Text file

Query, Book Proposal& MS of “Legend” By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten

Query, Book Proposal & Manuscript’s text only (37 pages)
“Legend”
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)

By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten

This is a picture book of 21 surreal psychic automatism collages made during the late sixties and is the only collection of its kind. They are a “roman” of mythology, which she calls Romantic Mythology.
For the first time they are scheduled to exhibit in fine art galleries and wish a book to be available for the general public, collectors and connoisseurs.
They currently appear on their website: www.bariefez-barringten.com
The website is not commercial and seen by very few.

Memberships
Alliance for the arts
Gulf Coast Writers Association
American Institute of Architects
American Society of Interior Designers
International Interiors Designers Association
Pratt and Yale University Alumni associations
Please see their website for complete background.



Query Letter
Greetings!
These 21 art works have attracted connoisseurs, collectors, as well as artist’s agents, exhibitors and galleries. The works of art are a one-of-kind unique collection of collages which have become an artifact of the sixty’s, surreal psychic automatism, pop art and sixty’s nostalgia. The collages were made from collections of high fashion magazines (Vintage Fashion) acquired by Christina in the sixties while Barie was a student at Yale and his cousin Louis Abolofia and the "love generation" were spawning happenings, fashion and music. The art captures the popular look and excitement of the period without being psychedelic, but is a kind of expression of the times. They were created in Puerto Rico just before they returned to New York City in 1969 where Barie taught at Pratt and was the co-founder of international Earth Day in 1970.
The art work is briefly annotated with a narrative about the period, art movements of the time and highlights of their life.

Christina's Romantic Mythology is derived from the German language where "roman" means “story” , taking artistic license to develop metaphor and reasonable contexts, events and representations based on what ever is known about something; in this case legendary mythological characters. Christina has done with each legend what story tellers and movie makers have done for ages with all mythology; to create a portrait of the mythological characters in the jargon of her own imagination; in this case the vintage fashion world of the vintage and very precious 1966,1967 and 1968 Harpers, Vogue and Mademoiselle magazines. In this sense, her work shows the superior reality of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.
It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. She made these collages in 1968 at the very time of their release with the vision she had of them and their mythological antecedents.

Christina and Barie are both members of Gulf Coast Writers Association and the Naples Press Club attending various writers’ conferences where they plan to offer this proposed book. They are also members of various art, design and professional organizations where they will also offer this book for sale. The original art works themselves are currently not for sale and only being offered to purchase as an entire collection while individual giclees may be purchased for individual personal collections. The book will be a popular way to get the works into the hands of many who would otherwise not have access to the whole collection nor individual pieces.
Christian and Barie have all the originals as well as jpg files and for nine they already have TIF and PDF files for your use. They need only make 12 more TIF or PDF for your use. The images shown are JPG files. Legend is to be printed in color with full-page picture of artwork on the left and on the facing page the description; left sheet picture and right sheet description so that the reader may see the full-page color picture while reading the description at the same place. This is a time when the editions of these fashion magazines are greatly valued and collected in their original form; they are themselves vintage collector’s items.

The book will make an excellent gift and a definite addition to a connoisseur’s collection.
As a trustee of the South West Florida Yale Alumni Association, Barie will also offer the book to its members and their families. They will also be able to offer the book when they speaking at various professional and social groups.

While browsing through Barnes and Noble Christina and Barie noticed that there were other art books being offered for sale by such publishers as Rizzoli, Abrams, Clarkson Potter, Tashen, Cedco, Harper Collins, Lococo fine art; Art Fund; Chronicle Book; Distributed Art Publishers Inc.; Empire, Balcony Press; ARS Libri; and Oak and Knoll, to name a few.
Their books had few words and beautifully printed fine art.
“Legend” should be one of these beautiful books.


Please let us know if you wish a copy of the MS in with the 21 images in PDF or JPEG format which can be send it as an attachment.
However, you can view the collages by clicking on “Christina’s Artwork” on www.bariefez-barringten.com

However, the Book Proposal and text of the MS follows below.


Book Proposal (2,643 words) 7 pages

“Legend”
by Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)

1. The Content (What the book is about)

The problem and the book as the solution

Unique selling proposition
AWR is art within reach for the person who cannot afford to spend $500 for a giclee or $5000 for an original but can spend under $50 for the entire collection of 21 fine art collages. In any case, even if the buyer could buy one he can then have all the rest.
Today, there are other such “within reach” markets for furniture, jewelry and fashion making culture, high styling and great art available for everyone. At the beginning of 2008, Christina’s entire collection will be exhibited in one of the nations largest such furniture chains called Design Within Reach. (DWR).

What’s so important and special about this book?
The book is important because it documents a period, kind of art and a unique person in the world of art. Why should a publisher want to publish it? (Aren’t there enough books out there already without adding another to the pile?) There are few affordable books of fine art and none of this period.
Who’s the core audience for the book, and why will they care about it? People who are just beginning to buy furniture, decorate there homes and begin collecting fine art and cultural metaphors will greatly appreciate this book. Especially those with a love of fashion, myths and legends. Already there is a tremendous market for vintage Vogue, Harpers, Mademoiselle, etc.

Premise:
Today, the popularity of myths, legends and fashion is overwhelming as society seeks heroes, a promising future and solutions to the challenges of our world. While the ugly, dissonant and disgusting have a market the beautiful, harmonious and opulent have even a greater market.
While TV, fashion magazines, comic books, internet, blogs, tunes, etc satisfy some of the markets needs art galleries are filled with fantasy and futuristic works of art. What can be better than to have a whole collection of a single vision of fantasy icons, legends and myths icons, which combine both fashion and myth? Not a replacement for the bible or many other sources of great heroes and fictional deities, Legend presents the look of the legends and links them to our own metaphors.
Manuscript
MS Status: The art work is 100% complete and the narrative is 90 %complete awaiting the input of editors and publishers possible emphasis, direction and redirection
Special Features: The special feature of this book is that it combines full color artwork with metaphorical narrative.
Anticipated Length: The book of 21 fine art images with a one page narrative for each will be proceeded by an eight page introduction and preface for a total of about 50 pages.
Anticipated completion: The manuscript is already complete in its draft form and the authors are ready to work with the publisher’s staff to complete any final editions in a matter of days.

2. The Market (Who will buy the book)

Demographic description:
The predominant segment of human population broken down by age or sex or income etc especially with regard to density and capacity for expansion or decline will be predominantly college, newly weds and baby boomers relocating and reestablishing homesteads. Many of their parents and friends will buy these books to give as gifts, wedding, birthday, home warming and shower presents.
Psychographic description is a graphic representation or chart of the personality traits of an individual or group: The psychographic of the buyers will be happy, positive and optimistic shoppers seeking high end icons, metaphors and symbols of their taste. They will be discriminating and selective buyers.
Affinity group is a natural attraction, liking, or feeling of kinship will be interior designers, academic college students, administrators, professors, schoolteachers, researchers, historians, architects, fashion designers, art collectors, connoisseurs, travelers, airlines, and retired professionals.
Competition: This book will compete with other beautiful fine art books of contemporary fine art now stocked in book stores such as Barnes and Noble and available on line by thousands of internet art and art book sales sites.

Promotion:
Christina’s artwork has a built-in audience on our webpage, galleries and participation with buyers and specifiers. Because we are both active members of interior design, architectural, art, writers and university alumni associations we will be able to bring this book to the attention of many including members of the media. In addition, we are both retired and have the ability to participate in book fairs, conferences and direct and indirect marketing venues.
Book stores now carry a goodly number of art picture books selling as gifts to art collectors and connoisseurs. We are actively marketing our art in galleries and our book about our twenty years in Saudi Arabia. We believe that the confluence of our different projects and involvements will greatly benefit the interest and sale of many of these books.

3. The Author (Why Christina and Barie are the best possible authors for this book)

Previous writing: Barie has had a contract to publish by John Wiley and sons, written and published about fifteen monographs in learned and peer reviewed journals in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, England, Finland and the United States of America. He has also written many corporate reports and manuals for the Gulf Oil Corporation and Arabian American Oil Company.


Current writing on other projects such as:


1 Saudi Arabian Mission Report: contains news paper collage clippings from the English language Saudi Arabian newspapers prior to 9/11 from 1993 to 1999.

2. Holy Spirit in Saudi Arabia about our twenty years in Saudi Arabia

3. Bronx Stardust about the first 21 years of my life growing up in New York City

4. Autobiographical Memoirs including my views on urbanity, metaphors, cities, family, relationships, schools, etc.

5. Little Fishermen is an illustrated Christian Children's book

6. Look of the End Times is a fine art pen and ink scripturally narrated book.

7. Anagrams (word grams) is a book of illustrated DaDa drawings and poems

8. European Pen and Ink drawings is a book of drawings made in 72 European cities in 1963

9. Sheba-Land is a pen and ink sketch book with brief narrations consisting of surreal fantasy drawings

10. Acrylics in Saudi Arabia made for a one lady exhibit in 1986

11. Architecture, the Making of Metaphors is a compendium of formerly published and unpublished monographs

Personal marketing
Place books and brochures:
• Gift shops
• Decorator and Design offices and shops
• Furniture and decorator shops and show rooms
• High Fashion shops
• Art galleries, which show my art
• Book Fairs
• Writers Clubs
• Book signings
• Fashion shows
• Writer’s fairs and conventions
• Lectures on making collages at art schools, schools, and libraries


Why are we the best persons to write this book?

Christina Fez-Barringten is a Pop Art artist and a writer. Her collages, acrylic paintings, and Plexiglas sculptures were part of the exciting visual arts movement that emerged in the mid 1950's in Britain and in the late 1950's in the United States. Pop-Art was one of the major art movements of the 20th century. It was characterized by “mass-cultural” themes and techniques drawn from popular materials and media such as plastics, magazine advertising, TV, pop-music, space-time relativity, and comic books. While Pop Art, like Pop Music, aimed to employ images of popular culture in art and emphasized the everyday elements of any given culture, Christina's work challenged the depressing “elitist” culture of the 1950's with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She believed that all of these elements could work together. Furthermore, she believed that the “deconstructivism” of DaDa and Surrealism art of the time could be made popular by mixing them with the jargon of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism that the new generations understood. Christina's work might be called Existentialism today. This brave young woman turned her beliefs into reality. She broke Plexiglas into fragments and reassembled them into vibrant, colorful sculptures. Christina ripped apart fashion magazines of the early 1960's and gently placed them into compositions of personality, boldness, love, deep thought, and excitement.

