RMW Ramblings

    Bridges of the Brandywine The September 2nd flood on the Brandywine seriously damaged the footbridge that gives access to Alapocas Park from the Highlands side of the river. It is now closed. That bridge, and all of the other bridges over the Delaware section of the Brandywine, appear on a pictorial map of the Brandywine I published in 2006. The footbridge, number 9 on the map, originally served the Bancroft Mills, as did a second bridge downstream, number 10, viewable by hiking along the riverfront trail in Alapocas Park.. I researched the pictomap by photographing the existing bridges, and researched the now gone historic bridges at the Delaware Historical Society and the Hagley Museum & Library.  I painted individual watercolors of the bridges depicted and assembled the map digitally.  The key to the bridges in the upper right corner is modeled on Delaware's historical markers that you see along our streets and roads. The iron girder pattern on the borde...

  Arrival of the Guests A Venetian Painting The guests have arrived by motor launch at a Venetian palazzo, welcomed by a group of women.  The setting seems to be the 1950s.  Acrylic on gallery wrap canvas.  Here it's hanging over our dining room buffet, soon to be replaced by something more seasonal.

  Grand Canale A Ve netian Panorama Venezia - Canale Grande is an acrylic painting on hardboard that serves as a decorative piece over a doorway at our cottage.  I have painted several panoramic pieces that are over doorways or panels on bookshelves. Canale is suggestively painted, without detail, but the building silhouettes follow the actual pattern seen along the Grand Canal. Here's a detail of the Piazza San Marco end of the panel.

  Wood Panel Painting Fortuna   Found frames often need custom size panels for painting if the frame is not a common size.  For this found frame painting I cut a birch plywood panel and used the wood grain as an element of the painting.   "Fortuna" is a sculpture in Venice by Bernardo Falconi that's atop the Dogana da Mar, the once customs house, now art museum, on a point directly across the entrance to the Grand Canal from the Piazza San Marco. This gull's eye view faces, not San Marco, but the San Giorgio Monastery.    I thinned the acrylic paint on the sky and water to stain, rather than cover, the wood grain.  This left the grain to suggest the cloud and water surface structure.    

 Euler's Identity Zero On "Pi Day," 3.14 (March 14), I posted about my books on the fundamental constants of Euler's Identity:       Missing from my set was zero.  I have since, acquired, and read the missing  biography of that component.        Here's the Euler set now... Charles Seife, in his Zero, fills the void, or rather, illuminates the void.  Zero's inseparable companion, infinity... ∞ plays a major role.    

  Rockford Horrors The Biker The Biker is roaring around the Tower throwing orange flames, followed by his "familiar" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familiar), the enormous bat you saw earlier.   This image was an inspiration for a T-shirt design I did for myself and family, celebrating our many years spraying water, not flames, riding our 1993 SeaDoo.  

  Rockford Horrors The Kong   The monster dragging the blonde up the Tower isn't King Kong, but Bob Kong dangling, not Faye Wray, but Mary.  The face is a self caricature from the 1980s when I had more, and black, hair, as in the blog banner.   This is a self-plagiarism of a Christmas party invitation I did in 2003.     The biplanes are from the 1933 classic movie King Kong , which utilized contradictions in scale as I have here and in the painting High and Mighty posted September 15.