This is a close up detail of a photo I took of a painting in the Musee des Beaux Arts, Brussels Belgium.
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This is a close up detail of a photo I took of a painting in the Musee des Beaux Arts, Brussels Belgium.
Across the street from where I stayed in Brussels was this very modern addtion to quite an old building.
The view from my window! I had a roof view.
beautiful overview of the park. They have gardening and horticulture classes at this park.
Giant banana
It takes a lot of flowers to do this type of planting.
Vivian Reiss is well known for her series of paintings of sheep. Here she is painting sheep on a farm near Roseneath, Ontario.
A beautiful church in Ghent, Belgium. I loved walking around this church, it had a very light airy feeling, which I found in churches in Belgium and Netherlands, as they like to paint the interiors white.
I was fascinated by this painting I saw in the Boijmans museum in Rotterdam. It has a little virgin and child surrounded by a cloud of symbols and angels in gold.
Bruges is an extremely beautiful and ancient city of canals, churches and houses. Walking along the canals at night is extremely peaceful and beautiful.
This park called Jardin du Mont Des Arts in French is located where the hill where the royal castle is built descends into the old town. It is a beautifully landscaped park, and the flute player looks a lot like some of the flemish portraits in the Musee.
This was one of my favorite paintings from the Musee de Beaux Arts in Brussels, Belgium, a museum filled with great masterpieces. I looked at this for a long time, and it charm only increased.
This tree is at the ancient Greek and Roman site of Gortys/Gortyna, on the island of Crete. This tree started growing 1600 years ago, which coincided with an earthquake which hit the site. A Byzantine church was destroyed in the earthquake, and the tree began growing around a column from the church, which is now embedded in the trunk. The site was filled with trees like these, with extremely knotted trunks. This tree is across the road from the main site, where vast fields are filled with rubble from unexcavated buildings dating from more than 2000 years ago.
Frank Sinatra sings the Best Is Yet To Come
Vivian Reiss has completed a large series of paintings of sheep in a farm outside Toronto. The works have extremely inventive compositions. Sheep stare directly out of the canvas, while other sheep stand in a the barnyard architecture with their backs to us, while other sheep haunches edge out of the side of the painting. Fasniating and unusual use of of composition and color.
Here is a sketch for the Bonheur De Vivre by Matisse. I have previously posted the final painting. I love this sketch, beacuse it is a more abstracted version of the final painting.
Here i am wamdering around the landscaping outside the New World Center, the symphony hall designed by Frank Gehry in Miami, Florida.
This is a baby golden snub nosed monkey from China. National Geographic had a photo essay on them this month.
They live in very cold conditions. One type of snub nosed monkey sneezes when it gets rain on its nose, so it spends rainy days with its head between its knees.
At the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach there are two very beautiful, small Diebenkorns that transfixed me.
This song was in my dream last night. Not sure what it means yet. By Jefferson Airplane
This beautiful moth was found on the kitchen counter where I am in the US Virgin Islands. It has both gold and silver on its wings. A precious metal moth! BK9W6TNBSG7E
On the way down to the beach in St. John, US Virgin Islands, I found these beautiful wild orchids
here is another beautiful orchid from USVI
I went snorkling in the US Virgin Isles with an underwater camera, here are some beautiful photos I took of the sky taken from underwater. enjoy!
I am in the US Virgin Islands having a great time. Today on the beach I found a hermit crab living in an abandoned snail shell. It was very cute, and shy at first, but pretty soon it was out of its shell and crawling around.
It has one large claw and one small claw. And it sometimes bites! I saw a guy in town with one on his necklace. he must feed it everyday.
Here is a fascinitaing fact about hermit crabs I found on wikipedia:
Several hermit crab species, both terrestrial and marine, use “vacancy chains” to find new shells: when a new, bigger shell becomes available, hermit crabs gather around it and form a kind of queue from largest to smallest. When the largest crab moves into the new shell, the second biggest crab moves into the newly vacated shell, thereby making its previous shell available to the third crab, and so on.
Great song by Bruce Cockburn. I keep having scary dreams about a problem I’m having, but last night I had a good dream where my problems were all solved -not perfectly, but good enough - and I could move on in happiness. It reminded me of the lyric “had another dream about the lions at the door, they weren’t half as frightening they were before”
Here are some beautiful things from the Mesoamerican collection at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto. I was there last week.
