Here is my latest piece of jewelry. Filigree flowers necklace and earrings.
Flowers are so beautiful, so delicate, their moment of glory a brief fragile moment in time. The Alchemist took the first pearly drops of dew at dawn and spun molten metal so fine it could be spiders silk, into beautiful delicate filigree flowers. “These flowers will never fade and never wither. They will stay beautiful forever” said The Alchemist.
Every year on the last Monday in May the country honour the military dead, and those that have died in the service of the country.
Memorial day or as it was once called Decoration day is cloudy in origin. It is likely that it had many separate beginnings; each of those towns and every planned or spontaneous gathering of people to honor the war dead in the 1860's tapped into the general human need to honor our dead, each contributed honorably to the growing movement that culminated in General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, giving his official proclamation on May 5th 1868 that Memorial day was to be observed on 30 May. Flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.
The first state to officially recognize the holiday was New York in 1873. By 1890 it was recognized by all of the northern states. The South refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after World War I (when the holiday changed from honoring just those who died fighting in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war). It is now celebrated in almost every State on the last Monday in May (passed by Congress with the National Holiday Act of 1971)
It is not important who was the very first, what is important is that Memorial Day was established. Memorial Day is not about division. It is about reconciliation; it is about coming together to honor those who gave their all.
But really we all know that Memorial day is the perfect time to get out the grill, drink beer and have a big ol parade.
Below is the highlight of the New Britain parade. The men with the fezz driving the liddle cars are called the Shriners and they just make me smile and laugh. Soooo cool.
Jim Denevan is an artist in pursuit of impermanence. Fleeting moments of perfection are what he does best using the medium of temporary land art. Sand temporarily washed smooth by the waves or the frozen surface of an ice lake in Siberia are the natural canvases that Jim uses to make temporary drawing on. Lines scratched in the sand, or earth or gouged in ice are a temporary record of mans interaction with the planet, all eventually erased by waves and weather. These massive geometric patterns carved into the earth are ever vulnerable to the elements and often the only way to record them is by photographs. Sometimes the only way to fully comprehend their scale is by air.
SAND
Denevan then walks for miles, leading his chosen drawing stick in a dance performed to the music of the ocean and the spirit of the place. Denevan says, "My movement has a present. And then where I want to be, that's the future. ... Then the line has a past."
"When I'm doing a drawing, I'm personifying the place that is empty. A place that is unmarked."
-- Jim Denevan
On May 2009, Jim created what was billed as the largest drawing in the world as wide as Manhattan on the vast stretches of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The 48-year old sand artist spent two weeks drawing on the beds of the dried Salt Lake in May producing this, his largest work of art.
The in March of 2010, Jim Denevan and his crew created a large scale artwork that was a spiral of circles, along a Fibonacci curve, growing from an origin of 18″ to several miles in diameter on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal, Siberia.
