My Published Articles for ViewsHound: My Favorite Coffee Table Books and the Juan Luna Paintings

Thursday, January 5, 2017

My Favorite Coffee Table Books and the Juan Luna Paintings

The last couple of months I have posted articles on my ties and caps/hats collection. Today I will discuss some of my favorite Coffee Table Books in my collection. I have more than 70 Coffee books in my collection. The photo above is just part of my collection. Two dozens more of my coffee books are under the coffee table that is not pictured in this blog. Topics of my collection are in art, sculptures and painting, Gardening and Landscaping, Food and Nutrition, Travel, erotic art and photography. My ten favorite coffee books are:

1. Robert Mapplethorpe by Richard Howard and Ingrid Sischy, Bulfinch Press, 1988 ( 210 pages)

2. Erotic Art compiled by Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, Bell Publishing Company, 1968 ( 250 pages)

3. Amorsolo ( Paintings) published by Filipinas Foundation, Inc, First Printing, 1975 ( 315 pages)

4. Japanese Eroticism, Text by Bernard Soulle, Crescent Books, N.Y., 1981 (320 pages)

5. 20th Century Masters of Erotic Art by Bradley Smith, Crown Publisher, 1980 ( 380 pages)

6. Augustin Pajou, Royal Sculpture, by James David Draper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 1998 ( 430 pages)

Marinduque from the Air

7. Marinduque, Heart of the Philippines by Dindo Asuncion, Published by the Provincial Government, 2004 ( 220 pages)

8. The Great Book of French Impressionism by Diane Kelder, Harrison House, NY, 1979 (450 pages)

9. The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, Foreword by David Remnick and Edited by Robert Mankoff, Leventhal Publishers, 2004 (520 pages).

10. American Painting, Introduction by Robert Rosenblum and Text by Donald Goddard, Beaux Arts Edition, NY 1990 ( 530 pages)

I should rotate this photo, but I will not so it is easier to read the titles of the books.

Note: I have two coffee table books authored and published by Macrine's first cousin, Bing Nieva Carrion Buck. I have more than 600 hard books and novels and more than a thousand pocket books. I have donated almost all of my pocket books to Goodwill and Salvation Army. I have more than 50 albums of photographs and 90% of my photos are in the web.

A note about coffee table books: A coffee table book is an oversized, usually hard-covered book whose purpose is for display on a table intended for use in an area in which one entertains guests and from which it can serve to inspire conversation. Subject matter is predominantly non-fiction and pictorial (a photo-book).

Pages consist mainly of photographs and illustrations, accompanied by captions and small blocks of text, as opposed to long prose. Since they are aimed at anyone who might pick up the book for a light read, the analysis inside is often more basic and with less jargon than other books on the subject. Because of this, the term "coffee table book" can be used pejoratively to indicate a superficial approach to the subject.

The late Dr. Teyet Pascual and his Collections of Paintings in his Condo in Makati, Manila

In 2005, I had an opportunity to purchase a coffee Table book of some of Juan Luna paintings collected by my former chemistry classmate, the late Dr. Eleuterio (Teyet) Pascual, Ph.D.( http://www.pressreader.com/philippines/philippine-daily-inquirer/20151101/282127815344995).

At that time he was selling it during our Chemistry Alumni Reunion and 50th Anniversary Party for P5,000. I thought it was expensive so I did not buy the coffee table book( it was about $125 at that time based on the pesos to dollars exchange rate). I am now regretting that I did not purchase the Juan Luna Paintings Coffee Table book. (http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/231631/fabulous-works-by-luna-and-19th-century-masters-repatriated/).

Anyway, here's a short video on the Juan Luna paintings that has never shown to the public.

One of the many well-known paintings of Luna is the La Bulaquena ( the Woman from Bulacan). Below is description of the painting from Wikipedia for your information if you are not Filipino and not familiar with Philippine culture and traditions.

La Bulaqueña, literally "the woman from Bulacan" or "the Bulacan woman", also sometimes referred to as Una Bulaqueña ("a woman from Bulacan"). This is the Spanish title of an 1895 painting by Filipino painter and hero Juan Novicio Luna. Bulacan is a province in the Philippines in Luzon island and its residents are called Bulaqueños, also spelled as Bulakenyos (Bulakenyo for men and Bulakenya for women) in the Filipino language.

This is a "serene portrait", of a Filipino woman wearing a Maria Clara gown, a traditional Filipino dress that is composed of four pieces, namely the camisa, the saya (long skirt), the panuelo (neck cover), and the tapis (knee-length overskirt). The name of the dress is an eponym to Maria Clara, the mestiza heroine of Filipino hero José Rizal's novel Noli Me Tangere. The woman's clothing in the painting is the reason why the masterpiece is alternately referred to as Maria Clara. It is one of the few canvases done by Luna illustrating Filipino culture. The painting is displayed at the National Museum of Fine Arts.

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Thursday, January 5, 2017

My Favorite Coffee Table Books and the Juan Luna Paintings

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