BEAUTTY: Art--Dahren Davey

I can't help but love Dahren Davey's wonderfully hued portraits ... and his freedom with color!

You can buy original pieces here:
https://dahrendavey.bigcartel.com/
But even better, you can buy tee shirts at:
https://dahrendavey.teemill.com/

I am getting this one, below. I love it!

BEAUTY: Painting--Mittie Cuetara

East Coast-born artist Mittie Cuetara relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area years ago and now paints scenes of streets, houses, and parks in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley ... views and images of cityscapes and landscapes I know so well! Regular readers know how much I love a painter who really uses paint in a visceral way, creating Impressionistic feelings with globs and swirls of glorious color, and Cuetara does that in a loose, free, masterful way. So beautiful!

http://mcueta.otherpeoplespixels.com/home.html

R.I.P.

It often comes in threes...

https://www.dollyparton.com/

https://www.timcurry.co.uk/

https://yayoi-kusama.jp/

BEAUTY: Painting--Aron Wiesenfeld

I have been appreciating the unsettling work of painter Aron Wiesenfeld for some time now and can't believe I have not shared him with you yet. I love his eerie narratives of a single person in a lone desolate spot, probably in some form of peril ... ... his unease with tunnels and what they mean psychologically is a recurring motif, as is the imagery of people (often adolescents or children) in snow wearing clothing clearly not meant for cold weather. They work like film stills, asking more questions about the spooky circumstances we are seeing than they answer.

Top to bottom: The Wedding Party; Turning Back, Tunnel; Transfer; Train Tunnel; Shell; The Settlers; The River; The Return; The Oathbreakers; Night Grove; Limbo; The Lesson; Hackers; The Garden; Entrance; Border: A Late Arrival

https://aronwiesenfeld.com/

Late Summer/Early Fall Thoughts by Ivy Kowalis

By Ivy Kowalis.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CicxSzGLe-M/

"Lizard" by Pedro Arizpe

When I saw this incredible graphic story by Pedro Arizpe of Portsherry, I flashed on my own childhood. I was born in New York state and went to school there through second grade. The curriculum at that time in New York valued reading and writing skills over math, which was planned to come later. But when we moved to Florida, the state approached math skills first, and I was totally lost. Having no foundation, teachers would just explain the same thing to me over and over, sometimes raising their voices as though yelling at someone who speaks a foreign language. No one bothered to assess why I could not grasp what they were trying to drill into my head. There was no foundational learning for me, I just had to jump in and pretend that, yes, of course, the answer is lizard, when what I was really screaming in my head was "How did you get LIZARD?" When you are a child, you don't know what you don't know. As an adult looking back on this, I see it clearly and I would love to go back in time and tell the entire school administration, "What the eff are you thinking? You call this is teaching? This is just creating trauma and a crisis of self-confidence."

What was most galling was that my New York-taught reading comprehension and writing skills were a few grade levels ahead of where they were in Florida and the other students in my class were embarrassingly bad at reading or writing, but no one seemed to care about that. To me, the students were bad, but for the teachers, they were where they should have been given the curriculum. Teachers saw I scored consistently high in English, but they weren't looking to those metrics for any measure of my general intelligence or understanding. As far as they were concerned, I was a sorry, slow, and maybe even special-needs learner, which of course was not the case at all. But I was treated like I was. So math class--and any extra "tutoring" I got--always ended up looking exactly like the story below...

Pedro, thank you so much for showing this so explicitly and giving it a name: INSTITUTIONAL NEGLIGENCE.

https://portsherry.com/comic/lizard/