Shortly before moving to New Haven to begin his studies, Barie was introduced to Christina. Christina lived at the International House, a home for graduate students on Riverside Drive. She studied fine arts at Columbia University Howard Cook, then, the president of the International House, graciously arranged for Christina to have a large art studio in the same building, where she could work and develop her new kind of sculptures.
Her medium was Plexiglas, which had never been used in fine art sculptures.
David Rockefeller commissioned her work to be exhibited at the Chase Manhattan bank. Other exhibitions followed. The Frank Lawrence Gallery at East 57 Street and Park Ave. Showed and represented her abstract sculptures; which, thanks to her medium, and , her artistry, are not like conventional sculptures where volume is inserted into space which surrounds them. Rather, they have become part of space as air, color and light play through it.

Background:
Christina was born in Leipzig, Germany. 1956 she came to New York to study philosophy. But when she discovered the powerful and inspiring movement of modern art in New York City, and, learned to know Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and, others. She decided to use her artistic talent and, changed her goals to study fine art at both the Art Students League and School of Visual Arts.

Shortly before she intended to return to Germany, Christina was introduced to Paul Lefson by Max Waldman, a theatrical photographer (Well known for his book "Waldman on Theater", and his photos in Life Magazine). Paul and Christina got married in 1958 and lived on East 31 Street in Manhattan. Sadly, Paul Lefson died accidentally while on business in Chicago early in 1963.

To overcome the devastating loss, Christina turned to her art more than ever. She now studied sculpture at Columbia University under Professor Peter Augustini. In that period, Christina learned to know Barie Fez-Barringten.

Barie and Christina married in 1966 in New Haven, while Barie studied at Yale University, under Paul Rudolf, Charles Moore, Vincent Scully and others. 1967 Barie originated the theory of” Architecture the Making of Metaphors". At that time, Barie conducted a lecture series at Yale University with Robert Venturi, John Cage, Paul Weiss, Christopher Tunnard, and others. This event is partially published in "Main Currents of Modern Thought".

After the completion of Barie's studies in February of 1968, the couple moved for a short while, (To escape the cold of winter.) to Puerto Rico. Barie was appointment junior partner of Schimmelpfennig, Ruiz and Gonzales and designed buildings for Ron Rico and El Mundo.

In Puerto Rico Christina developed a series of original and exciting collages. She was inspired by the most elaborate, rich and opulent editions of the 1960's - Harper's Bazaar and Vogue Magazines.
These collages are excellent posters and are now shown for the first time on the internet.

Back in New York, in order for Barie, now, a licensed architect to do his work, and Christina to have space for her sculptures, the couple moved in to a large loft on East 68 Street. Barie taught architecture at Pratt Institute. And, when Barie accepted the challenge of Mayor Lindsey to bring the first ""Earth Day" to New York City, he encouraged his students to build the stage for that event. Paul Newman and people from Sesame Street, Ally McGraw and others furnished the educational entertainment. The following year, John Mc Connell enlisted Barie's assistance to stage his version the Earth Day in Central Park and to get the General Secretary of the United Nations, U Thant, to proclaim Earth Day as an international holiday (March 21).

In addition, Barie founded a New York not-for-profit corporation: "Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments" with one of its goals to provide under privileged children a glimpse of the creative excitement of the building industry from cabinet work, to carpentry and design. There in order to illustrate his teaching he produced a series of words-drawings now in the hands of several collectors.

In 1973, Barie accepted the challenge to develop two vacation resorts in Tennessee, Sugar Tree and English Mountain. And, in addition, he designed homes for a development in Belmopan, Belize, British Honduras.

Also, Barie the artist developed a series of brilliantly envisioned drawings of futuristic metaphors, which he exhibited in conjunction with Christina's Plexiglas sculpture, at the Jonathan Gallery in Jackson, and in Memphis, Tennessee.

Later, he was recruited by the "Gulf Oil Real Estate Development Company" to be its lead project manager for a new computer building and other new structures in Texas. Because of that, the couple had moved to Houston. Also, Barie always interested to inspire young people in his profession, taught part-time at the University of Houston; and, later, fulltime, as associate professor at college station's Texas A&M University. Professor Fez-Barringten student's benefited by his friendship with the astronaut Joe Allen. Together they looked way into the future and designed space stations furniture and other imagined designed necessities.

By 1981, the Fez-Barringten's moved from Texas to Saudi Arabia where Barie trained Saudi Arabian students to work in architecture department of The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).

After moving to Riyadh, Barie got busy and designed 21 new towns for the people of Saudi Arabia. He also designed sport stadiums, office buildings and other building types.

In Riyadh Christina developed, out of necessity a new style of pattern-like paintings. For in this Muslim country objects can not be portrayed through art. 1986, Christina gave a major exhibition of her acrylic paintings sponsored by the American Ambassador in Saudi Arabia. In addition, she taught and was the judge of important art events, especially during the five years when Barie was Professor of Architecture at King Faisal University, located in Dammam on the Gulf of Arabia. Professor Barie Fez-Barringten's articles of metaphors, written during that time, are published in learned journals in the USA, Middle East and Europe.

Barie Fez- Barringten is an architect, philosopher, writer, artist, project manager and teacher. He is one of the world's foremost advocates of the artistic concept called the “Architecture, the making of Metaphors”. His work has been recognized around the world, particularly in the US and Saudi Arabia. According to Professor Fez-Barringten, there is a 3-way symbiotic relationship that exists between architecture, music and art, and the audience that experiences that art within the controlled space of that environment. Using the concept of the “metaphor”, a synergy that can be easily observed when all
three properly work together.
In 1999 the Fez Barringtens left Saudi Arabia...............

Praises of Author’s Work
Both of us have served for many years in secular public as professor, managers, architects, designers, teachers, and clerical positions as missionaries, pastor, and ministers with a following of constituents, congregations, and students who now have families and run business, mange companies and lead governments and government agencies. Because we both are good speakers and teachers the American Institute of Architects, American society of Interior designers, and Interior Design Society continue to invite them to serve in positions of leadership. Barie was recently appointed a trustee of the Yale club of Southwest Florida and Christina has been invited to show her collages in local fine art and internet galleries.

Competition will come from other contemporary artists and fine art publishers who will print and distribute books to the major book stores but will not be able to reach the major design and academic professional community as an insider.

All the chapters, Annotated Table of Contents and Chapter by chapter synopsis can be found in the pdf file.

Creative Interaction between Author and Editor involves listening, receiving criticism and work to develop and improve the ms. it is hoped that the state of this ms is early enough in its development to be able to be developed with shared artistic enthusiasm and interest.

Christina and Barie will await your kind word.
Sincerely yours
Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
1011 La Paloma Blvd.
North Fort Myers, Florida 33903
239 543 2736
www.bariefez-barringten.com
christinasfineart@gmail.com

Below please find the text only of the manuscript.
LEGEND”
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)

A graphic tale of the love generation’s hippie’s sixties started at
Haight Ashbury, San Francisco
Book of Christina’s Automatic Surrealist Collages
Made in Puerto Rico in 1968 from fashion magazines she collected in Manhattan and New Haven from 1966

By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
Artwork by Christina with Barie’s narrative

TOC
A. Preface
B. Introduction
C. Artist’s background
1.Appetite
2.Taproots
3.Kiss
4.Opulent:
5.Quixote
6.Mystery:
7.Easter

8.Creation
9.Lord’sSupper
10.Maria
11.Maya
12.Xanadu
13.Sun-He
14.CoCo
15.Narcisse
16.Salome
17.Vampira
18.Turandot
19.Mercedes
20.Luna
21.Gemini


Preface: Book is to be printed in color with full-page picture of artwork on the left and on the facing page the description, left sheet picture and right sheet description so that the reader may see the full-page color picture while reading the description at the same place.

Christina’s pop art collages are now available as fine art inkjet giclée printed reproductions as the entire collection of the originals is being kept as part of the artist’s estate. This is being done to preserve their integrity and value of their importance and value. Each of the fine art giclees are individually signed and dated and be part of any connoisseur’s fine art collection. Each is truly one of kind, unique and remarkable achievements. With the advent of digital photography and the slow demise of mechanical lithography, digital inkjet high-end printing is expanding exponentially. Giclée loosely means spraying or squirting in French. Christina’s collage giclees are characteristics of a true digital art print:

While the techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China around 200 BC the use of collage remained very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their poems. Her work cries out for words and music only to be found by the viewer. In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).In this way Christina’s home is filled family photo collages. It is her natural way to express her ideas and relationships of people, places and events. The term collage derives from the French "colle" meaning, "glue”. This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

Introduction:

Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties, Christina’s Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality.
Christina’s Giclées Collages combines the beauty and brilliance of this printing technology. While photographic prints are somewhat dull and limited a giclée print let her collages pop with deep blacks, saturation and gradations hard to achieve with other media. Her jet-printed glossy laminate.
“As she broke the Plexiglas into fragments, she too tore the magazine’s pages. As she reassembled the Plexiglas fragments to a form a new reality so she assembled the bits and pieces of magazine sheets to form metaphors of spirit, fashion, urbanism, and a fantasy life and into a visual memoir of the Love Generation”.
The Baby Boomers of today grew up in the midst of the greatest cultural revolution of our time, a revolution, which emerged out the beat generation into the hippie’s creativity in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and England’s Soho. It was the beginning of the culture of youth where being over thirty was ancient.
Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale’s school of architecture and Manhattan’s “art scene”. She did this in Puerto Rico while TV programs like:” Laugh In” and the first run of Star Trek was airing in the states. At Yale, they gave a lecture series published as “Architecture the Making of Metaphors” encouraged by dean Charles Moore with John Cage, Paul Weiss, Robert Venturi and others. At the time Timothy Leary was advocating the wonders of LSD while the young were tripping out on Broadway and loving at Woodstock. Society listened to acid rock and painted psychedelic illustrations and paintings. They listened while crowds proclaimed against the Vietnam war to “Make Love and Not War” while the musical Hair reaped in millions at the box office. The streets of New Haven were charged with “blacks” rioting against the “establishment”. Christina dressed in the her own designed and high fashion minis and soaked in the psychedelic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Bee Gees, Beatles and other like the Mamas and the Papas. All the while she collected the many magazines she would later use in her collages. She and her husband made graffiti and gorilla art on buildings, malls and with posters in their apartment and the buildings in Puerto Rico..
Christina’s Pop Art collages are a part of visual artistic movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain. It paralleled in the late 1950s in the United States. The early 50s was the time when Christina had to flee from east to west Germany, leaving her home city of Leipzig, a city once known for its commerce, music and literature. Christina was born educated in Leipzig and its surrounding area. It was the home of Gutenberg, Luther, Bach, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Handel, and Klinger, Goethe’s Faust “Auerbach’s Keller”, only to mention a few. Its neighboring small town is Dessau, the seat of the Bauhaus. Christina grew up in an atmosphere of great music and art. She draws upon that culture and sensitivities of grace and tenacity of that time which is little found in today’s politically correct generation.
Pop- Art is one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century, characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. Pop- Art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Christina was the first artist to use Plexiglas (acrylic). Her sculptures are amazing examples of three dimensional abstract expressionism and movement in the transparency of space. She studied sculpture under Peter Augustino at Columbia University
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She demonstrated that the two could work together and that “deconstructivism”; DaDa and Surrealism could be made popular into the jargon of the reality of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism.
Christina’s giclée collages are her response to Abstract Expressionism and marked a return to representational art. She uses images from mass culture and ordinary commerce as a relatively new development. In fact, her work incorporates the shapes and forms of her abstract expressionist foundation where each piece is a whole shape consisting of abstract forms arrayed in a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms in tension and counter tension dynamics and repose.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena.
Christina’s Psychic Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous assemblage without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. Automatism phenomena is perhaps parallel to the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz.
Christina’s Collage surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose there own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance. Her work is in the genre of other pop artist such as English pop artist Sir Peter Thomas Blake and Richard Hamilton; as well as Norwegian artist, Hariton Pushwagner. The tactility and appeal of each of her pieces is irresistible as the origins of each segment. She has made of each much more than the original form and, has immortalized what was once discarded and swept away with time.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Liechtenstein, Christina delights in using, reusing, and converting the obvious into the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson’s Muppets each becomes both the reality of our world and some other.
Christina Fez-Barringten is an international artist. She has exhibited her work in New York City, Connecticut, Tennessee, Florida, Europe and the Middle East.
Living in New York, Christina and her contemporary artists: Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, Peter Augustino and so many others opted to present the obvious in the new, a principle that remains also true in Christina’s dynamic acrylic paintings, and in her first of its kind acrylic sculptures. Rather than selling he originals Christina offers her collages as giclees. The printing technology of the fine art ink jet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media. Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Urbanism. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from Cut-Outs of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless and like a hidden treasure jet to be fully discovered.
Pop- Art is a major art movement of the Twentieth Century drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. While Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images opposed to elitist culture in art, and emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of the culture; Christina’s work challenged this depressing idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She believed the two could work together and that “deconstructivism”; Dada and Surrealism could be combined into the jargon of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism. Christina’s modern art is very easy to comprehend.
She was far ahead of her time when she used images from mass culture and ordinary commerce in her work. Realism and Minimalism are considered to be the current modern art movements. Her collages are a response to Abstract Expressionism and marked already then a return to representational art. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, England’s Soho and Woodstock stirred the beat generation and hippy’s to bring about the greatest cultural revolution of our time; of which Christina’s collages are one of the finest examples.


Barie Fez-Barringten was born 1937 in New York. He attended Christopher Columbus High School. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in interior design from Pratt Institute. After Several years of working for such architects as Edward Durrell Stone and Morris Lapidus; and a year of extensive travel throughout Europe he returned to the US to continue his studies. By 1968 he received his masters degree in architecture from Yale University.

Shortly before moving to New Haven to begin his studies, Barie was introduced to Christina Lefson. Christina lived at the International House., a home for graduate students on Riverside Drive. She studied fine
arts at Columbia University Howard Cook, then,
president of the International House, graciously arranged for Christina to have a large art studio in the same building, where she could work and develop her new kind of sculptures.
Her medium was Plexiglas, which had never been used in fine art sculptures.
David Rockefeller commissioned her work to be exhibited at the Chase Manhattan bank. Other exhibitions followed. The Frank Lawrence Gallery at East 57 Street and Park Ave. Showed and represented her abstract sculptures; which, thanks to her medium, and , her artistry, are not like conventional sculptures where volume is inserted into space which surrounds them. Rather, they have become part of space as air, color and light play through it.

Christina was born in Leipzig, Germany. 1956 she came to New York to study philosophy. But when she discovered the powerful and inspiring movement of modern art in New York City, and, learned to know Andy Warhol,
Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Liechtenstein and, others. She decided to use her artistic talent and, changed her goals to study fine art at both the Art Students League and School of Visual Arts.

Shortly before she intended to return to Germany, Christina was introduced to Paul Lefson by Max Waldman, a theatrical photographer (Well known for his book "Waldman on Theater", and his photos in Life Magazine). Paul and Christina got married in 1958 and lived on East 31 Street in Manhattan. Sadly, Paul Lefson died accidentally while on business in Chicago early in 1963.

To overcome the devastating loss, Christina turned to her art more than ever. She now studied sculpture at Columbia University under Professor Peter Augustini. In that period Christina learned to know Barie Fez-Barringten.

Barie and Christina married in 1966 in New Haven, while Barie studied at Yale University, under Paul Rudolf, Charles Moore, Vincent Scully and others. 1967 Barie originated the theory of:” Architecture the Making of Metaphors". At that time Barie conducted a lecture series at Yale University with Robert Venturi, John Cage, Paul Weiss, Christopher Tunnard, and others. This event is partially published in "Main Currents of Modern Thought".

After the completion of Barie's studies in February of 1968, the couple moved for a short while, (To escape the cold of winter.) to Puerto Rico. Barie was appointment junior partner of Schimmelpfennig, Ruiz and Gonzales and designed buildings for Ron Rico and El Mundo.

In Puerto Rico Christina developed a series of original and exciting collages. She was inspired by the most elaborate, rich and opulent editions of the 1960's - Harper's Bazaar and Vogue Magazines.
These collages are excellent posters and are now shown for the first time on the internet.

Back in New York, in order for Barie, now, a licensed architect to do his work, and Christina to have space for her sculptures, the couple moved in to a large loft on East 68 Street. Barie taught architecture at Pratt Institute. And, when Barie accepted the challenge of Mayor Lindsey to bring the first ""Earth Day" to New York City, he encouraged his students to build the stage for that event. Paul Newman and people from Sesame Street, Aly McGraw and others furnished the educational entertainment. The following year John Mc Connell enlisted Barie's assistance to stage the epic Earth Day event in Central Park and to get the General Secretary of the United Nations, U Thant, to proclaim Earth Day as an international holiday (March 21).

In addition, Barie founded a New York not-for-profit corporation: "Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments" with one of its goals to provide under privileged children a glimpse of the creative excitement of the building industry from cabinet work, to carpentry and design. There in order to illustrate his teaching he produced a series of words-drawings now in the hands of several collectors.

In 1973, Barie accepted the challenge to develop two vacation resorts in Tennessee; Sugar Tree and English Mountain. And, in addition, he designed homes for a development in Belmopan, Belize, British Honduras.

Also, Barie the artist developed a series of brilliantly envisioned drawings of futuristic metaphors, which he exhibited in conjunction with Christina's Plexiglas sculpture, at the Jonathan Gallery in Jackson, and in Memphis, Tennessee.

Later, he was recruited by the "Gulf Oil Real Estate Development Company" to be its lead project manager for a new computer building and other new structures in Texas. Because of that, the couple had moved to Houston. Also, Barie always interested to inspire young people in his profession, taught part-time at the University of Houston; and, later, fulltime, as associate professor at college station's Texas A&M University. Professor Fez-Barringten student's benefited by his friendship with the astronaut Joe Allen. Together they looked way into the future and designed space stations furniture and other imagined designed necessities.

By 1981, the Fez-Barringten's moved from Texas to Saudi Arabia where Barie trained Saudi Arabian students to work in architecture department of The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).

After moving to Riyadh, Barie got busy and designed 21 new towns for the people of Saudi Arabia. He also designed sport stadiums, office buildings and other building types.

In Riyadh Christina developed, out of necessity a new style of pattern-like paintings. For in this Muslim country objects can not be portrayed through art. 1986, Christina gave a major exhibition of her acrylic paintings sponsored by the American Ambassador in Saudi Arabia. In addition, she taught and was the judge of important art events, especially during the five years when Barie was Professor of Architecture at King Faisal University, located in Dammam on the Gulf of Arabia. Professor Barie Fez-Barringten's articles of metaphors, written during that time, are published in learned journals in the USA, Middle East and Europe. 1999 the Fez Barringtens left Saudi Arabia...............


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1. Appetite

This collage expresses the unsatiated hunger, appetite, longing and dreams of mankind for all the tangibles.
The printing technology of the fine art inkjet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media. Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless. And, like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.


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2. Taproots
This collage incorporates the shapes and forms of an abstract expressionist foundation. It is a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms in tension and counter tension, dynamics and repose. This work is pure imagination depicting automatism and repetition by which to express a real function of thought.

Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless and like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.



