Blurred images and hazy landscapes dominate “Beauty in Doubt,” a Ruffin Gallery exhibit featuring the unconventional oil paintings of Tom Burckhardt , who abandons the canvas for cast-plastic backgrounds. Burckhardt’s new work underscores the doubt present in the things we see around us and the things we attempt to construct.
Even in a time when digital photography and modern sculpture tend to eclipse more traditional art forms, for Burckhardt, the evolution of painting has a lot of room for growth . In fact, painting is more important than ever to illuminate the absurd nature of how we live today.
The most immediately striking thing in viewing his work is the proclamation of his paint, which Burckhardt achieves by using bright gradients and bold colors. In certain Burckhardt paintings the effect creates a sense of exaggerated reality. Houses are not green, faces are not red, patterns do not suddenly appear, but maybe, if the viewer squints hard enough or looks long enough, these things might eventually emerge.
In works such as American (2011) and Rakish (2011) , Burckhardt pursues the concept of fragmented reality . The face only half exists , to the point where the viewer often is not sure what Burckhardt is trying to display. The doubt comes back, not to mock the modern notion of painting, but rather to play with it, to display its flexibility.
In addition to their common theme of doubt, Burckhardt’s paintings also use pareidolia. Pareidolia, seen in Rorschach’s inkblot tests, describes the psychological situation in which people perceive vague or random images as significant. In Burckhardt’s pieces, faces appear out of patterns, colors and shapes. An intriguing aspect of these works is this exact paralleling of patterns and colors. By default, our minds attempt to work out some significance in the way these elements are put together. We see faces and houses where objectively there are only green lines and black triangles. Burckhardt has described the process of realizing these images as though “they grow into individuals, as paintings, by growing into individuals as representations of faces.”
Artists have not completely rejected cast-plastic and cardboard, but these types of mixed media are frequently considered to be a lower-class form of art. Certain factions of the artistic world praise such works, but many critics bemoan this alleged “fall” of the artistic form from its historic pedestal. Burckhardt focuses on the middle ground between these two attitudes. Burckhardt has seen the life cycle of painting occur many times over and he seems to show amusement in the face of its repeated death and resurrection. The hazy distortions of Burckhardt’s paintings seem to dismiss the existence of previous works of the more academic artistic canon.
Conceptual quibbling aside, Burckhardt’s interplay of colors and patterns is beautiful in its own right. Notions of doubt and historical ambivalence, however, underlie any sense of simplicity in his pieces. They are by no means immediately attractive, but their meditations on absurdity, doubt and the artificiality of conventional beauty make them fascinating fodder for both thought and sight.
2012年1月30日星期一
2011年10月26日星期三
German Forgers Face Prison for Scam Worth More Than $22 Million
An art forger and his three accomplices, who together made more than 16 million euros ($22 million) by selling oil paintings they falsely attributed to famous artists, today face sentencing in a Cologne court.
Wolfgang Beltracchi, 60, confessed to painting 14 works that he sold as masterpieces by Max Ernst, Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk, Andre Derain, Fernand Leger and Kees van Dongen. His wife, Helene Beltracchi, her sister and a fourth associate confessed to bringing the works to the art market.
Dealers and collectors say confidence in the German art market has been shaken by the forgery scandal, described as the biggest ever in Germany, as art historians, museums and auction houses were duped by the scam.
“The whole thing is quite terrible,” said Christoph Graf Douglas, a Frankfurt-based independent art dealer and consultant to collectors. “It has completely undermined confidence in the market. Not only were criminals at work, there was also some shoddy research. People have bought the idea that experts can detect forgeries, and this shows that is not the case.”
Among the forgers’ victims was the U.S. actor Steve Martin, according to a May report in Spiegel magazine. Martin paid 700,000 euros for a painting falsely attributed to Heinrich Campendonk, called “Landscape With Horses,” from Galerie Cazeau- Beraudiere in Paris in 2004, according to Spiegel.
