The Hammock Papers: Ackerman

Showing posts with label Ackerman. Show all posts

02 October 2026

09 August 2025

20 June 2025

William Ackerman, "Conferring with the Moon"

09 February 2025

Half-Tone.

The origin of Windham Hill's great logo ...

The logo was designed by my friend Jay Durgan… he and I were on Skyline Blvd above Palo Alto and Stanford and slightly over onto the western side on Old La Honda Rd. and walking in an open field ringed with redwood trees… Jay looked to the west and saw the sun going down behind the redwood trees and said something like “there’s your logo.” It was inventive in that it was a line drawing that incorporated a “half-tone” in part of the shadow of the trees.”

Thanks, Kurt. You're doing God's work. Inspirational.

Erik Satie and folk fingerpicking ...

I'm looking for help on the name of the typeface they used.

06 November 2023

Artists.

In 1982, George Winston, William Ackerman, and other early Windham Hill artists got together ...

07 October 2023

Eternity.

Volkov, The Old Divide, n/d

AUTUMN

The thistledown's flying, though the winds are all still,

On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,

The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;

Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.

The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,

The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.

The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,

And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,

And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;

Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;

Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

John Clare

06 March 2022

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

30 December 2021

Clarify.

James Ackerman, Professor Emeritus at Havard University, examines how the earliest architectural photographers - operating around the period 1840-65 - determined what constituted a proper depiction of a building, which buildings were chosen to be photographed, and how the documentary character of these photographs related to the intense effort to clarify them as fine art.

22 December 2021

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

30 July 2021

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

25 July 2021

William Ackerman, "Processional"

22 November 2019

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

21 June 2019

Will Ackerman, "Processional"

06 September 2018

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

22 September 2016

William Ackerman, "Last Day at the Beach"

BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."