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3. Kiss
Lips, heads, and flowers orbit a sky surrounding an eye looking at the yellows, cerulean blues, lavenders and burgundy rainbow. Each are made a family of separated identities in a new structure of this kiss context. The clouds of color carry the content of the figures in an artist’s pallet of complementary hues and tones. All of these images are created in a spontaneous surreal technique called Automatism

Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous writing, drawing, or the like practiced without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. "Pure psychic automatism" was how André Breton, surrealism's founder, defined surrealism, and while the definition has proved capable of significant expansion, automatism remains of prime importance in the movement. Seeing many of Christina’s works one immediately thinks of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending the staircase”. Duchamp discusses his work saying, `I discarded brushes and explored the mind more than the hands.’
Christina’s work speaks across centuries, cultures and genres. To own her work is to posses a still life of importance and value.


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4. Opulent:
The focal point is a well dressed aristocrat surrounded by white horses, damsels and exotic dogs as a clouds of ochre, persimmon, blues and gold. Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina’s Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale’s school of architecture and Manhattan’s “art scene”. She did this in Puerto Rico while TV programs like:” Laugh In” and the first run of Star Trek was airing in the states. At Yale, they gave a lecture series published as “Architecture the Making of Metaphors” encouraged by Dean Charles Moore with John Cage, Paul Weiss, Robert Venturi and others. At the time, Timothy Leary was advocating the wonders of LSD while the young were tripping out on Broadway and loving at Woodstock. Society listened to acid rock and painted psychedelic illustrations and paintings. They listened while crowds proclaimed against the Vietnam War to “Make Love and Not War” while the musical Hair reaped in millions at the box office.


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5. Quixote

Like the famous legend of Don Quixote de la Mancha, the lady is dressed in warrior black with a great black hat. The images are a quiet story of the pride and proclamation of knight hood of great and single purpose. Collage is the making of metaphors, which make the strange familiar. Quixote is now a person who is victorious and the metaphor is the bits and pieces of constructed icon combined into the new reality of this surreal automatic expression. Like its Height-Ashbury Love generation contemporaries, this work conjures and freely lets psychic and poetic realities become a medulla upon which to feast the eyes and heart. The Baby Boomers of today grew up in the midst of the greatest cultural revolution of our time, a revolution, which emerged out the beat generation into the hippie’s creativity in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and England’s Soho. It was the beginning of the culture of youth where being over thirty was ancient.


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6. Mystery:

As the period, this collage restates the metaphors of a culture, past and future in the form of women in exotic and colorful costumes. Are they gypsies, nobility, or part of a kings harem? Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale’s school of architecture and Manhattan’s “art scene”.
It is a collage of bobbles, bangles and beads with surreal double images and decorated faces hiding the true identity of the one person they represent. Everywhere there are hints of her identity but she still remains illusive.


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7. Easter

A new beginning in the Grace of God, this collage exhibits the exuberance of victory;
the joy of man and nature of the Lord’s triumph over evil and death.
The printing technology of the fine art inkjet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless. And like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.


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8. Creation
A new beginning in the Grace of God. This collage exhibits the exuberance of victory.
The joy of man and nature of the Lord’s triumph over evil and death.

The printing technology of the fine art ink jet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless. And like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.

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9. Lord’s Supper table
The world of the unseen let’s Christina sees Jesus surrounded by worshipers in a swirl of ochre, browns, blues and whites. A winged angel and others in ancient costumes compose a swirl of time and progression of the essence and meaning of communion and fellowship, not religious but a vision of our relationship with the Lord.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena. Christina’s Psychic Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous assemblage without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. Automatism phenomena are perhaps parallel to the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz.
Christina’s Collage surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

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10. Maria
There is no doubt that this modern day icon represents a female form another time and place. With her reverence of the mother of Jesus she surrounds the hallowed face with soft pastel roses, and winged birds, clouds and shy. This new vision of holiness is a priceless collectors item which can only be compared with the medieval icons. This piece does not deny or embolden misinterpretation but simply expresses the purity and peace of faith and hope.
Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose there own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance

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11. Maya
To the Hindus Maya is The power of a god or demon to transform a concept into an element of the sensible world. It is the transitory, manifold appearance of the sensible world, which obscures the undifferentiated spiritual reality from which it originates; the illusory appearance of the sensible world. It is another term for the Mayan culture and this collage places a blond female head on female body surrounded by swirl of white and ochre fabrics.

Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, she delights in using and reusing the obvious in to the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson’s Muppets each becomes both the reality of our world and some other.

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12. Xanadu
Mongol city founded by Kublai Khan, 1625, Anglicized form of Shang-tu. Sense of "dream place of magnificence and luxury" derives from Coleridge's poem (1816). It is a place of great beauty, luxury, and contentment. A Shangri-La expressed by this exuberant female in swirl of fabrics above and below her upper and lower torso. Her eyes only peek out from behind the swirl and dares us to enjoy the dance, music and excitement of this instant caught by Christina.
While the techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China around 200 BC the use of collage remained very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their poems. Her work cries out for words and music only to be found by the viewer. In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).In this way Christina’s home is filled family photo collages. It is her natural way to express her ideas and relationships of people, places and events. The term collage derives from the French "colle" meaning, "glue”. This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

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13. Sun-He
The Korean name conjures light and bursts with energy of musical, acting and artistic talent. This collage is a sole figure of a female wearing a bronze billowing skirt below a great yellow and yellow ocher middle and above her bare waste a copper brown silk and leather topping. Some say Zixiao (Sun-he) was formally Emperor Wen (of Eastern Wu) was a son and one-time crown prince of Eastern Wu's founding emperor Sun Quan during the Three Kingdoms period.

Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina’s Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality.

Christina’s Giclées Collages combines the beauty and brilliance of this printing technology. While photographic prints are somewhat dull and limited a giclée print let her collages pop with deep blacks, saturation and gradations hard to achieve with other media.


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14. CoCo
Like Picasso Christina rearranges the human figure in this surreal pink and rose colored burst of petals with her head set in a lower ovary (ovule). Like its name sake for a tall palm tree bearing coconuts as fruits; widely planted throughout the tropics these blossoms are prolific and bountiful. It will be a treasure to its owner to remind about the possibilities of life and creativity with in each person.

While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She demonstrated that the two could work together and that “deconstructivism”; DaDa and Surrealism could be made popular into the jargon of the reality of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism.


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15. Narcisse
The word is derived from a Greek myth. Narcissus was a handsome Greek youth who rejected the desperate advances of the nymph Echo. As punishment, he was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his love, Narcissus pined away and changed into the flower that bears his name, the narcissus.
Freud believed that some narcissism is an essential part of all of us from birth.
Andrew Morrison claims that, in adults, a reasonable amount of healthy narcissism allows the individual's perception of his needs to be balanced in relation to others.
Some say Narcisse is about sex, religion, power and deceit. Red, gold, purple swirls surround this female seemingly skipping though life.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena.

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16. Salome
Persimmon, gold beige and black furs and adorned with pearls and Arabic hangings is the laughing female face. The shapes and forms are only fantasy shaped animal icons creating a new icon of the famed seductress set on a purple background.

“As she broke the Plexiglas into fragments, she too tore the magazine’s pages. As she reassembled the Plexiglas fragments to a form a new reality so she assembled the bits and pieces of magazine sheets to form metaphors of spirit, fashion, urbanism, and a fantasy life and into a visual memoir of the Love Generation”.

Christina’s pop art collages are now available as fine art ink jet giclée printed reproductions as the entire collection of the originals is being kept as part of the artist’s estate. This is being done to preserve their integrity and value of their importance and value. Each of the fine art giclees are individually signed and dated and be part of any connoisseur’s fine art collection. Each is truly one of kind, unique and remarkable achievements. With the advent of digital photography and the slow demise of mechanical lithography, digital ink jet high-end printing is expanding exponentially. Giclée loosely means spraying or squirting in French. Christina’s collage giclees are characteristics of a true digital art print:

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17. Vampira
Vampira portrays that seductive woman who uses her sensuality to exploit men. In red silk fur with rode lame she reclines open armed and backward on a gigantic lipstick red divan.
Vampira’s dark eyes and white skinned arm are all that shows covered by the blood red power of red on a purple background. Christina’s Pop- Art is part of one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. Pop- Art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Christina was the first artist to use Plexiglas (acrylic). Her sculptures are amazing examples of three dimensional abstract expressionism and movement in the transparency of space. Christina studied sculpture under Peter Augustino at Columbia University
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance.


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18. Turandot
Discovered in Heidelberg in 1904 by Max Wolf is a minor planet orbiting the sun. Christina’s cousin was an astronomer on the staff of the Max Plank Institute in Heidelberg and as a German appreciates the Turandot of German mythology and Turandot is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, to an Italian libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, based on the play Turandot by Carlo Gozzi. Turandot is a Persian word and name meaning "the daughter of Turan",
Turan being a region of Central Asia which used to be part of the Persian Empire. In Persian, the fairy tale is known as "Turandokht", with "dokht" being a contraction for "Dokhtar" (meaning "Daughter"). Indeed shows the daughter of Turan in great Russian furs.
The story of Turandot was taken from the Persian collection of stories called The Book of One Thousand and One Nights or Hezar o-yek shab (1722 French translation Les Mille et une Nuits by Francois Petis de la Croix), where the character of "Turandokht" as a cold Chinese princess was found. But this story about a Chinese princess bears much resemblance to Persian poet Nizami's story about a Russian princess being pursued by the Sassanid king Behram. The story of Turandokht is one of the best known from de la Croix's translation. Christina cloaks this African Queen in exotic mink, ermine, and fox in an icon of nobility and stature. This vision was merely a precursor to the twenty years she would later spend in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia where her art was very well received in first of its kind one lady shows in the desert capital city of Riyadh.

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19. Mercedes
While Mercedes is a city in SW Uruguay, on the Río Negro the Infanta Maria de las Mercedes of Spain (1880–1904), Princess of the Asturias, for all 24 years of her life the Heiress Presumptive of the Spanish royal crown, and for a period in 1885–1886, the extant Head of the State of Spain, was born as Doña María de las Mercedes de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena, eldest daughter of King Alfonso XII of Spain (Don Alfonso de Borbón de Cádiz y Borbón de España).