It was then sold by Christie’s in 2006 for 500,000 euros to a Swiss businesswoman, the magazine said. Christie’s spokesman Matthew Paton declined to comment on the sale.
‘Highly Skilled’
The Cologne auction house Kunsthaus Lempertz said in January that it had sold five of the forgers’ works. The authenticity of all of them “was confirmed by leading experts and some of them were subsequently shown in a number of museums.”
“My colleagues and I, like the whole art market, were deceived by the highly skilled and professional operations of the forgers,” Lempertz chief executive Henrik Hanstein wrote in a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in July.
The group not only produced and sold the paintings, it also invented an entire provenance for them, claiming the art came from either the “Jaegers Collection” or the “Wilhelm Knops Collection,” according to the Cologne court.
They said Werner Jaegers was Helene Beltracchi’s grandfather, while Knops was the grandfather of another associate, named as Otto S.-K. in court documents.
“People should have asked: Who is Jaegers?” said Douglas, a former managing director of Sotheby’s in Germany. “When did he live? Do we have a photo? How can there be a collector no one has heard of?”
In return for the confessions, prosecutors agreed to request prison sentences of no longer than six years for Beltracchi, a maximum of four years for his wife, five years for Otto S.-K. and a maximum suspended sentence of two years for the wife’s sister, Jeanette S., who is only implicated in three cases, according to the Cologne regional court.
The Beltracchi couple agreed to pay 980,000 Swiss francs ($1.12 million) to the court.
Christian Rode, Beltracchi’s lawyer, said in a final statement that his client wasn’t motivated by profit alone. The master forger, who has unruly gray locks and once lived in a houseboat, took great pride in his work, he said.
He felt a close connection with the artists whose oeuvres he sought to “complete,” calling his paintings the works that the artists should themselves have produced, but never got around to, Rode said. Beltracchi told the court that his pictures were sometimes almost “too good” for the artist, because he had the benefit of hindsight and knew how the artist and the history of art developed.
Rode said the trial exposed many of the shadier aspects of the art market.
“We have heard a lot about experts driven by interests, who don’t only provide expertise but also buy, mediate and receive commission,” he said in his concluding statement. “We have heard about duty-free entrepots in Geneva and payments from Swiss accounts to Swiss accounts.”
As many as 41 more paintings not included in the trial because of statutes of limitations may also be forgeries by Beltracchi. The scandal has spawned a number of civil cases against dealers and auction houses, as well as the criminal trial.
The forgers were only caught out when one buyer became suspicious and sent his picture to be examined by scientists. They discovered a paint color that had not existed at the time the work was supposed to have been produced.
“We want to know the whole truth,” said Douglas. “How many paintings did they forge? How many more are still on the market? The only way to combat the lack of confidence is with some detailed work.”
Wolfgang Beltracchi, 60, confessed to painting 14 works that he sold as masterpieces by Max Ernst, Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk, Andre Derain, Fernand Leger and Kees van Dongen. His wife, Helene Beltracchi, her sister and a fourth associate confessed to bringing the works to the art market.
Dealers and collectors say confidence in the German art market has been shaken by the forgery scandal, described as the biggest ever in Germany, as art historians, museums and auction houses were duped by the scam.
“The whole thing is quite terrible,” said Christoph Graf Douglas, a Frankfurt-based independent art dealer and consultant to collectors. “It has completely undermined confidence in the market. Not only were criminals at work, there was also some shoddy research. People have bought the idea that experts can detect forgeries, and this shows that is not the case.”
Among the forgers’ victims was the U.S. actor Steve Martin, according to a May report in Spiegel magazine. Martin paid 700,000 euros for a painting falsely attributed to Heinrich Campendonk, called “Landscape With Horses,” from Galerie Cazeau- Beraudiere in Paris in 2004, according to Spiegel.
