his paintings a direct outgrowth of his experience as a professional football player, a successful career that he gave up in 1965 to dedicate his life to his art.
One day on the playing field, I looked up and the sun was breaking through, hitting the unmuddied areas on the uniforms, and I said, ‘That’s beautiful!’ I knew then it was all over being a player. I was more interested in art. So, I traded my cleats for canvas, my bruises for brushes, and put all the violence and power I had felt on the field into my paintings
In 1971, Barnes broke through with his solo exhibition The Beauty of the Ghetto at the Heritage Gallery in Los Angeles. His aspiration not only to encourage those in his own community , but to express the intrinsic beauty of that community in its barest details. 
In 1984, he was honored with the Sports Artist of the Year Award representing his exceptional depictions of the 23rd Olympiad in Los Angeles, California. Barnes remains one of the most collected artists in America.
Americans in Focus: Ernie Barnes