Christina engulfs the slender royal in baby blue ostrich feather, silks and vertical high reaching blue timed domed minaret. This vertical axis grisaille is contrast on a stark black background metaphorically linking the royal lady with her dreamy castle and royal structures.
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20 Luna

The black background sets off the blues and lavender shapes and forms which seems to be a female in flight and the moons way of making shadows in the sky. Part of the abstracted spot design is parts of the moon hovering over the lower blue forms in moon’s shadows.
Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece, we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles, fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose there own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance. Her work is in the genre of other pop artist such as English pop artist Sir Peter Thomas Blake and Richard Hamilton; as well as Norwegian artist, Hariton Pushwagner. The tactility and appeal of each of her pieces is irresistible as the origins of each segment.
She has made of each much more than the original form and, have immortalized what was once discarded and swept away with time. They have been become costumes of the legends they represent.

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21. Gemini
Gemini is a harlequin of double personality and image this two female figured icon wrapped in pink, persimmon, ocher, gold, red and black furs and plush fabric.
The face look at you and away from each other reifying Christina’s understanding of the Gemini star sign. Gemini is the third sign of the zodiac in astrology. Also called Twins. They are together and share the colors and luxury of a common context.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, she delights in using and reusing the obvious in to the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson’s Muppets each becomes both the reality of our world and some other.
Christina’s work speaks across centuries, cultures and genres.
To own her work is to posses a still life of importance and value.

To see the image inserts please see Christina’s art on their website.
For more of her work and background see her website: www. bariefez-barringten.com
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)

2.0 Earth day and LME
Both the NYC Earth day events in Union Square and then in Central Park were for two different organizations and my involvement in either was unsolicited by me.
I mean, I never really actually knew, or, was concerned about the issues founding either undertaking; or, the motivations for staging the events.
In the case of the 1969 event in Union Square I was approached by a member of the Pratt faculty, who was himself designing some of the media electronics, and requested I gather my students to design and build the performance stage upon which his crew did its media things. My students were ecstatic and before you know it I was meeting with people in the Environmental Action Coalition (EAC) and Fred Kent and Mr. Hays and others. One very strange radical Pratt faculty member called and described what he was doing and what was additionally needed and could I utilize my class to do what was needed. He gave the contacts and took me to several organization meetings where I could learn about the mission and the operations. The mission seemed wrapped around many variations on environmental issues while the films and sound effects of the Pratt faculty member dealt rather with war and peace, identify and the greater good for a different society. Truly, it was not any part of my vocabulary but I was open and learned all that I could.
I had to get the materials so I looked in the yellow pages; and, low and behold every lumber company, scaffolding contractor, paint company, etc. jumped at the opportunity to supply free materials and labor to erect our design on 14th Street and Union Square. I used the lessons taught to me by Pastor Bergen in Puerto Rico.
My students and Christina designed and made the most beautiful drawings. Little did we all realize that some thing bigger was on its way?
The actual event led to legislation in New York State and Washington having to do with the formation and funding of the Environmental Protection Department and attending legislation.
The actual event was a delight where we got close to Pete Seager, the cast of Hair, Paul Newman, the Sesame Street gang, etc. We had a great time. It was here I met Adam Alexander who for several years visited us. He was a member of the Mayors special task force. Our design was published in all the leading architectural journals.

In addition to teaching at Pratt, I was also working part time at the office of LH Pomeroy in the Plaza Hotel and we were living at the Picasso House in Manhattan.
One day I get a phone call from a soft and quiet voice announcing that he was John McConnell and he wanted my help to stage the ”real” earth day on March 21, 1970 and would I help him. Immediately invited him to tell me more and invited him to our apartment. He showed up and for a couple of hours he explained his concept and plans to my self, several of my key operative students, such as “Ken”, “Jeff” and a few others. The plan was to get a petition signed by the people of New York City which on that day he would present to U-thant, secretariat of the UN while we stage a huge gathering in Central Park.
He already had the design for flags; the planet earth as photographed from the Apollo on a blue background. We were to get them up the flagpoles at the main band shell. I volunteered to handle the media my students were again very enthusiastic and after my lining up CBS, NBC, ABC, Daily News, Post, etc/ my cousin Louis, Adam, my students and I came to Central Park to find over one hundred thousand people in front of the band shell. The cameras and news reporters swarmed us and we told John’s story and held the crowd’s interest. To this day and in his late eighties I still get phone calls from John McConnell to discuss his various peace initiatives. He feels that his entire efforts were shanghaied by environmentalist and that he is still trying to win the peace by a world rallies and single-minded efforts and agreements. John had gotten Earth Day proclaimed as an international holiday and things ended.

LME (Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments)
At the time I was meeting in my apartment at the Picasso House, several nights a week with an architectural student of City College introduced to me by Pomeroy’s, Phil Winters.
Some where in all of this we noticed that we needed space to meet with students and colleagues, perform architectural work, artwork, etc. Soon our lease would be up. Having the examples of Gene’s girlfriend, Davian, Max Waldman, and other artists we reckoned that this would be the most affordable and metaphorically luxurious context we could afford. So, I set out find a place and soon conceived the idea of the place to be a loft, but not in the village where lofts were typically inhabited, but, in mid town where we could combine her studio with a potential architectural studio. I just believed that in this mid-town silk stocking district there were depressed and marginal properties. I recall seeing them a few years ago with my homosexual Pratt professor friend, Ed Carroll; particularly next to the Fifty ninth street Bridge. He showed me this neighborhood in 1962 and this was eight years later.
It also occurred to us that we could also get people and materials to really design and build a wonderful place, if, with a foundation such as John’s and EAC. I scoured the news papers and walked the neighborhood. I telephoned and I visited. I narrowed down a few very good places.
But this time we do our own. In addition, we wrongfully thought that there was a lot of grant money available to sponsor environmental programs and that we could participate in them with Phil Winters, Adam and my students, etc.
Using my Yale Club and University contacts I went to the NY bar Association and got a team of Attorneys to volunteer to incorporate us a NY not-for-profit corporation. Using the completed Lecture Series at Yale University on Metaphors and a place in which to experiment with ideas we came up with the name:” Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments”. Main Currents in Modern Thought was just publishing parts of Yale lecture series on “Architecture, as the Making of Metaphors”
Now I needed to find a place. I looked in all the newspapers and visited many places meeting so many interesting owners and land loads. One was the owner of the Plaza Hotel and Chrysler building. Finally I gave up and just started walking around the neighborhood I knew Christina would like in search of old factories. I recalled from my days with a gay Pratt faculty member he showed me a friend place on 59th Street, so I walked there and soon I found 320 East 65th Street and its owner Jose Fernandez. He had the bakery on the ground floor filed with German manufactured equipment baking bread, which he supplied to all the top hotels and fines t restaurants. I told him our story and he showed me the empty third floor which had one wind separated from the rest. He really liked me and offered me the place for peanuts. ($400/month). Gene, Christina, and I designed the space and
Robert Jacobs volunteered to draw the isometric of the space. Christopher Sweeney volunteered to help do the carpentry and many construction companies volunteered to supply the 2x12 timbers. The space was 4000 square foot. It was a beauty with skylights and giant floor to ceiling casement windows.
For several months my students and I scraped a hundred years of paint and false ceiling and asbestos off of the walls and ceilings. Nightly eating fresh hot bread and dinner at the corner restaurant. It was a hard but wonderful time for all of us.
Far from finished, our lease at Picasso House and the month’s extension was past so we moved in. Those first nights sleeping in the loft were magic. The moonlight and street light s coming in to the space and us laying thereon our blow up mattress amidst all our furniture and construction materials and equipment. We worked on the place for months and it evolved into a living and workspace.
I designed my self-a small telephone booth type’s office and dually called every foundation and philanthropist. I met and explained our mission. Henry Classon met with us regularly and authored our LME Prospectus. He even paid for its printing. I held some of my Pratt “Open School” classes in our meeting area which is how I met Jeffery Chusid. Various hospitals and schools asked us to train their students and we took on special education young me and taught them construction skills.

But, alas, the city’s coffers went dry. I had qualified and was at the top of the list to get Public works projects and developer asked me to draw up schemes for projects. But the city filed for bankruptcy. I the midst of all this “Forrest Wilson invited me to teach in Athens. Ohio; so I commuted, while at the same time looking for work in real estate development and construction outside of New York
We invested thousands of hours of labor and thought to the creation of LME and so many people supported LME in spirit and hopes. We had so many visitors, classes and seminars. We prepared many proposals and presentations. To even to the Lutheran church Rueben Jessup; Fund Raiser; Missouri Synod office on Riverside drive) to repeat the neighborhood construction effort we had initiated in Puerto Rico’s Grace English Lutheran church in Santurce.

It was during this time we visited Germany and toured the Ruhergebeit seeing how Germany deals with water, waste and air pollution I made many photographs of one plant that cleans the water and provides power to a village on the river which was published in Progressive Architecture in 1971. Ken invited us to stay a week in his parent’s upstate NY house and we visited with Christina’s father in Berlin.
LME was a great dream, the loft was a great place to live the dream, and New York was a great place for dreamers such as us. Even Warner Leroy liked what we were doing and when we left Mr. Fernandez rented him our space. Mr., Fernandez took me around some time before I left for Jackson, Tennessee and showed me his many tenement buildings. When we were in Jackson we were watching Pat Robertson show and learned from watching his young wife being interviewed that Mr. Fernandez had died, she remarried and squandered the bakery, the building and all his real estate holdings. Gil Colgate who had commissioned us to design an Ice Hockey Rink in Brooklyn remained a good friend and kept in touch; particularly making the Yale Club available for us when we visit New York. Many of our board members are still living and working somewhere but most have been lost to us. Unfortunately, we were too poor to photograph the place and regret not having a collection of pictures, but it was a magnificent place. Several of our Special Education students kept in touch with us for many-years. One boy in particular continues to write Christina about his new jobs and locations.
I remember vividly not speaking to any one in Jackson about what we had just come through; not about Earth Day, the environment, the loft or LME. It had quickly become ancient history, irrelevant and redundant. We truly knew that no one we met could under stand the loft, the Earth stage and the ideals of dreamers.

