Just Above Sunset
Volume 5, Number 10
March 11, 2007

January 30, 2007

 The world as seen from Just Above Sunset -

"Notes on how things seem from out here in Hollywood..."

Tuesday, January 30, 2007 -

Mondrian's Eyes

Maybe the kid from Amersfoort just saw things differently.  That would be Piet Mondrian, born there on March 7, 1872 (as Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Jr.) - a primary school teacher who dabbled in painting - landscapes and windmills, haystacks in a field at dusk and that sort of thing.  But then in 1908 he got involved the theosophical movement of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Blavatsky believed that it was possible to attain "a knowledge of nature more profound than that provided by empirical means." He seems to have taken that seriously.  And after seeing a bit of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso at an exhibition in 1911 in Amsterdam it was off to Paris the next year.  No point in being stuck in some provincial backwater.  It was all abstract after that - geometric shapes and interlocking planes - as in this from 1923 or this from 1930.  What seem to have happened is Mondrian was visiting the Netherlands when World War I broke out and couldn't get back to Paris, and during the war years, stuck in Holland, he further reduced his colors and geometric shapes and formulated what he called his "non-objective Neo-Plastic style." Fame followed.

What he did was almost architectural, so of course there's The Mondrian at 250 East 54th Street in Manhattan, in the middle of the city where he spent the last four years of his life.  And there's the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset out here, but it's a dull building, except for the Skybar up on top.

9000 Sunset Boulevard, negative image

Mondrian saw things others did not - that's what artists do after all. Here's another idea. His eyes sometimes worked in negative, and he would see this ordinary office building at 9000 Sunset Boulevard looking much like this.

The rest of us see it like this.

9000 Sunset Boulevard,

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If you use any of these photos for commercial purposes I assume you'll discuss that with me.

These were shot with a Nikon D70 - using lens (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300mm telephoto, or after 5 June 2006, (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor, 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. They were modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0

The original large-format raw files are available upon request.

[January 30, 2007]

Last updated Saturday, March 10, 2007, 10:30 pm Pacific Time

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 - Alan M. Pavlik

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