Serpent bowl from Panama 800-1200 AD

Crab bowl from Panama 800-1200 AD

polychrome bowl with hieroglyphic writing and a God in the centre. Guatemala 550-950 AD

Dancing spider monkey vase, Belize or Guatemala AD 550-850

Veracruz standing dancer, from Veracruz Mexico.
QI is fun british quiz show featuring Stephen Fry. The questions are so difficult that they dont expect the panel to know the answers, so points are awarded based on how interesting the answers are. Points are deducted, and alarms go off when an answer given is obvious but wrong. You can watch a lot more episodes on Youtube, including the last two parts of this episodes.
Another beautiful painting I saw from my last trip to the Metropolitan Museum. This painting is by Liberale da Verona entitled Scene from a Novella and was painted in Siena between 1467 and 1476. It is a rare secular painting from the Italian renaissance, as such a huge proportion of paintings were of the life of Christ, with portraiture a distant second. The painting depicts a scene from a now-lost novel about two lovers. There is a matching panel in which the two lovers are playing chess.
Bobo Stenson is a terrific jazz pianist and composer. My childhood nickname was Bobo, so I particularly like him. Here he performs a concert in a forest, which is a great accomplishment of logisitics and a beautiful conceit. The first piece is his composition. You can see the whole concert on youtube.
Here is a beautiful song by Bob Marley on the same subject as Don’t Worry Be Happy! by Bobby Mcferrin. Dont you worry bout a thing! Enjoy!
During my recent trip to the Metropolitan Museum, I was transfixed by this beautiful painting by Bramantino (Bartolomeo Suardi). It really deserves much greater fame. It is an unusually peaceful serene composition. The Madonna holds an apple, with Latin name malus, for it represents Adam and Eve’s original sin. She holds it away from the baby Jesus. On the right, there is a potted dianthus or carnation, which smell like cloves. It is a symbol for the Virgin Mary. The curvature of the Madonna’s arms creates a swirling impression and the baby Jesus’ arms mimic this movement.
It also has a really beautifully carved frame.
I just returned from a trip to the Metropolitan Museum and I am going to post some things I saw. What a beautiful museum. Here is the right panel of a triptych by Donato De’ Bardi. It is so beautiful and serene. Everyone should have a miniature sheep as a pet. The beautifully sculptural folds of cloth were a major preoccupation of the rennaissance.
Early in Piet Mondrian’s career, before he developed his famous style, he went to Zeeland in the Netherlands and painted a series of paintings of sand dunes. These paintings were a landmark in his development as an artist, and where he began to develop his understanding of line, geometry and color.
These paintings have been on my mind and have been a great inspiration to me. Thank you Mondrian.
This painting is in the Guggenheim Museum and dates to 1910.
visit my myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/joelgarten to hear 7 of my new compositions I just recorded yesterday! They are the first seven peices on the myspace playlist. They are all solo piano improvisations. Enjoy!
I`ve been through some really tough, anxious times recently. This song can really brighten your mood in these hard times. it comes with much love. Joel
Vivian Reiss’ front yard is filled with swiss chard, so she calls is her front chard. Beautiful rainbow colors!
A fun monkey cup in terracotta. It dates to the mid-6th century B.C.. It comes from East Greece or Cyprus.
A beautiful song sung by Smokey Robinson
I love Islamic calligraphy. The shape and flow of the letters is so beautiful.
Islamic art did not feature large scale painting, so other arts, such as bookbinding, calligraphy and miniature painting became very prominent.
This sculpture is in the magnificent Phnom Da style of Cambodia and dates to around the 6th c. AD. There are very few examples of this style of art, which remarkably displays influence from ancient Greek art. I saw a few examples in the National Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This particular piece comes from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Look at the beautiful sculptural curvature of the body.
I recorded a few new pieces today and I have posted one of them on my mysapce page. It is a solo piano improvisation. I hope you enjoy. To listen, please go to: www.myspace.com/joelgarten
It is the first piece in the lineup.
Hope you enjoy!
