Turkey Time

Happy Thanksgiving from Mona Lisa Turkey!

Mona Lisa Visits New York -- and Washington D.C.

Google has made Life magazine photos available. At last, I found the iconic images of Mona Lisa's visit with President and Mrs. Kennedy. For more about her trip see A Mona Lisa Banquet at Sea.

New Lens

Whenever there's a new piece of camera equipment to test, we go to the Botanical Garden. The recent photos on the food blog were also taken with the new lens.

Mona Lisa From Above

I've seen Mona Lisa depicted in profile, and from the back, but now here's an interpretation of what she looks like from above.

The weird thing: this is an ad for dandruff shampoo!

Art and Music

Music: Mona Lisa Overdrive. Also from random websurfing:

Household Objects

Mona Lisa Light Switch

Mona Lisa Soap Dispenser

Mona Lisa Apron

Mona Lisa Notebook

T-Shirt Wrap Up

First, above, my only shirt not made of ordinary cotton: this is from a designer and made of stretch nylon. Mona Lisa wraps around from front to back. Not easy to wear!

And the rest follow. The last shirt commemorates "The Mona Lisa of the Galilee" which is a Greco-Roman mosaic in Israel that reminded the discoverers of Mona Lisa's face. Ironically, a video about the mosaic (playing in an exhibit I saw once) seemed to think it was a complete coincidence that Roman art would resemble Renaissance art. The script writers seem to have forgotten that Renaissance means rebirth, and the Renaissance painters thought they were giving a new life to Classical art -- that would be Roman and Greek. Not exactly a coincidence. But it's a lovely mosaic, and a nice shirt to end this series.

You Guessed It!

Here's the next group from my Mona Lisa T-shirt collection.

T-Shirts Yet Again

Every Mona Lisa tee is different, and all are precious.

In My Neighborhood

Today is a great day. My neighbors and I are very happy to be in the REAL America.

Not My Tee

Just so you know: googling "Mona Lisa Tee Shirt" gets a vast selection. Here's one of the first that comes up. Maybe I'll buy some more.

And T-Shirts

It's voting day, but I can't think of a single vote-themed Mona Lisa item in my collection. Oh well, here's the next installment of Mona Tees.

Mona Lisa T-Shirts

For years I've been collecting Mona Lisa T-shirts. Some are very worn, because I liked them, or because someone gave me an old favorite. Some are unworn, even with a price tag still stuck on. I love them all. Here's the first installment. The last two photos show both the front and the back of a single shirt.

Mona Lisa in a Galaxy far away

From The Mona Leia Takes My Breath Away on the blog GeekSugar we get Mona Leia by Jim Hance (see also The Mona Leia by Jim Hance).

I admire the way this seems to be painted, or at least done with a lot of attention to detail, not just by cutting out a face and pasting.

Another Parodist

The current New Yorker has a review of an art parodist I had never heard of, but it definitely intrigues me. Here's what it says:

The guileless heroine of Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running comic strip “Nancy” is an unlikely icon in contemporary art, recurring in work by postmodern cartoonists like Bill Griffith and Scott McCloud, in an Andy Warhol painting, and in rock posters by Frank Kozik. But no one put her to better use than Joe Brainard, in whose irreverent, effervescent paintings, drawings, and collages (occasionally produced in collaboration with poet friends like Ron Padgett and Frank O’Hara) Nancy appears as an ashtray; a medical illustration; the subject of pieces by de Kooning, Picasso, and Leonardo; and part of Mt. Rushmore.

The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard (1942-1994) is in just out in a new edition. The Mona Lisa Nancy is in the collage. I always read Nancy in the St.Louis Post Dispatch when I was a kid -- I think I even remember my mother reading it to me before I went to school and learned to read to myself. She would have been shocked at some of the images...