It was then sold by Christie’s in 2006 for 500,000 euros to a Swiss businesswoman, the magazine said. Christie’s spokesman Matthew Paton declined to comment on the sale.
‘Highly Skilled’
The Cologne auction house Kunsthaus Lempertz said in January that it had sold five of the forgers’ works. The authenticity of all of them “was confirmed by leading experts and some of them were subsequently shown in a number of museums.”
“My colleagues and I, like the whole art market, were deceived by the highly skilled and professional operations of the forgers,” Lempertz chief executive Henrik Hanstein wrote in a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in July.
The group not only produced and sold the paintings, it also invented an entire provenance for them, claiming the art came from either the “Jaegers Collection” or the “Wilhelm Knops Collection,” according to the Cologne court.
They said Werner Jaegers was Helene Beltracchi’s grandfather, while Knops was the grandfather of another associate, named as Otto S.-K. in court documents.
“People should have asked: Who is Jaegers?” said Douglas, a former managing director of Sotheby’s in Germany. “When did he live? Do we have a photo? How can there be a collector no one has heard of?”
In return for the confessions, prosecutors agreed to request prison sentences of no longer than six years for Beltracchi, a maximum of four years for his wife, five years for Otto S.-K. and a maximum suspended sentence of two years for the wife’s sister, Jeanette S., who is only implicated in three cases, according to the Cologne regional court.
The Beltracchi couple agreed to pay 980,000 Swiss francs ($1.12 million) to the court.
Christian Rode, Beltracchi’s lawyer, said in a final statement that his client wasn’t motivated by profit alone. The master forger, who has unruly gray locks and once lived in a houseboat, took great pride in his work, he said.
He felt a close connection with the artists whose oeuvres he sought to “complete,” calling his paintings the works that the artists should themselves have produced, but never got around to, Rode said. Beltracchi told the court that his pictures were sometimes almost “too good” for the artist, because he had the benefit of hindsight and knew how the artist and the history of art developed.
Rode said the trial exposed many of the shadier aspects of the art market.
“We have heard a lot about experts driven by interests, who don’t only provide expertise but also buy, mediate and receive commission,” he said in his concluding statement. “We have heard about duty-free entrepots in Geneva and payments from Swiss accounts to Swiss accounts.”
As many as 41 more paintings not included in the trial because of statutes of limitations may also be forgeries by Beltracchi. The scandal has spawned a number of civil cases against dealers and auction houses, as well as the criminal trial.
The forgers were only caught out when one buyer became suspicious and sent his picture to be examined by scientists. They discovered a paint color that had not existed at the time the work was supposed to have been produced.
“We want to know the whole truth,” said Douglas. “How many paintings did they forge? How many more are still on the market? The only way to combat the lack of confidence is with some detailed work.”
2011年10月12日星期三
The Visceral Surge of Spanish Art
The plummy walls of the San Diego Museum of Art give the exhibition they surround, From El Greco to Dalí, a velvet jewel-case warmth. If the rooms were full of Goya’s ferocious Caprichos or Disasters of War, or Miró’s baleful work of the 1930s, or Picasso’s unforgiving restlessness, well, then, all that warmth would fast fly out the ventilation ducts. But it’s not that sort of show.
The pictures in From El Greco to Dalí, instructive, historically balanced, and occasionally exciting, belong to Pérez Simón, a Spanish-Mexican businessman born in Asturias who began collecting only 20 years ago, so the collection’s limitations have been determined by market availability. He has a great passion for the art of his homeland, however, and the things on view, while sampling a few familiar masters, fill lacunae in our knowledge of Spanish art. Mr. Simón has been especially acquisitive of works by another Valencia native, Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923), a painter virtually unknown here, and his general strategy has been to buy stuff that represents the progress of Spanish art from 15th-century panels to 17th-century Mannerist painting up to the formal inventions of the 20th Century.
To judge by what’s on view, after Goya’s prolific, all-mastering expansiveness of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Spanish painting — compared to what was happening during the same period in the France of Impressionism and Symbolism — seemed to lose its nerve. It didn’t find new excitements until Picasso, the sculptor Julio González, and Miró came along. The late 19th Century in Spain looks a lot like the same period in Italy, when a group called the Macchiaioli (I’d loosely translate that as “daubers” or “mark makers:” “macchia” means stain, spot, mark) treated indigenous Italian subjects with sketchy, vaguely impressionistic technique. From El Greco to Dalí, like Macchiaioli painting, is top heavy with women and anecdote — women sewing, women milking cows, women gossiping at village fountains, and one swell duchess mounted on a horse (both costumed like parade floats).
The Spanish parallel to Macchiaioli painting was costumbrismo, which represented regionalist customs and scenes of daily life in a quickened but dense impasto. Sorolla made many pictures in the style, though he sometimes inflated the ethnographic intimacy of costumbrismo into the monumentality of Afternoon Sun, where countrymen use three pair of oxen to tow a fishing boat to shore. Even in the small oil study included in the exhibition, you can see how Sorolla relished stormy sea spray and ribbons of ocean current. Much of his output looks to me like a mash-up of Manet, Degas, Boudin, and Cassatt. He’s a deft and enthusiastic colorist who is easy on the eye and easy to like. You sigh with affection before his pictures, you don’t gasp with surprise or astonishment or drop-dead delight. He’s also an example of a historical turnabout: you see in his brushwork something of Manet’s inflammatory handling, though Manet was himself critically shaped by Velázquez, Ribera, and Goya.
Spanish painting sometimes feels like raw experience just barely mediated by an artist’s touch. I visited the Prado for the first time last year, and when I walked into the room containing Goya’s The Third of May 1808, I felt physically shoved around, first by its dimensions (106 x 137 inches), which no book reproduction had prepared me for, but mostly by the brutality and merciless candor of Goya’s depiction of the firing squad execution of rebels who resisted French occupation. (Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian comes straight out of Goya’s picture.) It reminded me that the most memorable pictures often entail misbehavior, whether in the use of formal resources or in the treatment of subject matter. That said, Goya also was a court painter who made elegant, telling portraits, one example of which — Doña María Teresa de Vallabriga y Rozas — appears in the exhibition.
One of the finest things here is also one of the smallest, El Greco’s Head of Christ. The Greek effectively became a Spanish artist because he spent 30 years of his career shuttling between Toledo and Madrid. Born in Crete, El Greco began as an icon painter, and the head from Simón’s collection has the stark presence of icon art, kneaded by the devotional emotionalism El Greco absorbed from Tintoretto during his years in Italy and gently stretched by his own signature manner. His Redeemer stares heavenward with stunned, porcelain eyes, apparently yearning without hope.
Another great Mannerist painter, Jusepe de Ribera, reversing El Greco’s career trajectory, was born in Valencia province in 1591 but around 1608 left for Naples and made his life in Italy. He started as a Caravaggista, much indebted to the florid carnality and canted overhead light of Caravaggio. His 1648 Saint Jerome, however, shows off his individuated, free-standing manner. His hermit is so physically diminished that it’s hard to distinguish Jerome’s wrinkles and folds of flesh from body hair. His grubby, emaciated hands grasp close to his breast the traditional cross and skull. It’s a portrait of piety in extremis. Like El Greco’s Christ, Jerome looks yonder but without much expectation. Half his face gleams, the other half shrivels into darkness.
This show made me realize that I’ll never like Ribera’s near-contemporary Bartolomé Murillo. The misted contours of his saints and angels and putti and clouds and sheep and all the rest suggest the fluid harmonics of Andrea del Sarto, and, like him, he’s Spain’s equivalent to what Vasari called del Sarto, “the perfect painter.” For me, though, his perfection is soporific. And his most notable follower, Alonso Miguel de Tovar, carried on the tradition in The Divine Shepherdess, where a peaches-and-cream Virgin Mary cozies up to sheep with flowers in their mouths. Two of the bouncy beasts, jaws locked down on roses, stare suspiciously forward as if daring us to giggle.
