knitting kitchen

In case you haven’t left your house in the last month, let me tell you that every kid out there needs a tissue. What that means to me, is late evenings at work, making sure that every exhausted parent of every coughing kid has seen the doctor.

My point here is that there’s not much time for knitting when your evening starts after 7:30 pm. and your morning begins around 5:30 am.

The last couple of evenings only afforded me an hour or so of knitting time. M and I started watching Simon Schama’s The Power of Art.  We love Professor Schama in my house and have listened to or watched anything he’s bothered to share.  So after all the coughing, wheezing, and crying at work (mine, not the kids), I’ve managed to knit 9 rows in the last two days and learned a thing or two about Caravaggio and Bernini.

By the time I hit 43,728 stitches, I was pretty certain Caravaggio was one messed up bro. I love how he used real people to depict Important Biblical Subjects, elevating the model’s humanity. To me, it blurs the line between sacred art and every day life in the street.  I like the idea that it is the universality of the emotions behind Important Biblical Subjects that makes them sacred. Our pain at the loss which floods us at a death, connects each of us in a place outside of time, thus binding us together in the shared experience of our humanity.

The next night, M and I watched the episode about Bernini. As an artist, he pretty much rocked the marble. This civilized creator of fine art and friend of the Pope, paid a servant to slash the face of his errant mistress. Too bad I’m not a writer for Desperate Housewives. There is definitely fodder here for future storylines.

Caravaggio with his crazy beautiful and disturbing paintings and Bernini with his voyeuristic take on the on the antics of a saint beg me to ask the question: is it only possible for great works of art to be created by intensely unhinged individuals?

With that thought, on day 10, with a stitch count of  43,728, I present to you Scotland: