Red Raspberries on a Forest Floor, by William Mason Brown
1866, oil on board
Well, y'all, it's fall. It doesn't feel a lot like it here in Cardiganland, but as of tomorrow, it's officially October, baseball is thankfully nearly over, football is cranking into high gear, and pumpkin everything is happening everywhere. So I found an appropriately autumnal painting for Style Imitating Art. William Mason Brown painted mostly still lifes, mostly of fruit, mostly on the forest floor. Charming! Brown was born in Troy, New York, and spent his early life in Newark, New Jersey. He eventually moved to Brooklyn, and there he stayed until his death in 1898. Although the name William Mason Brown might not ring a bell, he was a pretty well known artist during his life and today his small pieces (at most 12 inches wide) can swing $30,000 at auction. Pretty impressive for a guy from the Hudson Valley.
Send me your submissions by the evening of Monday, October 7th. (Jets/Falcons night!) Enjoy!
Sunset at Montmajour by Vincent van Gogh
Oil on canvas, 1888
The world recently learned that there's another painting by Vincent van Gogh floating around, and that's pretty amazing. I love that art can continue appearing even hundreds of years after it has been created. Email your photos of your interpretation to Salazar by the evening of Monday, September 23rd! Have fun, y'all!
I was at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta yesterday for a Dutch masters exhibit, which included Girl with a Pearl Earring. I found a ton of artwork that you may see as inspiration for a future SIA! But most striking (and which I will be kind and not make you use for SIA) is this delightful portrait of Floride Bonneau Calhoun, a South Carolina debutante who was married to the one and only John C. Calhoun, a congressman from my very own South Carolina and vice president to John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Yeah, I googled all that shit. Everyone who walked by this portrait stopped in their tracks, including myself. It's rather unexpected, to say the least, for a historical portrait to be so honest about the less-than-perfect qualities of one's physical attributes.
It's SIA day! Yay! Today's inspiration is Day and Night Electricity by George Rodrigue. Below are the submissions!
First is Vivienne of Thrifted Shift, and I love her top.
Next is Rebekah of From the Mixed-Up Files..., who photoshopped her dog into this painting, which about made me pee my pants.
Here's Jen of Librarian for Life and Style, who used dashes of primary. And an awesome headscarf.
My co-creator, Salazar of 14 Shades of Grey, looks charming as always. She (like everyone else, it seems!) laments the lack of dog in her outfit photo.
But never fear, Ellie is here. Sort of. She helped me take my outfit photos:
God, what a loaf. Anyway, thanks for participating, ladies! Well done!
Happy football season, y'all.
"Will you play sexy librarian with me?"
I've heard this a number of times before. Sometimes jokingly, sometimes seriously. Being a librarian runs the weird spectrum of either being a stuffy, angry old lady with a severe bun and severer glasses to being super-sexy with a half open button down and and a short, super tight pencil skirt. Compare these two images, for example.
Kill me now, please.
I didn't get into librarianship because I was a grump old coot or a sex bomb. People don't (usually) pick their life careers based on how they look or want to look to others. But there's no other profession, I think, that has the level of physical stereotyping that librarianship does. I don't know about you, but when I was young, I never encountered either of the librarians above. My first librarian was a 30something African-American woman with short hair who wore khakis. My second librarian was a grumpy old man, a rarity in the field. I work in a public library now, which is what the average person thinks of when he or she hears "librarian", and my coworkers now run the sheer gamut, though they are mostly women, and a solid 80% of them don't wear pencil skirts or buns.
I've never introduced myself as a librarian: I'm not really officially one until December 16th, and I hate telling people I'm something I'm not, even though most people look at all library employees the same way. We're all librarians, from the pages who shelve the books to the head of HR to the systems department, who may not even know how to work our staff client that handles everything from searching for books to cataloging and patron information (our ILS, for those of us who really are librarians). We're all librarians, even though we're not, and we're crammed into these two stereotypes, even though we're not.
I don't generally blog my outfits as a librarian and how a librarian dresses, but just how I dress on a day to day basis. Most of these outfits are for work, of course, but I also write about what I wear to concerts and weddings. I am a librarian at neither of those things. But aren't we all defined by what we do? When someone says "tell me about yourself" or "who are you", don't you first explain your job? And at heart, I am a librarian. I just wish that didn't mean that I simultaneously dragged "sexy" and "grumpy" behind me like a ball and chain.
For a view of the actual broad range of librarian style, take a look at Amber's Check Us Out linkup from Friday. Screw buns and pencil skirts!
Day and Night Electricity, by George Rodrigue
Oil on canvas, 2013
I was in New Orleans back in 2011, and at one point I rounded a corner and encountered a giant blue dog staring me in the face. You've probably seen the darling Blue Dog before too, though maybe not in as striking a way. It's the end of summer, and I wanted to do something cute. What can I say? Send me your submissions by the end of the day on Monday, September 9th. Have fun!