The secular pictures in the exhibition carry interesting information. An anonymous bullfighting picture from the 1650s doesn’t look nearly as theatrical and organized as the corrida has come to live in our imagination. Groups of spectators, students, and soldiers are neatly squared off, and action is scattered about the ring — toreadors, picadors, a bull and wounded horse, random participants brandishing swords, picks, and capes, plus a gaggle of priests (to administer last rites). Even when it’s far from religious fervor and social bloodletting, Spanish painting carries a visceral surge. The fiery flower pictures of Bartolomé Pérez, for instance, are among the surprises in the exhibition. His razor-lipped tulip blooms look like instruments of predation, and the arrangements suggest the randy turbulence of the mythic figures painted on the urns.
The pictures in From El Greco to Dalí, instructive, historically balanced, and occasionally exciting, belong to Pérez Simón, a Spanish-Mexican businessman born in Asturias who began collecting only 20 years ago, so the collection’s limitations have been determined by market availability. He has a great passion for the art of his homeland, however, and the things on view, while sampling a few familiar masters, fill lacunae in our knowledge of Spanish art. Mr. Simón has been especially acquisitive of works by another Valencia native, Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923), a painter virtually unknown here, and his general strategy has been to buy stuff that represents the progress of Spanish art from 15th-century panels to 17th-century Mannerist painting up to the formal inventions of the 20th Century.
To judge by what’s on view, after Goya’s prolific, all-mastering expansiveness of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Spanish painting — compared to what was happening during the same period in the France of Impressionism and Symbolism — seemed to lose its nerve. It didn’t find new excitements until Picasso, the sculptor Julio González, and Miró came along. The late 19th Century in Spain looks a lot like the same period in Italy, when a group called the Macchiaioli (I’d loosely translate that as “daubers” or “mark makers:” “macchia” means stain, spot, mark) treated indigenous Italian subjects with sketchy, vaguely impressionistic technique. From El Greco to Dalí, like Macchiaioli painting, is top heavy with women and anecdote — women sewing, women milking cows, women gossiping at village fountains, and one swell duchess mounted on a horse (both costumed like parade floats).
The Spanish parallel to Macchiaioli painting was costumbrismo, which represented regionalist customs and scenes of daily life in a quickened but dense impasto. Sorolla made many pictures in the style, though he sometimes inflated the ethnographic intimacy of costumbrismo into the monumentality of Afternoon Sun, where countrymen use three pair of oxen to tow a fishing boat to shore. Even in the small oil study included in the exhibition, you can see how Sorolla relished stormy sea spray and ribbons of ocean current. Much of his output looks to me like a mash-up of Manet, Degas, Boudin, and Cassatt. He’s a deft and enthusiastic colorist who is easy on the eye and easy to like. You sigh with affection before his pictures, you don’t gasp with surprise or astonishment or drop-dead delight. He’s also an example of a historical turnabout: you see in his brushwork something of Manet’s inflammatory handling, though Manet was himself critically shaped by Velázquez, Ribera, and Goya.
Spanish painting sometimes feels like raw experience just barely mediated by an artist’s touch. I visited the Prado for the first time last year, and when I walked into the room containing Goya’s The Third of May 1808, I felt physically shoved around, first by its dimensions (106 x 137 inches), which no book reproduction had prepared me for, but mostly by the brutality and merciless candor of Goya’s depiction of the firing squad execution of rebels who resisted French occupation. (Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian comes straight out of Goya’s picture.) It reminded me that the most memorable pictures often entail misbehavior, whether in the use of formal resources or in the treatment of subject matter. That said, Goya also was a court painter who made elegant, telling portraits, one example of which — Doña María Teresa de Vallabriga y Rozas — appears in the exhibition.
