Tag: Monday Mood

Mood: Monday


Name that mood!

detail from Barbecue, 1960
oil on canvas
Archibald Motley, Jr., American

ETA: Today, March 21, 2024, I was reading news and when I got to the Arts and Ideas section, I thought, Huh, that painting looks familiar. It was a different part of the same painting shown above. Here’s the blurb about it from The New York Times:

How it started: A century ago tonight, a dinner party in New York set in motion one of the most influential cultural movements of the 20th century. Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke, two Black academic titans, gathered the brightest of Harlem’s creative and political scene to mingle with white purveyors of culture. The relationships formed that night would soon blossom into the Harlem Renaissance.

At the time, little was written in the news media about the party. But Veronica Chambers, a Times journalist, and Michelle May-Curry, a curator in Washington, D.C., have reconstructed the evening. They used rarely seen letters and other archival material.

Mood: Monday

I previously posted a photo titled Old Red Truck, oil on canvas from artist Michael Meissner.

Still working on blog repair: have completed years 2004 through 2012, as well as 2017 through 2022. So only four years remain.

Below is an excerpt from a July 2012 post that drew on memories from around 1987 and inspired today’s choice of a painting.

[The truck I borrowed, Big Red] was an ancient pickup–I can’t remember if he was a Ford or a Chevy, but he was beat up as hell. He’d been part of a working ranch or farm… so he’d earned every dent, scratch, and faded bit of paint he wore. Every time I clambered into the cab, slammed the door, and cranked him up, I slipped inside the pages of a Larry McMurtry novel. And I love Larry McMurtry even more than red trucks, so I am talking BLISS.

I know that one day, somehow, another Big Red will come into my life. If he’s not pretty, I don’t care, as long as what’s under the hood will keep us on the run. And if it doesn’t happen before I check out, then I can’t think of a better way to be imagined: tooling through the universe–make me young and thin again, with long brown hair whipping around me, and all the dogs who went before me taking turns riding on the seat next to me. Whenever you’re sitting at home or inside a place of business, and you hear a bit of music as someone drives by–and if you know me, you’ll probably know what music is likeliest–then think to yourself, There goes Becky. Or, you know, Aunt Becky, Beck, Becks, Beckster, or any of the BettyPeggyBetsyDebby names I’ve been miscalled through the years. It’s all good in a red truck.

Mood: Monday

I previously posted a photo of an oil on canvas painting titled Still Life with Tumber, Wedgewood Pitcher and Fruit from artist Marion Patten in 1930.

For me, the mood the painting evokes is satisfaction. On October 17, 2011, I posted a photo of a sage green vase I’d found that reminded me of two similar blue vases I had when I was young. I thought they might have been free gifts with Avon products. Mark L suggested they looked like jasper (as in Wedgwood Jasperware), which I then searched and couldn’t find anything similar to what I own(ed). Wedgwood Jasperware can be expensive, and the white designs are raised on them. The white on my vase(s) is painted, and I knew what I had were not expensive, then or now.

Since I’m having to edit every post as part of the big blog attack clean-up (hello, still in 2011, eek), and reread that post, I searched again, once again trying, “avon,” “wedgwood,” and “jasperware.” While it’s not proof, both the blue and green vases are listed on eBay, Etsy, Poshmark, and Mercari with various descriptions that include those words, along with “replica.” So I think I was correct back in 2011 by thinking they were free gifts with Avon products circa the 1960s/1970s.


Images taken from the Internet.

Mood: Monday

This work is part of the public domain.

Name that mood.

Thunder Storm On Narragansett Bay
Martin Johnson Heade, American
1868, oil on canvas

It’s not raining here, though we could use it. This painting has more to do with my current mood as I struggle to fix my blog. It’s taking up so much time and energy that I’d normally be using for writing. But when I try to focus on anything else, that just isn’t happening right now.