Cartier Mystery Clocks

I got to see Cartier and America at the Legion of Honor (again).

The most interesting objects there (in my opinion) were the Cartier "mystery clocks." You cannot tell very well from the picture, but everything around the hands is crystal - invisible crystal. This astounded me when I first saw it. I took a closer look, "Yup; it's clear." I really had no clue how it works. Apparently they had it written somewhere in the exhibition. That surprised me; I thought it was some long-kept secret technology. I guess not. The way it works is that the center part (the rock crystal) is cut in half, and the middle part is taken out, just enough to make room for two discs, about the size of the hands. These discs are what hold the hands. They also connect the hands to the base of the clock (or where ever the clock mechanism is).

Apart from having the "invisible" clock mechanism, these clocks have some other attributes. How about the gold and diamond patterns that form the frame? Do you like a clock worth over $1,000,000? Well, who wouldn't?

Antiques - Violano Virtuoso

OK... So you might be thinking, "Antiques? How is that art? That's just old stuff..."

Nope. I mean, some antique stores are filled with useless old stuff that a granny turned in for some cash, but some antique stores are really something special.

We came across one of these good stores in Solvang. It was a huge store with all different kinds of things. They had a See's Candies scale, several pianos, a foot organ (you have to push two pedals for sound), lots of older kinds of music boxes, and various small collectibles.

But the object that fascinated me the most was something called a Violano Virtuoso. It's basically a piano and a violin that play themselves put together in one box. True, it doesn't sound too impressive considering all of the advances we've made in recording/listening to music in the past several decades. If you consider that this was made in the 1920's and that it still works, it's pretty cool. Of course, it can't play very many pieces, and it might be just a "little bit" bigger than a CD player (it's "only" about 6 feet tall).

This is a picture of part of a Violano Virtuoso.

It must have been a very creative person that came up with this idea. And how talented the people who made it were. It took them 13 years to finish the project, and it was well worth it.

Of course, these are no longer for practical uses; they have become a true collctible. Some estimate there to be about 700-800 left out of several thousand.

Jean as a Huntsman by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I had the great fortune of seeing an exhibition of Renoir paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week. Out of the paintings there, this was one of my favorites.

The painting, completed in 1910, is of the artist's son, Jean. He was asked about the painting and remembers having to pose for it.

"When I was fifteen years old, I wore a jacket that reminded my father of a hunter, so he had me pose with a gun and with Bob for a hunting dog. The gun was borrowed from one of our farmers."

-Jean Renoir

What I really like about this painting is the fact that you can see the strokes of the paintbrush, but it's not huge strokes that make the whole picture blurry. They don't force you to have to step away from it in order to see the subject.

One of the things you see in many of Renoir's paintings in the background. It's there, and you know the subject is not floating in space, but it is done in a way that forces you to focus on the subject, not what's around it.

Renoir was an impressionist painter, even though later in his life he tried to separate himself from the impressionists. But even when you compare his painting to those of other impressionists, you can clearly see the difference; you don't even have to be very familiar with his art in order to be able to tell if it's Renoir or not. He paints in a way that you can really tell that it's a painting, not a photo. I admire the fact that some people can paint something that looks like a photo, but what's the point? That person didn't leave their mark, their style on it. Renoir found a perfect balance between accurateness and an artist's touch.