This is a spectacular sculpture that I remember as one of the highlights of the British Museum in London. The British Museum is a huge storehouse of treasures from around the world, including the Rosetta Stone, the engraved stone with inscriptions in three languages that allowed Egyptian hieroglyphics to be deciphered.
This sculpture comes from the Mesopotamian site of Ur, which is in Iraq. A pair of these sculptures were found in the same area by the archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley. It is made of gold, shell and the beautiful blue semi-precious stone Lapis Lazuli, one of my favorite minerals. It dates to 2400-2600 BC. This is a great masterpiece of Mesopotamian art.
Prokofiev is one of my favorite composers, and was a master orchestrator. Unfortunately, his creativity was cramped but the repressive Soviet regime. He has created many great pieces, ballets and operas. Here are three movements of a piano concerto he wrote. To make it even more exciting, play all three at the same time! (This is what the composer Charles Ives would have recommended!)
Maybe I’m Amazed by Paul McCartney
I will be playing a solo concert of my piano improvisations on August 25 2010 at 8pm. This is a casual concert by invitation. If you would like to come and havent received an invitation, please email me at contact@Joelgarten.com
This is one of Matisse’s great masterpieces painted 1905-1906, a huge canvas with a lot going on. It resides in the Barnes Foundation. Barnes was a great collector of Matisse and many other French painters.
The energy in this painting is intense at the same time as being slightly euphoric and transformational. The painting has so many elements in it, I see ice age cave paintings in the gazelles at the right, and it looks like Kandinsky in the area at the top middle of the painting. The composition is intriguing with a ramp like feature ascending from the bottom of the painting. The dancing figures seem to be sending energy to the sky. This painting is the future.
Toronto’s newest beach is the sweetly named Sugar Beach, located next to the Redpath Sugar plant. It has cheerful pink beach umbrellas and white sand. The shade of pink in the umbrellas is slightly purple-y, which is quite lovely. A very relaxing inviting place to while away a few hours on the beach chairs. It is located at the foot of Jarvis on Queens Quay East.
Charming music video by harpist/vocalist Joanna Newsom
Tarako is a type of Japanese pasta sauce made from spicy fish roe. Its really delicious! The Kewpie company makes these fun commercials with the little kewpie-beanbag charachters. Thanks to Yurie for sending me this video.
These portraits of me were taken by the photographer Mia Hanson, who as you can see is extremely talented. They were taken last March at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my favorite museum.
This was a present from my mother. It reminds me of a white ceramic monkey that Elvis had at Graceland, which coincidentally my grandmother also had in her apartment in Florida.
I love orchids, they are such beautiful exotic flowers. The most popular orchids for at-home growing is the phalaenopsis orchid. They are very hardy, and the blossoms last a long time. They require watering once a week with lukewarm water.
Philip Guston, like Richard Diebenkorn was an artist that had a career both as an abstract painter and a figurative painter, both of which were very successful.
The intent of the two phases of his career seem very different, yet it is possible to see how stylistically he morphed from one to the other. I love how musical his abstract works are, and I love how his figurative period matches a playfulness with serious artistic accomplishment.
You can now hear my solo piano improvisations on my myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/joelgarten
These beautiful monkeys have a golden mane of fur. They are tiny little monkeys that live in the jungle in Brazil, where they eat insects and vegetation and anything else they can scrounge like bird eggs. There are some at the Toronto Zoo and there are some in Singapore zoo, where they are kept without a cage in a bush in the middle of the zoo. As I was watching one it hopped out and rested on my shoe for a moment. They live in little family units and sleep in giant bromelaids. Unfortunately they are very endangered.
Last night’s concert was a great success. I played five pieces and an encore. Above are a couple photos of me playing inside the piano. The concert was attended by two radio personalities, Jaymz Bee and Marilyn Lightstone.
This beautiful, simple vase comes from Korea and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its from the late 13th Century. It has such a simple grace to it. The glaze is called Celadon, which is usually a greenish color, but depending on its application can be from white to grey to yellow to blue to many shades of green.
A great masterpiece by Petrus Christus from 1449. There is so much going on in this painting, its hard to catalogue. Look closely and carefully, and you can teast out a great many details, compositional tricks, and exceptional shows of technique. A picture that keeps giving. Thanks to Petrus Christus!
