64 x 50 (Score)

The local library has set up a used book store which opened this week. Today I went to check it out and came away with two big scores, a paperback entitled Nevelson Wood Sculptures and a copy of the large-format Promontory Press version of Portraits from North American Indian Life, a collection of photographs by Edward S. Curtis. Pleasant surprises, and basically dirt cheap.

Elaboration: Nevelson is a transcendent, one-of-a-kind artist and one of my inspirations for the wood sculptures I've been doing the last few weeks. And I've been interested in Curtis's work ever since I read Timothy Egan's Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, one of the best books I've read (and written about) this year. Curtis devoted essentially his entire adult life to documenting the lives of Native Americans even as their cultures were being more or less systematically eliminated. His photographs are striking and beautiful and of major historical and artistic importance.

While I was at the library book shop I also found poetry collections by Robert Hass and Wendell Berry. Later on, my grandson's team won their soccer game, my wife and I had a nice dinner out afterward, I'm finishing up on a wood collage that I think will come out well… overall, a pretty sweet day.