1.2.3 Summary of the LME Loft: The main room of the 2,000 square foot loft was enclosed on its 100 foot long side by brick and on its 20 ends by wall to wall windows which went from ceiling to just 3 feet above the floor. Its ceiling was also the roof so it had three skylights which were held in place by 2x12 timbers every 16” on center. It was accessible from a freight elevator which opened into a vestibule and through a door into a small lobby which e=we made our reception office. We designated the entire area from the entry door to the front of the building public and the balance private. We built up the floor of the rear so we could store our many steamer trunks under the floor grid which we built pout of regular two by lumber and covered with good plywood. At one end we build a bathroom. Centered from the entry to the about three feet before the raised floor in the rear we built a cube enclosed by sheet rock. The cube had a loft for sleeping and watching television while below for cloths storage. To one side before ht bathroom was an alley with all the food preparation sink, burners, and refrigerator build into a niche of the cube and along the side wall.
On the other side was another alley for Christina office built into a niche of the cube.
The outside wall of the cube was used a projection screen and in front of the wall was build four tiers of steps which was used by students , public and audiences for lectures, symposiums and seminar,
Between the entry and the 20 feet away for the front windows we built a ziggurat of stacked drafting tables and walkways with six drafting table’s works station were below and eight workstations were above. The two sets of steps were connected above by a walkway between each and below the walkway were a low storage is for tools, drafting and art supplies.
The front area was used for gatherings and exhibits.
I had built a triangular telephone booth on the edge of the conference steps where I spent most of my time calling all of New York’s foundations, learning centers and schools. The loft was generally illuminated by front to back 4 bulb fluorescents hung from the ceiling facing the shinny white walls. All the wall were painted with a glossy white acrylic, the ceiling’s wood beams and wood panels were stained dark brown as was the drafting table structure. The conference area steps were likewise painted white and the rear raised floor was covered in our Persian carpets.

http://www.explore-oil-pastels-with-robert-sloan.com

I found out that writing How To, especially on art topics, was as much fun as writing fiction. I'd like to become a prosperous middle class author, not just try to live on the low income science fiction writers get -- most of the best are engineers or scientists writing on the side who don't need the money.

I started working on an art instruction book in 2000, but have had to completely retrain how I look at writing. How-To has no plot, no characters, no dialogue, no conflicts and no grabby immersive setting. It's ALL explication! Yeesh, how do I make that interesting? It took a lot of practice, that's how.

I have about 90 articles up at http://www.ehow.com and you can find a list of my titles in my profile there or on the footer of my blog at http://robertsloan2.deviantart.com -- most are on art topics. Out of all the pay for post places, that one paid off best and its template taught me the Step By Step formula.

I dithered between several topics till I discovered that there are very few books on Oil Pastels and only one website -- the Oil Pastel Society, a fine art society that I've since joined. It does have some articles but is not a comprehensive information site about the medium that includes a basic drawing course for beginners who can't draw a straight line. (Hint, use a ruler and don't worry about it.)

Now I have a direction. I've been making myself an expert in Oil Pastels after a lifetime of puttering with art, goofing off with art and using street sketching as the best day job I ever had. This project demands that I be a Renaissance Man.

Oil pastels are cheap. If you want to learn to draw or paint in color, the cheapest student stuff is to get oil pastels and a canvas pad along with a brush and a little bottle of turpentine. This will result in Real Oil Paintings of the sort that I sold for $5 each in New Orleans when I was starting out my street art career.

If you're unemployed or in fear of losing your job, the skill of drawing realistically will give you a level of employment security that no one who works for other people has. At the middling "journeyman" level of competence you will never be without resources again. You can always sell someone a sketch of their cat, dog, loved ones or the cool places around the place you live. Anything tourists would visit is fair game for local artists to make a buck. Most people love their hometown.

That is a lot of why I am doing this site and writing my art instruction book as a website first. John Scalzi and other science fiction writers sold pro novels and then gave away the full text as a free download. This launches careers. For my oil pastels site, it is also a passion for me to break the big Catch-22 about art and art instruction.

You don't need to be rich to learn to draw and you will never be broke if you know how to draw -- that is, draw realism. Abstracts and modern art are something else. They actually take some upper level skills even to appreciate them and are more esoteric. What the majority of people respond to is an accurate picture of someone or something they love. Or something pretty to put on their walls like a pot of flowers or bowl of fruit.

Oddly enough, while artists love doing wolves and big cats, art buyers seem to prefer paintings of prey animals like deer, pheasant and so on. Me, I like having a sabertooth on my wall and a bobcat and a lynx, but my daughter figures that's some instinct thing -- the life size tiger reads as a threat right in your den unless you are a serious cat nut.

This is a complex issue, best broken down to these questions:

Q. What do you know about people illegally downloading files over the internet?

A. I know what everyone knows from being exposed to the news media and to lawsuits filed by publishers: the phenomenon is widespread and most of the millions of exchanged files are music tracks and films (though book rip-offs are not unknown as well).

Q. Why do you think people are taking part in these electronic transactions? Does the cost of purchasing the media come into play?

A. It's a complex canvass of motivations, I guess. Many media products (especially in developing and poor countries) are overpriced in terms of the local purchasing power. Illegally downloading them is often an act of protest or defiance against what disgruntled consumers perceive as excessive profiteering. It may also be the only realistic way to gain ownership of coveted content.

The fact that everything - from text to images - is digital makes replication facile and enticing. Illegal downloading also probably confers an aura of daring and mystique on the "pirates" involved (whose life may otherwise be a lot drearier and mundane).

Additionally, these products resemble public goods in that they are nonrivalrous (the cost of extending the service or providing the good to another person is (close to) zero) and largely nonexcludable.

Most products are rivalrous (scarce) - zero sum games. Having been consumed, they are gone and are not available to others. Public goods, in contrast, are accessible to growing numbers of people without any additional marginal cost. This wide dispersion of benefits renders them unsuitable for private entrepreneurship. It is impossible to recapture the full returns they engender. As Samuelson observed, they are extreme forms of positive externalities (spillover effects).

Moreover, it is impossible to exclude anyone from enjoying the benefits of a public good, or from defraying its costs (positive and negative externalities). Neither can anyone willingly exclude himself from their remit.

Needless to emphasize that media products are not public goods at all! They only superficially resemble public goods. Still, the fact that many books, music, and some films are, indeed, in the public domain further exacerbates the consumer's confusion. "Why can I (legally) download certain books and music tracks free of charge - but not others?" - wonders the baffled surfer, who is rarely versed in the intricacies of copyright laws.

Q. Do you think this leads to a feeling of disrespect toward the various pieces of media by the person that steals it so frequently? (If I download music all the time, will I lose interest in it?)

A. I am not sure that the word "respect" is relevant here. People don't respect or disrespect music - they enjoy it, like it, or dislike it. But frequent illegal downloading of media products is, probably, the outcome of disrespect towards content intermediaries such as publishers, producers, and retail outlets. I don't know for sure because there is no research to guide us in this matter, but I would imagine that these people (wrongly) perceive content intermediaries as parasitic and avaricious.

Q. Downloading is still a widespread act today. The threats of lawsuits and legal action against downloaders hasn't stopped the problem. What, in your opinion, needs to be done to stop this behavior?

A. Law enforcement activities and lawsuits are already having an effect. But you cannot prosecute thousands of people on a regular basis without suffering a commensurate drop in popularity and a tarnished image. People do not perceive these acts as self-defense but as David vs. Goliath bullying. Sooner or later, the efficacy of such measures is bound to decline.

Media companies would do better to adopt new technologies rather than fight them. They must come forth with new business models and new venues of dissemination of content. They have to show more generosity in the management of digital rights. They have to adopt differential pricing of their products across the board, to reflect disparities in earnings and purchasing power in the global marketplace. They have to transform themselves rather than try to coerce the world into their antiquated and Procrustean ways of doing things.

Q. Psychologically speaking, is there a certain kind of person who is more likely to take part in this behavior? Do you feel that this is a generational issue?

A. I cannot but speculate. There is a dearth of data at this early stage. I would imagine that illegal downloaders are hoarders. They are into owning things rather than into using or consuming them. They are into building libraries and collections. They are young and intelligent, but not affluent. They are irreverent, rebellious, and non-conformist. They may be loners who network socially only online. Some of them love culture and its artifacts but they need not be particularly computer-savvy.

More here:

The Demise of Intellectual Property?

http://samvak.tripod.com/nm047.html

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###

The following provides a context formy internet work and, in the process, will serve as advice for those who are looking for advice.-Ron

The first edition of this particular list of sites, sites especially devoted to publishing and posting(1) in 2001/2 was a very short list consisting of only a small handful of locations. A second edition in 2003 became a third edition in April 2004. That original list of a few sites in 2001 had burgeoned to over 800 sites by January 1st 2005 and to over 1000 by May 21st 2005. The contents of what became eleven files(8 arch-lever files and 5 two-ring binders) and well over 1000 sites is now divided into 18 parts, a division that evolved naturally and was not based on any inherent system. As the sites were contacted and their forum outlines copied, filed and used for recording my postings, the collection of resource/site information, et cetera was brought together into these several volumes.

This list, like the first list described in the first document(List #1) became, as I say above, too lengthy a list to really service properly. It required the work of other Baha’is and so I placed a notice/article in the Australian Baha’i Bulletin which appeared on October 12th 2004 across Australia. I also presented a workshop at the Tasmanian Summer School on “The Art of Using the Internet.” There was no response to my notice in The Bulletin and no evidence of any increased presence of Baha’is other than myself at the vast majority of the sites, except of course at specifically Baha’i sites, ten months after the advertisement. The participation of Baha’is at websites is difficult to assess when one is talking about 2000 sites. The sheer magnitude of the task/process, the number of sites and the vast quantity of participants over all these sites is simply beyond any one person to assess participation levels by the thousands of Baha’is on the internet.