One of the finest things here is also one of the smallest, El Greco’s Head of Christ. The Greek effectively became a Spanish artist because he spent 30 years of his career shuttling between Toledo and Madrid. Born in Crete, El Greco began as an icon painter, and the head from Simón’s collection has the stark presence of icon art, kneaded by the devotional emotionalism El Greco absorbed from Tintoretto during his years in Italy and gently stretched by his own signature manner. His Redeemer stares heavenward with stunned, porcelain eyes, apparently yearning without hope.
Another great Mannerist painter, Jusepe de Ribera, reversing El Greco’s career trajectory, was born in Valencia province in 1591 but around 1608 left for Naples and made his life in Italy. He started as a Caravaggista, much indebted to the florid carnality and canted overhead light of Caravaggio. His 1648 Saint Jerome, however, shows off his individuated, free-standing manner. His hermit is so physically diminished that it’s hard to distinguish Jerome’s wrinkles and folds of flesh from body hair. His grubby, emaciated hands grasp close to his breast the traditional cross and skull. It’s a portrait of piety in extremis. Like El Greco’s Christ, Jerome looks yonder but without much expectation. Half his face gleams, the other half shrivels into darkness.
This show made me realize that I’ll never like Ribera’s near-contemporary Bartolomé Murillo. The misted contours of his saints and angels and putti and clouds and sheep and all the rest suggest the fluid harmonics of Andrea del Sarto, and, like him, he’s Spain’s equivalent to what Vasari called del Sarto, “the perfect painter.” For me, though, his perfection is soporific. And his most notable follower, Alonso Miguel de Tovar, carried on the tradition in The Divine Shepherdess, where a peaches-and-cream Virgin Mary cozies up to sheep with flowers in their mouths. Two of the bouncy beasts, jaws locked down on roses, stare suspiciously forward as if daring us to giggle.
The secular pictures in the exhibition carry interesting information. An anonymous bullfighting picture from the 1650s doesn’t look nearly as theatrical and organized as the corrida has come to live in our imagination. Groups of spectators, students, and soldiers are neatly squared off, and action is scattered about the ring — toreadors, picadors, a bull and wounded horse, random participants brandishing swords, picks, and capes, plus a gaggle of priests (to administer last rites). Even when it’s far from religious fervor and social bloodletting, Spanish painting carries a visceral surge. The fiery flower pictures of Bartolomé Pérez, for instance, are among the surprises in the exhibition. His razor-lipped tulip blooms look like instruments of predation, and the arrangements suggest the randy turbulence of the mythic figures painted on the urns.
2011年9月25日星期日
Boulder's Goss Grove neighborhood paints a pavement mural
Butterflies, dragonflies, crystals and a pink Lotus flower took shape today at the intersection of 19th and Grove streets, forming a compass to mark the Goss Grove neighborhood as Boulder's geographic center.
The Goss Grove neighborhood is the first, under a new Boulder permit system approved in the spring, to paint a permanent mural on the road. The city piloted the “paint the pavement” program two years ago in the Martin Acres neighborhood, after a resident came up with the idea for a neighborhood mural.
Jerrie Hurd, Goss Grove Neighborhood Association chairwoman, said she wanted a project that would bring the neighborhood together — college students, families and retirees.
“There's a buy-in for pride in the neighborhood,” she said.
The mural was designed by resident and oil painting artist Jan Burch. She said the lotus and crystals represent the Dushanbe Teahouse and Naropa, which border the neighborhood. Butterflies are common, she said, while the neighborhood also is visited by “a million dragonflies.”
The colors are bright and playful — yellow, orange, blue, lavender, pink and green. Most of the paint, mainly street paint and some patio paint, and the materials were donated. Donors included Colorado Paint, McGuckin Hardware, Rocky Mountain Blueprint and Izze.
The neighborhood chipped in to cover unexpected expenses, including extra paint.