This beautiful enamel beaker is one of the finest examples from the medieval period. It features playful monkeys taking a peddler’s belongings and frolicking in the trees. The monkeys are a symbol and commentary on human folly. No matter what we do, the monkeys take the proceeds. This beaker was once in the collection of Piero de Medici and later of J. Pierpont Morgan. It is now in the Cloisters in New York.
This monkey is called the douc langur, and it is beautiful. They are very endangered. I’ve never been to Vietnam, but I’ve seen them in a zoo and they are very graceful, peaceful animals.
baby one:
Here is another amazing vietnamese monkey, the Cat Ba Langur. Look how perfect its hair is!
I will be playing a solo concert of my piano improvisations on July 21 2010 at 8pm. This is a casual concert by invitation. If you would like to come and havent received an invitation, please email me at contact@Joelgarten.com
Blythe dolls are sixties-style big eyed dolls that became popular in Japan after being promoted in an advertising campaign for the department store Parco. When I was in Japan I had a friend who looked exactly like one of these dolls. Here is a blog that specializes in tiny clothing for the dolls.

Manet painted many great paintings, many of which feature this model, named Victorine Meurent (1844–1928). What I find most interesting about his work are his compositions. The inclusion here of the parrot perch is essential to balancing the picture. Each element is, in its own subtle way, important to the painting’s composition.
This painting is of the same model, this time dressed as a bullfighter. Again each element is essential to the composition in its own subtle way. These paintings both reside in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
National Geographic Magazine had an amazing article about bowerbirds, a small bird that lives in Australia and New Guinea.
What makes the bowerbird unique is that the males create amazing love nests decked out with found objects to woo the oposite sex. They compile objects, including blue caterpiller feces, bits of broken CDs, plastic wrappers, leaves, and stones into decorated “avenues” that lead to a roundish enclosure, all to entice females to visit and mate with them. The females often visit numorous times before deciding to mate with a male, chosing based on the quality of the architecture and the pizzazz of the male’s dance.
They also have a culture, in that in different areas, different design schemes are more popular, including one area where the birds prefer grey and green palates.
This is one of my favorite paintings by Vermeer. There are only 36 Vermeer paintings in existance.
Maid Asleep is a dreamy painting with a composition with multiple planes.
Viktor and Rolf are an innovative fashion design duo. Here is a fashion show they put together for Spring/Summer 2009 which I admire. It is a completely digital show, featuring the model Shalom Harlow, who was filmed with multiple cameras and digitally inserted into a catwalk wearing each outfit. The result is that she walks past herself on the runway numerous times. The clothing itself is very futuristic, but not star-treky. It reminds me of what people might be wearing five or ten years in the future. The first dress is a real show stopper.
Cute alpcas captured by my cell phone camera.
One of the features that humans find inherently cute is large eye size in realtion to head size. Alpacas have very big eyes, which is part of the reason they are so cute. Scientists conjecture that the ability to discern cuteness is an adaptation that makes us want to take care of babies, who, like alpacas, have large eye to head size ratios.
Alpacas are a domesticated form of the wild animal called the vicuña. They, along with llamas, are related to camels (two humps) and dromedaries (one hump). All of the existing camelid family had a common ancestor in North America, which spread to South America and Asia, but then died out in North America. Over time, humans have domesticated the wild forms, leaving us with alpacas, llamas, and camels today.
A great inspirational song. “Our Golden Rule: have faith in you and the things you do, you wont go wrong, this is our family jewel”.
The family jewel is faith in yourself and what you do; a concept rather than something material.
Also its fun to dance to.
Odaiba is an island area in Tokyo Japan accessible by a monorail. It was one of the most fun adventures I had in Tokyo (and there were a lot!). Every stop on the Odaiba Monorail had some great architectural attraction.
The Island is actually artificial, built to protect Edo from the Americans at the end of the Edo Period. It didn’t work, so Japan was forced to open itself to the world, exporting woodblock prints to Europe which would help to unleash impressionism. But more about that later, here are a couple sights on Odaiba:
Fuji TV building with its giant spherical nodule.
Tokyo Big Site, conference centre that looks like an upside down pyramid.