I have given this entire package of 15 arch-lever files and 7 two-ring-binders, in 18 parts, the label Volume 12: Publishing because the total exercise is one of publication in some form or another on the Internet. I made several copies of an earlier list of sites for those attending the workshop on “the use of the internet” at the Tasmania Baha’i summer school in February 2005. Volumes 1 and 2: The Baha’i Faith and the Arts(1.1.,1.2, 2.1 and 2.2) and Volumes 3 to 17: Publishing(excluding Vol.12) contain a large body of sites on: Australian Poetry, Canadian Poetry, Cinema/Media Studies and several collections involving The Baha’i Faith and the Arts. These subjects contain a burgeoning list of sites, sites which I acquired and serviced during the first three developmental years 2001 to 20042 but which, at least for the most part and at least since Ridvan 2004, I have come to service or contact relatively infrequently. This latter category of sites, while being devoted to posting and publishing as well, as the titles on that list indicate, is also devoted to obtaining information.

At this stage of development, these sites serve as an archival base that I service periodically as the need, interest and desire arises. Sections like (a) Canadian Poetry, (b) American poetry, (c) diary/journal sites, (d) literature and (e) cinema/media sites I try to service more frequently but this, too, has become impossible on even a regular basis.

3. Future Development

In the months and years that lie ahead I’m sure this base of over 4000 sites will be extended into further parts and volumes. I hope, too, that the other 1000 or more archival/information sites will find my presence there more extensively than thusfar. But, as anyone can appreciate, well over 4000 sites to post Baha’i material in some kind of teaching capacity is too much of a bite to chew, as one might put it colloquially. This activity is clearly a publishing and teaching device that has assumed impossible dimensions. There is always work, publishing work and teaching the Cause in the process. Perhaps, too, I will develop a system for servicing the sites with more frequency and thoroughness, especially if others become involved in this activity which I am confident they will in the years ahead even if this involvement is not part of any coordinated exercise and even if, at present, I have not engaged anyone else in a similar level of activity.

There is necessarily a life other than posting stuff on the internet. It could be argued that I spread myself too thin and should aim for depth and not breadth and that may be true. Posting at sites has a certain serendipitous quality just like teaching the Cause in everyday life. On the internet, so in life, I have scattered seeds far and wide, but not necessarily deep/in one place. Depth, of course, is always difficult to measure and all I want to do in this brief outline is give readers a general picture of my website activity.

Since the completion of my autobiography by Ridvan 2004, I have had no specific idea/plan for another book, although intimations of a book to write occur from time to time, but I do not seem to have the inspiration, the specific direction, to take on a book. I spend some time occasionally, as I said above, working on the sixth edition of my autobiography and developing ideas for other books. But, in the main, I now work in this milieux of over 4000 sites3 when the spirit moves me. These sites provide enough to keep a marathon runner-writer busy into perpetuity, well into several more Olympic games or, in terms of the Baha’i calendar, at least to the end of the first century of the Formative Age in 2021 or even the end of my own first century in 2044 and two Baha’i centuries.4
___________________________________________________________
_______________________FOOTNOTES________________________

1 The term ‘publishing’ refers to systematic posting of essays and, indeed, a variety of other material on the internet, material like: emails/letters, parts/chapters of books, poems, prose-poems, reviews of films books, inter alia. In addition this List #2 is comprehensive but not absolutely accurate due to the sheer number of sites involved.

2 In the six year period before the first edition of my own website, from 1991 to 1997, and the four years after the creation of the 1st edition of my website, from 1997 to 2001, I began to search out and contact websites. This was the first decade of my use of the email facility as well. These were embryonic years and I have no record of any results, any sites listed from this decade of beginnings. Of course I was still employed professionally as a teacher in Tafe until 1999 and as a volunteer teacher with a School for Seniors until 2004 or actively engaged in community work of different kinds until May 2005. I dropped these involvements at various times in the years 1999 to 2005.

From 1999 to 2001, during the first two years of my retirement, I began to set up my systems: files, categories, internet order and form, etc. here in George Town for future writing and work on the internet. In these first two years I really only began to see, insensibly for the most part, the potential for publication and teaching in this medium. But as the 2nd edition of my website went on-line in May 2001, at the start of the Five Year Plan(2001-2006) and at the same time as the opening of the Terraces, I began to see the internet potential for ‘seed planting.’ By April 2006 I was spending virtually all my time reading and posting on the interent; and in writing articles, essays and books generally.

3 A team of several people could be kept happily employed servicing these sites with a minimum of regularity and a periodicity of once a week, fortnight, month or whatever frequency, depth and breadth; indeed many more could also be employed should this exercise be seriously taken up by a group of Baha’is, especially/only people with skills at writing and depending on the time they could devote to this exercise. No coordination would be required for such an exercise, although if it was to be done in a sophisticated way that is another question. It would be too onerous and complex a task for me to enagage in from this remote backwater. Perhaps a small team of two or three would be best. In addition, there are many more sites which will be added to this list as time goes on. I think this idea, this proposal, is unlikely to be taken up in the short term, in the immediate years ahead.

4 I hope this brief essay provides a useful base of information, a useful outline, to anyone expressing interest in this activity of internet posting. I have written this introduction, as I say above, partly for my own use simply to outline just how this activity has developed in recent years and partly for interested others who think they might like to give their writing skills and their interest in teaching the Cause on the internet a good workout. Readers should not concern themselves unduly with the above process of development that I have outlined. It is essentially a sketch for my personal purposes and interest. But, as I have also said above, my interest in this process of record keeping is minimal and my reason for outlining the process has had, thusfar, little interest and value to anyone else.
___________________________________________________________
STAGE 2: LISTS 2 & 3:

List #2:
INTERNET SITES IN 19 PARTS (15 arch-lever files & 8 two-ring binders)
A SUMMARY STATEMENT

Most of the internet site information below was gathered after I stopped writing the 4th edition of my autobiography, Pioneering Over Four Epochs at Ridvan 2004. In late May 2004 I initiated the 5th edition of that book and a copy was placed in the Baha’i World Centre Library. Work on that 5th edition has continued from time to time as inspiration and relevant content has come to mind. Posting on internet sites came centre stage in 2004, but after several months of posting the spirit became exhausted with the process and had to move on to other activity. What is found here on this list below in Volume 12: Parts 1 to 19, was initiated in 2004 and continues to 1 July 2008 as I make this summary statement.

On 23 May 2008 I will have been engaged in this exercise for seven years since the opening of The Terraces(23/5/01), the opening of the 2nd edition of my website and since recording my postings on the internet. The internet site titles/ headings from over 4000 sites now in 2008 I have listed in a document of some 110 pages. They can be obtained from me under separate cover. As the months and years go on, of course, more sites, will be added.

There are some 1000 sites(a guesstimation) put together from 2001 to 2008 which are for the most part only information sites. No posting is done to these sites, no dialogue, no interaction—just information is obtained. This list is comprised of both Baha’i sites and other interest group sites for information and publication and I have not included it here.1 I have subtracted these 1000 sites from the total of all my sites giving a working base of some 4000 sites at which to post, interact and teach.

Each Baha’i who makes the effort to register and post at internet sites will obviously do so on the basis of his or her own interests and capacities. My list inevitably will not be another person’s list. But the following list of sites will give anyone who is interested in posting Baha’i material and what for them is ‘Baha’i related material’ an idea of the sites on which I am ‘working.’ Feel free to write to me for more advice on how you might take advantage of this immense teaching opportunity. -Ron Price, 1 March 2008.
___________________________FOOTNOTES____________________
1 There are several lists of sites now which taken together come to over five thousand sites. Some are Baha’i information sites and some useful sites for posting Baha’i related material. I have not included them all here; they are available to anyone who is interested. I have included here(above and below) a total of some 110 pages of A-4 size(font 14) material.
2 Given the range and extent of the internet sites I have posted at; and given the limitations of time and energy, the presence of the Baha’i Faith at most of these sites is still (a) embryonic, (b) slight and (c) requires much more development/interaction/postings to be noticeable or significant in any quantifiable sense. To put it another way, the Baha’i presence at these sites is still coming out of obscurity. But, for the most part, the history of these sites is coextensive with my own involvement. The years 2000/2001 and after were, in many ways, beginning years for many, if not most, of the sites. I am pleased that I was able to get involved in these foundation years.

I have had more jobs, FT, PT and volunteer, over more than 50 years and, in the process, there was much reinvention of myself, although I did not see it as such at the time. The following essay illustrates my point.-Ron
---------------------------------
A WAY OF TRAVELLING: A MODUS OPERANDI/VIVENDI
LETTER WRITING

2 JOB APPLICATIONS A WEEK FOR 40 YEARS
JOB HUNTING 1961-2001

The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer use in the job-hunting world, should help anyone wanting to know something about my professional background, my writing and my life. This resume might be useful for the few who want to assess my suitability for some advertised/unadvertised employment position which, I must emphasize, I never apply for any more. I stopped applying for full-time jobs five years ago in 2001, part-time ones in 2003 and general volunteer activity in 2005. I left the world of volunteer activity, except for work in one international organization, so that I could travel in my mind. And so it is, that after travelling in the world of the great new technological birds of the sky, which began to their extensive movements to and from city and after in the 1950s, after my own years of buying tickets to travel by air(1967-2002)-some 35 years, I never get into the sky any more.

The years 55 to 60 marked a turning point for me into a much more extensive involvement in writing. Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary and hopefully stimulating leisure-time-part-time-full-time pursuit. Travel takes place but it is, for the most part, in one's mind, one's imagination and memory. In my case in these first years of late adulthood(60-62) writing is full-time, about 60 hours a week.1 The times I travelled by air: to Baffin Island, to several cities in Canada, to Europe, to North America, to Australia, to Hong Kong, to Israel over those 35 years are now memories, happy ones that dotted my life with their landmarks of change and transition.

