Robbie Burns and Barbie

Robbie Burns and Barbie

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye worthy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

January 25th marks Robbie Burns 256th birthday.  Of course, Barbie will be attending a traditional dinner complete with haggis, neeps, tatties and cranachan.  Disgusting to describe, haggis is actually quite tasty and the ceremony surrounding its arrival in the dining room is charming, albeit a little loud.

A Burns dinner is a carefully choreographed affair necessitating a master of ceremonies and a deep tolerance for poetry and speeches but tradition must be observed.

Barbie is dressed for the occasion in a reasonable facsimile of a kilt and tartan sash.   A real kilt takes meters of plaid and can cost hundreds of dollars.  The full regalia includes wool socks, ghillies, a sporran and a sgian-dubh (a ceremonial knife). 

Barbie isn't really a Scot but she is a chameleon, isn't she?  The truth is she hates to miss a party and this as good a reason as any to have one.

Barbie's Getting Married in the Morning!

Barbie's Getting Married in the Morning!

Wedding Breakfast, whatever happened to the idea of the wedding breakfast?  Everyone went to church in the morning after fasting all night, a ceremony during mass and then breakfast.  What a great concept!  Mimosas to drink, lots of carbs to help offset the alcohol, everyone goes home by lunch and the wedding couple catch the stagecoach to someplace up-to-date like Kansas City.

Lots of time for speechifying in that schedule.

And ranting.

Cinched-in Waist Barbie

 

Cinched-in Waist Barbie

Tight Sash 

                                                                                       

I went to the Jack Bush exhibit at the National Art Gallery yesterday.  His abstracts are large with splashes of colour, often just three or four on a neutral background.  He worked for many years as a commercial artist and there was a display of some of the magazine illustrations, advertisements and children's books.  I was surprised to find I recognized his style.  He must have drawn lots of those Little Golden books we read when we were little.

Some of the works on display were not interesting to me.  For example, there is a group of flower paintings; I did not like his colours, or ideas even, at all.  But there was a painting he called Bonnet.  Wow!  And there was a series inspired by a woman's dress with a cinched-in waist that he had seen in a shop window.  The one above, because of the colour choices, looks like a hallway diminishing to a vanishing point.  One, I swear, was Barbie's torso with her back to the viewer and her arms raised.  And in the next one I understood his genius.  It was the same theme but he restricted the view still further so you could not see one side of the torso.  Double wow!

For contrast we also looked at some Escher prints.  At the same time that Jack Bush was creating his large scale abstracts, Escher was working on small prints with meticulous attention to detail and with thousand of tiny lines in the etchings.

We left the National Art Gallery when my brain was full.  Barbie's was as empty as always.