Several views of Mount Fuji

Posted on August 9, 2015 by Richard Bowker

The spectacular Hosukai exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts ended today, and I finally managed to get there. I took bunches of photos, none of which do justice to the originals. I’ll post just a few of them today.

Hokusai’s greatest hit was the series of landscape prints called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Here’s the greatest hit of that greatest hit, “The Great Wave of Kanagawa”:

And here’s “Umezawa in Sagami Province“:

And “Tsukuda Island in Musashi Province“:

And “South Wind, Clear Sky”:

As a special bonus, here is an MFA favorite, Monet’s portrait of his wife in Japanese costume, “La Japonaise”:

The winter of our discontent needs some flowers

Posted on February 21, 2015 by Richard Bowker

The commuter boat from my little town got stuck in the ice in Boston harbor yesterday morning.

Later, parts of the roof collapsed at the grammar school that our kids attended.

Last night, a couple of guys we hired spent two hours in near-zero weather clearing our roof to prevent it from collapsing after the snow and freezing rain that’s coming tonight.

We need to see some flowers from Tom Whelan. Like a New England aster:

And a bouganvillea:

We will ignore all his very fine photos of ice crystals.

Birches at sunrise

Posted on November 27, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Let’s give thanks for birches!

While we’re at it, let’s also give thanks for poetry:

. . . Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Frost wrote the poem “Birches” just about a century ago. How time flies!

Happy Thanksgiving!

A flower for a dreary day

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Richard Bowker

It’s a gloomy day here in New England, and it was a gloomy election on Tuesday, so I thought I’d brighten things up with a photo of a New England aster stolen from Tom Whelan’s Nature Diary:

Images from Costa Rica

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Richard Bowker

My friend Tom Whelan decided to go to Costa Rica and makes us all jealous. Here’s a photo he took there of a hummingbird:

And here’s a waterfall:

And here’s a strange white butterfly:

Go buy some of his photos.

Crocus

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Because it finally feels like spring around here, I thought I’d steal a crocus from Tom Whelan’s Nature Blog:

Who wouldn’t want to see Agatha Christie with her surfboard?

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Richard Bowker

This was why the Internet was invented: photos of famous authors doing sports. Here is Ms. Christie at Waikiki in 1922. Dude!

Some of the photographs are meh: Stephen King throwing out the first pitch at a Red Sox game hardly counts as a sports photograph. The Winslow Homery photo of a young Ernest Hemingway fishing is cute, but that fishing doesn’t qualify as a sport, if you ask me.

But Jack Kerouac scoring a touchdown in high school? Stephen Crane posing with the rest of the Syracuse University baseball team in 1891? Wow!

In honor of Agatha Christie, here are the Beach Boys singing “Little Surfer Girl” live in 1964. Has it really been 50 years?