Inevitably the style of one's writing is a reflection of the person, their experience and their philosophy. I could set out my experience in an attachment and I did so for some 40 years in a logical fashion in the form of a resume.2 If, as Carl Jung writes, we are what we do, then some of what I am could be found in that attachment. This document would seem over-the-top as they say these days since it goes on for 12-15 pages, but forty years in the professional and non-professional job world produces a great pile of stuff/things. This document is the last resume I used when I was in the job hunting game back in 2001-3. I have updated it, of course, to include many of the writing projects I have taken on during these first years of my retirement from full-time, casual and volunteer employment.

The resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the document, the entry ticket which, over the years, has opened up the possibilities of another adventure, another pioneering move to another town, another state or country, another location, work in another organization, another portion of my life. I'm sure that will also be the case in the years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should, for some reason, movement from place to place be necessary or desired. But this seems unlikely as I head into the last stages of my life. The first step was the job application and the second step, if the first was successful, was to get on a plane and go to a part of the world where you had never been and at the end of the journey would be a job interview.

People who come across this statement might like to see it as "what happens when you can travel and not have to go to work any more." In the last eight years which have been the first years of an early retirement(1999 to 2007), I have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had been able in my early and middle adulthood(1965 to 2005) when job, family and the demands and interests of various community projects kept my nose to the grindstone as they say colloquially. And now, with the unloading of much of the volunteer work I took on from 1999-2005, with my last child having left home in 2005 and a more settled home environment on the domestic front than I've ever had, the years of late adulthood(age 60 to 80) beckon. My resume reflects this shift in my activity-base and travel is what it's all about now. But, as I say, it is travel in my head, on TV and DVDs, on video, in paintings, photos, pictures but never in those jets and their streams of energy, their booming and buzzing through the sky with their silence and their noise.

This process of frequent moves and frequent jobs is not everyone's style or pattern of living. I have lived in 37 houses and 22 towns since I was born: 1944-2004. That was a good deal of travelling, let me tell you. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place and, perhaps, a very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although some degree of inner change, some inner shifting is just about inevitable, or so it seems to me, especially as we have moved toward and entered this new millennium. Most of the people on Earth never get on a plane.

For many millions of people during the years 1961-2001, my years of being jobbed, the world was my oyster and the oyster of many a million in the West. It was an oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist-oyster, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context, a global oyster. This was true for me during those years in which I was looking for amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment security and comfort. These were my adventurous years of pioneering, my applying-for-job days, a particular form of travel, the forty year period 1961-2001.

The following resume(not included here) altered many times, of course, during those forty years is now for the most part, as I indicated above, not used in these years of my retirement, except as an information, bio-data, vehicle for interested readers. This document is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry, although some poets regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, personal background as irrelevant to their writing-work. I frequently use this resume at various website locations now on the Internet when I want to provide some introductory background on myself, indeed, I could list many new uses after forty years of only one use--to help me get a job, make more money, experience some enrichment to my life, etcetera. The use of the resume saves one from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

I don't have to say it all again in resume after resume to the point of utter tedium as I did so frequently when applying for jobs, especially in the days before the email and the internet. A few clicks of one's personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of life's game goes on or comes to a quick end—and another jet appears like magic on one’s personal horizon.

During those job-hunting years 1961-2001 I applied for some four thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of those forty years! Well, its not the best base for travel, but it is very common. This is a guesstimation, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this forty year period. The great bulk of the thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of perhaps half a dozen of those letters in a file in the Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X of my autobiographical work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Given the thousands of hours over forty years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to the pioneering venture that is my life; given the amount of paper produced and energy expended in the process; given the amount of writing done in the context of these various jobs,3 some of the correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life, my autobiography.4

It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire, to write this short statement fitting all those thousands of resumes into a larger context. I like to see it as 'a perspective on travel.' The things we do when we retire!5 Reflections on one’s experience of the age of popular jet travel, the opportunity to travel in a sort of fantasy land that really took off in the 1950s when I was a child and adolescent.

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1. This involves reading, posting on the internet, developing my own website and writing in several genres.
2. My resume is only included with this statement when it seems appropriate or on request.
3. Beginning with the summer job I had in the Canadian Peace Research Institute in 1964, I wrote an unnumbered quantity of: summaries, reports, essays, evaluations, inter alia, in my many jobs. None of that material has been kept in any of my files.
4. The Letters section of my autobiography now occupies some 25 arch-lever files and two-ring binders and covers the period 1960 to 2005. I guesstimate the collection contains about 3000 letters. This does not include these thousands of job applications and their replies. I have kept, as I say above, about half a dozen of these letters.
Note: Since about 1990 thousands of emails have been sent to me and replies have been written but, like the job application, most have been deleted from any potential archive. For the most part these deleted emails seem to have no long term value in an archive of letters. They were deleted as quickly as they came in. Of course there are other emails, nearly all of the correspondence I have sent and received since about 1990 which would once have been in the form of letters, is now in the form of emails. They are kept in my files. A brief perusal of my files will indicate a great deal of the form of travel I am emphasizing here. ____________________
That's all folks!

I will place the acquisition of ideas in the context of my notebooks:
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AN INTRODUCTION TO MY NOTEBOOKS

In his work from day to day Leonard da Vinci concentrated on one thing at a time and, while he concentrated on that one thing, that thing was the most important in the world. Not much got done in the short term because da Vinci seemed interested in everything but, over a lifetime, da Vinci accomplished many great things, albeit unfinished. After his death Leonard da Vinci’s Notebooks were hidden away, scattered or lost. His wonderful ideas were forgotten; his inventions were not tested and built for hundreds of years. It was largely due to his wide interests that the things he started were never finished. These casual, passing, fleeting, but intense, interests can be found described, outlined, in those Notebooks. These Notebooks record his observations, his sketches, his notes. They are all scattered through 28 Notebooks in over 5000 pages from 1490 to 1519. The Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of philosophy, scientific enquiry and art with, arguably, four major topics: painting, architecture, mechanics and anatomy made when he was 37 to 67.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Leonardo da Vinci,” 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., October 31st, 2004.
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Some may see it a little presumptuous for me to compare my Notebooks to those of one of the greatest geniuses of history. But, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in her article Artist, Seeker and Seer, our greatness “rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle around the great.”1 ‘Contrast’ is a better word than ‘compare’ because my Notebooks are so very different than da Vinci’s. I won’t ennumerate all the differences; perhaps the main difference is a visual bias in his work and a print bias in mine. Mine were collected some 500 years after da Vinci’s. Perhaps the first Notebook I created was in 1949 in kindergarten and from that year until 1962 I created many a school Notebook. None of these notes now exist except two essays from English class in 1961-2 and now located in my Journal Volume 1.1.

I have some other notes going back to the early to mid sixties, to the start of my pioneering-travel life in 1961-2, newspaper columns by Richard Needham of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the 1970s, mostly (a) photocopies of material given to me by students at Box Hill Tafe in Melbourne, (b) from Baha’i books which I keep in my Notebook: “Notes/Quotes file B,” (c) from a sociology of art course I taught in 1974 and (d) from media studies courses I taught in Ballarat in 1976-7. But the vast bulk of my notes comes from the period 1982 to 2004. Many notes and Notebooks from 1982 to 2002 were given to the Baha’i Council of the Northern Territory as part of the History of the Baha’i Faith in that territory.

What exists now in my study are notes and Notebooks for a twenty-five year period, 1983 to 2008, from the age of 39 to 64.2 This collection of 300(ca) Notebooks, in the form of two-ring binders and arch-lever files, consists of written notes and quotes from books on a multitude of subjects, photocopies and typed copies of the works of others and notes taken mostly from my reading and to a far lesser extent my observations and experiences. There are many categories of these Notebooks: (i) journal and diary Notebooks, (ii) Baha’i Notebooks and (iii) Notebooks on a multitude of humanities and social science disciplines/topics. I have made a list of these and previous Notebooks in Section IX.1 of my files. They are found in the same file as: Section VI, Volume 2: Part 1: Unpublished Writings. I have also added additional information on the notebooks of other writers to help provide perspectives on my own notes and note-keeping. I should add, too, that there are many (iv) poetry Notebooks which occupy an extensive category unto itself. One could say that these are the four main categories of Notebooks that I have in my study twenty-five years after I began to keep notes that became the collection that now exists.3

New ideas are incubated, to some extent, in these Notebooks. I have squeezed brief writing periods, sketches of varying lengths and tasks of different kinds, into my frenetic life out of necessity because I was teaching a particular subject, out of interest because it was associated with my involvement in the Baha’i Faith or because I wanted to write about a subject, an idea, an experience, if not at the time I recorded the words, at least later on. I rarely recorded observations of nature in any detail, although occasionally I did in my poetry. The accounts of my experiences can be found in my journals and my poetry.

There are 1000s of pages of notes; I would not even want to begin to count them. Over time I hope to write a more detailed outline of their origins, their evolution and their present contents. I’m not sure they are worth preserving as da Vinci’s were hundreds of years after they were written. I think it unlikely, although I will leave that to a posterity that I can scarcely anticipate at this climacteric of history in which I am living. For now, though, this brief statement is sufficient.4
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__________________________________FOOTNOTES_______________________
1 Bahiyyih Nakhjvani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.19.
2 My Notebooks from the age of 18 to 39, from 1962 to 1983, are so minuscule as to hardly rate a mention. Those from the age of 5 to 18, although extensive, have disappeared into the dustbin of history. My first notes from the period 1983 to 2008 come from January 19th 1984, a journal entry. A more extensive analysis than this cursory one here may reveal a different timetable, a different history of my Notebooks.
3 Of course the whole note-taking process could be said to begin in the early years of primary school, say, 1949-1953 by which time I was in grade 4 and nine years old.
4 Ron Price, “In Commemoration of the 47th Anniversary of the Passing of the Guardian in 1957,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 4, 2004.
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Ron Price
23/10/’08.
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