Neighbors and the occasional tourist stopped by throughout the day to watch the progress. Erik Lasko, who moved to Boulder a few days ago, was going to buy groceries when he saw the mural and agreed to help paint.
“It looks like a really cool design,” he said.
Eithne Mulligan, 7, and her brother Graham, 6, tackled the orange butterfly wings. They live about three houses away from “the center of Boulder,” Eithne said.
“It's really awesome,” she said as she surveyed her work.
Another volunteer painter was Deb Crowell, who ended up with blue paint streaks on her face and blue covered hands after working into the early afternoon. She said she bailed on a camping trip because she didn't want to miss it.
“I wanted to be a part of this,” she said. “It's a cool neighborhood with a lot of diversity. We've all worked hard to make it what it is.”
The neighborhood group plans to touch up the painting once a year.
The application process for a neighborhood street painting is set up much like that of a neighborhood block party. Neighbor have to sign off on closing down the street for the project and submit a draft design for the Boulder Arts Commission to review.
There is no charge for the permit, but residents are responsible for renting street barricades to block traffic.
Boulder Green Streets sponsored the Goss Grove project and helped the neighborhood with the permit process.
The Goss Grove neighborhood is the first, under a new Boulder permit system approved in the spring, to paint a permanent mural on the road. The city piloted the “paint the pavement” program two years ago in the Martin Acres neighborhood, after a resident came up with the idea for a neighborhood mural.
Jerrie Hurd, Goss Grove Neighborhood Association chairwoman, said she wanted a project that would bring the neighborhood together — college students, families and retirees.
“There's a buy-in for pride in the neighborhood,” she said.
The mural was designed by resident and oil painting artist Jan Burch. She said the lotus and crystals represent the Dushanbe Teahouse and Naropa, which border the neighborhood. Butterflies are common, she said, while the neighborhood also is visited by “a million dragonflies.”
The colors are bright and playful — yellow, orange, blue, lavender, pink and green. Most of the paint, mainly street paint and some patio paint, and the materials were donated. Donors included Colorado Paint, McGuckin Hardware, Rocky Mountain Blueprint and Izze.
The neighborhood chipped in to cover unexpected expenses, including extra paint.
Neighbors and the occasional tourist stopped by throughout the day to watch the progress. Erik Lasko, who moved to Boulder a few days ago, was going to buy groceries when he saw the mural and agreed to help paint.
“It looks like a really cool design,” he said.
Eithne Mulligan, 7, and her brother Graham, 6, tackled the orange butterfly wings. They live about three houses away from “the center of Boulder,” Eithne said.
“It's really awesome,” she said as she surveyed her work.
Another volunteer painter was Deb Crowell, who ended up with blue paint streaks on her face and blue covered hands after working into the early afternoon. She said she bailed on a camping trip because she didn't want to miss it.
“I wanted to be a part of this,” she said. “It's a cool neighborhood with a lot of diversity. We've all worked hard to make it what it is.”
The neighborhood group plans to touch up the painting once a year.
The application process for a neighborhood street painting is set up much like that of a neighborhood block party. Neighbor have to sign off on closing down the street for the project and submit a draft design for the Boulder Arts Commission to review.
There is no charge for the permit, but residents are responsible for renting street barricades to block traffic.
Boulder Green Streets sponsored the Goss Grove project and helped the neighborhood with the permit process.
2011年4月7日星期四
Ahead in the solar sector
It's 9am on a Monday morning and Enecsys' Danish ceo Henrik Raunkjaer is in ebullient mood.
"There's no one else in Europe with our technology," he tells me in the firm's Harston Mill space as people get set up for the week ahead.
"There's only one other company – in the US – doing this. Here in the UK people are now starting to be aware of it and I'm very positive." Indeed he is. And rightfully so, as Enecsys' micro-inverter technology is finally getting the recognition – from the public and the installation trade – it deserves. As we speak – actually as Henrik speaks since he's clearly in the zone and I'm playing catch-up via coffee – there's a huge media furore raging about the way the Government's feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme is allegedly being abused by commercially-organised solar farms who are taking big chunks out of the £400m set aside to help convert the nation's homes to solar power. But Henrik's already on an unstoppable roll.