Update!
These came from the blog http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/
Check out these amazing sculptures by Jean Dubuffet in a show from 2008. They look a little like Leger sculptures.
see all the images here http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/tag/jean-dubuffet/
Jean Dubuffet is in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the top two paintings, and the MOMA, which has many. His work pus together a very inspired child-like aesthetic, married with a seriousness that allows the creation of work that aligns “the primitive” with the sublime and “high culture” ….. whatever any of those academic terms even mean. I have always admired his work, that can play on so many levels, its seriously childishness, its muddy textures that evoke a faint trace of african tribal art, the dreamlike compositions. Overall an underappreciated artist who somehow founds his way to great collections.
Jean Dubb
It turns out that my blog entry on wooden gongs is the first hit for a google search of Wooden Gongs. I never imagined that happening! More information about the Chinese wooden gong:
Beautiful sunrise over Stony Lake where I was this past few days. July 1 2010 Canada Day
Jeanne Beker of Fashion Television, who was at last week’s impromptu concert where I played my solo piano improvisations, says about my music:
“Joel’s multi-layered music sweeps you away. He paints rich and mysterious mental landscapes and magically creates awesome sculptural shapes in your mind’s eye that continually transform and mesmerize… This is like NOTHING you’ve ever heard!”
Berry Flatman, another concert attendee writes:
“Joel’s music is powerfully evocative and visually arresting – at times like a silent movie soundtrack ramped up on steroids. It is emotionally challenging – compelling you to reference shards of all the music you have ever heard, seemingly at once, layer upon layer.”


Two figures from the Ancient Near Eastern Art collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first is an “Eye Idol” found in Tell Brak in Iraq. The second is a figure found in the site Tell Asmar in Iraq. Figures of these types were found in huge caches left in temples. Although they are from very different time periods, (the first dates from 3000-3500 b.c., the second from 2750–2600 b.c.) they both have beautifully attentive, wide eyes, to which they owe their charm that peers out to us from across thousands of years.

In the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, they have a great collection of paintings by the artist Richard Diebenkorn, who I find to be very inspiring for my music. In the museum they have one of his paintings next to a De Kooning, and it was fascinating to see how they had such different energies yet both tapped into the sublime. Diebenkorn not only had a long career as an abstract painted but also had a long period where he did representational painting, showing just how multi-talented he was, and how he could channel his talent in many ways – a skill not very well appreciated in our time. The Metropolitan Museum used to have one of his paintings in its Modern Art collections, but last time I was there it was sadly not hung. I received recently a catalogue of his early works which featured Gorky-like figues with washes of colour.
Above is a painting of his most iconic style, one that has layers of luminous color in large and small rectangular fields, harmonious and cool to the touch of the eye.

This enormous Slit Gong is a wooden gong, similar types of which are found all throughout the South Pacific. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a collection of them on display in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas collection. This particular one comes from Vanuatu. It is quite remarkable to see gongs made out of wood, though I have also seen gongs sets made out of carved stone in China.
I have in my collection a wooden gong that was used in Chinese temple ceremonies. It has two fish heads at the top and is quite worn on one side. It doesn’t have the most pleasant ring to it.
I also have a Burmese (Myanmar) wooden slit gong or bell. Its clappers on the outside of the gong and shaped like elephants. This is apparently a cow bell for an elephant (or elephant bell!). It produces a wonderful clear sound.
I have two Cambodian wooden bells, which I assume are also elephant bells due to their large size. They have a delightful bright sound to them.
I recently has a dream about the Chinese gong, and as I was looking at the Metropolitan Museum website I came across the slit gong above, and I remember wandering through the beautiful Oceania collection area in the museum, which I have done many times. As I looked through my collection I realized I had two more wooden gongs, and I never realized I had so many. Now I hope to build on that collection. As I finish this post, I just received a call from my mother, filled with ululations from sheep, as she was at a sheep farm and put the phone up to the sheep so they could talk to me.
Last night I played a delightful impromptu concert which was well attended. I played four improvisations on the piano. Two were on the keys, and two on strings or “prepared”. The audience really loved the concert. I hope to make these impromptu concerts in intimate settings a monthly event.
playing intensly!
playing inside the piano