The Hammock Papers: Courbet

Showing posts with label Courbet. Show all posts

21 July 2026

Quest.

Courbet, Self-Portrait with Black Dog, 1844

I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.

Gustave Courbet

10 June 2026

Happy Birthday, Gustave Courbet

Courbet, Cedar Tree at Hauteville, 1868

I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.

Gustave Courbet, born on this day in 1819

10 December 2025

Quest.

I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.

Gustave Courbet

10 June 2025

Happy Birthday, Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait, 1849

I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.

Gustave Courbet, born on this day in 1819

24 April 2025

Intense.

Courbet, Self-Portrait with Dog, 1844

I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.

Gustave Courbet

20 June 2024

Now.

Courbet, Girl in a Hammock, 1844

NOW THAT the SUMMER's HERE

In slow motion, I'm reborn

I need a week to mow the lawn

I eat dinner with my flip-flops on

Now that the summer's here

With my chores, I only flirt

Hung in my hammock reading Kurt

Struggling to remain inert

Now that the summer's here

Now that the summer is here

I laze all day, my work can wait

And I behave like a firefly

And oscillate with my mate

I can spare some wherewithal

Listening to Ahmad Jamal

"Poinciana" says it all

Now that the summer's here

One thing is crystal clear

I won't be going anywhere

Except my Adirondack chair

Now that the summer's here

Michael Franks

10 June 2024

Happy Birthday, Courbet

Courbet, View of Ornans, 1853

Gustave Courbet was born on this day in 1819.

10 June 2023

Led Zeppelin (sort of), "Black Dog"

For Courbet's buddy ...

Happy Birthday, Courbet

Courbet, Courbet with a Black Dog, 1942

Gustave Courbet, born on this day in 1819.

16 March 2023

Quest.

Courbet, The Wave, 1870

I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.

Gustave Courbet

10 June 2021

Happy Birthday, Courbet

Courbet, Self-Portrait with Pipe, 1849

Gustave Courbet was born on this day in 1819.

I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, maintain that art is completely individual, and that the talent of each artist is but the result of his own inspiration and his own study of past tradition. The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found, it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.

Gustave Courbet

Courbet, The Seaside at Palavas, 1854

10 June 2020

Happy Birthday, Courbet

Courbet, The Artist's Studio, 1855

Gustave Courbet was born on this date in 1819.

I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times & intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients. I have studied the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I no longer wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my intention to attain the trivial goal of "art for art's sake". No! I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality.

Gustave Courbet

08 September 2018

Evolve.

Courbet, La Bacchante, 1846

An artist has to evolve some standards, because nobody's asking you to do this, and what you think of as your muse is really a couple of dozen violent bacchantes.

Jim Harrison

12 November 2016

Rejoice.

Courbet, Branch of Apple Blossoms, 1873

So it comes to pass that most people don't know at all how beautiful the world is and how much splendor is revealed in the smallest things, in some flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, or a birch leaf. Grown-up people, who have business and cares and worry about a lot of trifles, gradually lose their eye entirely for these riches which children, when they are alert and good children, soon notice and love with all their hearts. And yet the finest thing would be if all people would always stay in this relationship like alert and good children, with simple and reverent feelings, and if they would not lose the power to rejoice as deeply in a birch leaf or in the feather of a peacock or the pinion of a hooded crow as in a great mountain range or a splendid palace. The small is as little small as the big is big. There is a great and eternal beauty throughout the world, and it is scattered justly over the small things and the big; for in the important and essential, there is no injustice on the whole earth.

Rainer Maria Rilke

10 June 2016

Happy birthday, Courbet.

Courbet, Self-portrait with a Black Dog, 1844

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."

DAN CAMPBELL