"We're right now looking for investors to take us to the next level and due diligence is ongoing." I can see the vision and the mettle shining in his eyes. "We're expecting to close third round funding at the end of March and we'll be using that for the US, expanding our operations and bringing costs down." Henrik's right, of course. There's no such thing as bad publicity and the row over how the £400m should be divvied up brings the topic of renewable energy back into the public consciousness at an absolutely crucial time for the world's energy markets. And Enecsys, whose new micro-inverter technology went on sale last year, is now perfectly positioned to be a global player.
"We are now hiring a lot of people. Why? Because this technology is fantastic and we have the chance to change the game globally." The key development has been to shift from string inverters to micro-inverters. To harness solar power you need a solar panel and Enecsys' box of tricks to convert the sun's rays for use in the national grid. With a string inverter you collect all the energy harvested from the panels into one box which then feeds the current into the national grid. But the micro-inverter means that each panel has its own inverter, so each panel feeds separately directly into the grid, so less power is lost, because previously if one panel went down (maybe it was in the shade for a while), it would slow down the collective feed-in.
"There's no one else in Europe with our technology," he tells me in the firm's Harston Mill space as people get set up for the week ahead.
"There's only one other company – in the US – doing this. Here in the UK people are now starting to be aware of it and I'm very positive." Indeed he is. And rightfully so, as Enecsys' micro-inverter technology is finally getting the recognition – from the public and the installation trade – it deserves. As we speak – actually as Henrik speaks since he's clearly in the zone and I'm playing catch-up via coffee – there's a huge media furore raging about the way the Government's feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme is allegedly being abused by commercially-organised solar farms who are taking big chunks out of the £400m set aside to help convert the nation's homes to solar power. But Henrik's already on an unstoppable roll.
"We're right now looking for investors to take us to the next level and due diligence is ongoing." I can see the vision and the mettle shining in his eyes. "We're expecting to close third round funding at the end of March and we'll be using that for the US, expanding our operations and bringing costs down." Henrik's right, of course. There's no such thing as bad publicity and the row over how the £400m should be divvied up brings the topic of renewable energy back into the public consciousness at an absolutely crucial time for the world's energy markets. And Enecsys, whose new micro-inverter technology went on sale last year, is now perfectly positioned to be a global player.
"We are now hiring a lot of people. Why? Because this technology is fantastic and we have the chance to change the game globally." The key development has been to shift from string inverters to micro-inverters. To harness solar power you need a solar panel and Enecsys' box of tricks to convert the sun's rays for use in the national grid. With a string inverter you collect all the energy harvested from the panels into one box which then feeds the current into the national grid. But the micro-inverter means that each panel has its own inverter, so each panel feeds separately directly into the grid, so less power is lost, because previously if one panel went down (maybe it was in the shade for a while), it would slow down the collective feed-in.
2011年4月5日星期二
Allied Building Products Distributing Enecsys Micro-Inverters
The solar division of Allied Building Products, a division of Oldcastle Inc. (the North American holding company for CRH PLC), has entered into a distribution partnership with Enecsys, a provider of solar micro-inverter systems for residential and commercial applications.
Allied will be the first North American distributor for Enecsys and will be the first in the U.S. to hold inventory of its micro-inverters, the companies state. The products are on schedule to be stocked this month at Allied's New Jersey; Santa Ana, Calif.; and Hawaii warehouse locations.
Allied will be the first North American distributor for Enecsys and will be the first in the U.S. to hold inventory of its micro-inverters, the companies state. The products are on schedule to be stocked this month at Allied's New Jersey; Santa Ana, Calif.; and Hawaii warehouse locations.
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