Every comedian started their career at open mic night. St. Louis is home to several top touring comedians as well as aspiring comics. Open mic night is a a weekly pro-am line up filled with 12 to 20 local acts. At $1 for entry, it’s also a great date night bargain!
Sometimes road conditions require a quick snapshot, when you’re not able to hang out for very long. What was the barn used for, when was it abandoned, what is its future?
I’m eternally fascinated by the relatively isolated Pleasantview Road, with its beautiful barns and farmhouses. The rubble up above used to be a corn crib, I believe. Pleasantview School, slowly converted to storage lockers, seems to have stalled out. That… Continue Reading →
Afield	abandoned buildings, Central Illinois, demolition, deserted, historic barns, historic houses, historic schools, Italianate, Modernism	
The isolated southern side of the Meramec River Valley continues to fascinate us. We had previously spotted this railroad viaduct the last trip, and this time we drove down. It’s developed quite the patina over the years. Pevely Farms was… Continue Reading →
Someone died, and that meant it was time to sell off his land for a bunch of McMansions. He was one of the last holdouts, selling fruits and vegetables at a roadside stand at Clayton and Schoettler roads. St. Louis… Continue Reading →
Out west are all sorts of surprises, tucked between the valleys and subdivisions are old log cabins, such as the one off of Valley Road, or the old farmhouse off of Strecker. This old farm house below has sat empty… Continue Reading →
The Bauernhof at Grant’s Farm comes from German, meaning “farm court,” which refers to the walled, building-lined compound that still typifies many farms in Germany. The architecture is typical of Sixteenth Century German states, which is an interesting mix of… Continue Reading →
We tend to assume that we all live in the same world, all see the same things and all experience them in much the same way. It’s a very helpful assumption. For one thing, conversation would become extremely tricky if we couldn’t assume that the people we are speaking to will understand the things we talk about in the same way that we do.
Of course, the fact is that conversations do become very tricky precisely because people often have such very different ideas about the same things. Sometimes it isn’t all that obvious. Sometimes it is bafflingly obvious. You know the kind of thing...
Now, depending on your point of view that conversation is either taking place between someone with the soul of an artist and someone with no soul at all or else between someone with a very annoying tendency to bang on about the romantic scenery when it is already past time for dinner and someone a good deal more practical. The truth is that neither of them is actually ‘right’. They simply live in completely different worlds. What is apparent to one simply does not exist for the other.
To a great or lesser degree, in fact, this will always be the case with any two people. None of us lives in quite the same world as anyone else. This is because none of us perceives the world in quite the same way as anyone else. (You can check with any decent scientist or you take our word for it; it’s true.)
Well, it means that, whether or not there are worlds to explore out in space, there are definitely other worlds all around us, all the time. The worlds inside other people. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to see and to experience just some of those worlds? But unless you’ve perfected the art of the Vulcan mind meld, those other worlds must remain inaccessible.
The exception is when an artist gives expression to his or her own world through the act of creating a painting, or drawing, or sculpture or some other form of artistic construction. Through art, we are able to enter directly into the world the artist sees, a world entirely unique and otherwise inaccessible.
For instance, in the work of Jeremy Houghton you will see a world made of light and space and movement instead of hard physical form. In fact, science yells us this is a truer vision of the world than the one our senses present to us. Seeing the world Houghton shows us through his painting, the world as he sees it, is to see the world forever differently. Perhaps to see the world a little more as it really is.
Then there are the seascapes of Melanie McDonald which capture the point at which sea and air and land dissolve into a kind of continuum. Once you have seen the ‘dissolving point’ in her paintings you cannot help seeing it when you walk along a seashore. We could go on but you get the idea...
This is one reason why running an art gallery is such a thrill. It allows constant access to all the new and very different worlds which our artists offer.
The next best thing, of course, is taking advantage of an art gallery, (like ours for instance!), and exploring some of those worlds from time to time as a visitor. And who wouldn’t want to make time for a little inter-world travel?