Jean-Jacques Audubon was born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) on his father's sugar plantation.  He was the illegitimate son of Lieutenant Jean Audubon, a French naval officer and his mistress Jeanne Rabine, a 27-year-old French chambermaid.  They named the boy Jean Rabin.  His mother died when the boy was a few months old.  The senior Audubon in 1789 sold part of his plantation in Saint-Domingue and purchased a 284-acre farm called Mill Grove, 20 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Rising unrest in Saint-Domingue convinced Jean Audubon to return to France.  In 1791 he arranged for John to be delivered to him in France.  John was raised in Coueron, near Nantes, France, by Audubon and his wife Anne Moynet Audubon, whom he had married years before.  In 1794 they formally adopted John to regularize his legal status.  They renamed the boy Jean-Jacques Fougere Audubon.  When Audubon, at age 18, boarded ship for immigration to the United States in 1803, he changed his name to an anglicized form:  John James Audubon.  In 1803, his father obtained a false passport so that Audubon could go to the United States to avoid conscription in the Napoleonic Wars.  Upon his arrival, he spent a majority of his time roaming the wooded hills along the Perkiomen Creek and the Schuylkill River hunting, observing, collecting and sketching.  It was during this period that he experienced early stirrings of a fascination for wildlife that was to become his all-absorbing life interest.  Inspired and captivated by his new surroundings, Audubon became a pioneer in portraying birds and other wildlife in natural settings.  During his time at Mill Grove he built a substantial base of interest in ornithological art, and his experimentation resulted in the rapid development of his skills as an artist.  While at Mill Grove he made many drawings and performed the first recorded experiment of bird banding in America.  He also developed his "wire armature," a device that gave life to his freshly shot specimens and his drawings of the birds.   http://johnjames.audubon.org/john-james-audubon-0

"On my very first author visit, the librarian literally rolled out the red carpet, making writer and readers alike feel like rock stars, and making books feel fun, fabulous, and of-the-moment." - Danielle Paige  See also http://www.harpercollins.com/cr-107588/danielle-paige

The Basket of Apples is a still life oil painting by French artist Paul Cézanne.  It belongs to the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.  The piece is often noted for its disjointed perspective.  It has been described as a balanced composition due to its unbalanced parts; the tilted bottle, the incline of the basket, and the foreshortened lines of the cookies mesh with the lines of the tablecloth.  Additionally, the right side of the tabletop is not in the same plane as the left side, as if the image simultaneously reflects two viewpoints.  Paintings such as this helped form a bridge between Impressionism and Cubism.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basket_of_Apples  The Basket of Apples will be on display at the Toledo Museum of Art beginning February 16 as part of a special loan.  See also https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/post-impressionism/a/czanne-the-basket-of-apples

Paul Cézanne wanted to make paint bleed.  The old masters, he told the poet Joachim Gasquet, painted warmblooded flesh and made sap run in their trees, and he would too.  He wanted to capture “the green odor” of his Provence fields and “the perfume of marble from Saint-Victoire,” the mountain that was the subject of so many of his paintings.  He was bold, scraping and slapping paint onto his still lifes with a palette knife.  “I will astonish Paris with an apple,” he boasted.  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/cezanne-107584544/?no-ist

In 1988 the University of Arkansas Press published Billy Collins’s The Apple That Astonished Paris.  This collection includes some of Collins’s most anthologized poems, including “Introduction to Poetry,” “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House,” and “Advice to Writers.”  Billy Collins was appointed poet laureate of the United States for 2001–2003.  http://cavern.uark.edu/~uaprinfo/titles/sp06/collins_apple3.html

In late August 1859 a spectacular eruption of the northern lights dominated the New England heavens for several days, commented on by newspapers across America and Europe.  In the same period Walt Whitman, the great poet of that day, witnessed what he described as a “year of comets and meteors transient and strange.”  For those who saw these astronomical phenomena the experience was indelible.  It was a major stimulus to artists and writers at the time.  The imagery remained vivid in Whitman’s memory, and in the later versions of his narrative masterpiece, “Leaves of Grass,” he included a short free-verse poem titled “Year of Meteors (1859-60).”  The Pop artist Robert Indiana (b. 1928) held a special empathy for Whitman.   Born Robert Clark, the artist grew up in the central part of Indiana, moved constantly with his family during childhood, served in the Army in Europe, and then studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago.  After moving to New York in 1954, he adopted the name of his native state and declared himself to be “an American painter of signs.”  This assumption of a new artistic identity followed the example of Whitman, who dropped Walter to take on the more informal Walt in “Leaves of Grass.”  In 1956 Indiana found living and work space at Coenties Slip on the lower Manhattan waterfront.  There he was joined for several years by Ellsworth Kelly, who had recently returned from Paris, having developed a style of depicting shapes abstracted from architecture and plants.  Executed in 1961, Mr. Indiana’s “Year of Meteors” (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo) was one of his first major works, an overt tribute to Whitman.   From a painterly manner of execution in his early work, Mr. Indiana moved toward the hard-edge definition and flat surfaces produced by Mr. Kelly.  But Mr. Indiana soon introduced the graphics of literary content, a course that would eventually lead to a personal and artistic separation between the two.  Mr. Indiana has also written free verse throughout his career.  While his stenciled typography came primarily from commercial signage, he has engaged in a visual dialogue with many American writers.  A third early canvas of 1961, “The Calumet,” referred to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, completing a trilogy of painted homages by Mr. Indiana to his cultural ancestors.  The artist’s literary interests continued with his attention to the early modernists Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein, in canvases and stage designs of the later 1960s and ’70s.  Single words such as EAT and LOVE have gained their own fame.  The latter was designed in 1964 in a block configuration with its tilted O, now perhaps the most recognizable word in the history of art.  John Wilmerding  http://www.wsj.com/articles/painting-poetry-1452894732

Poems inspired by paintings--a selection of 10 great poems and the paintings that inspired them

http://www.theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/listed-poems-inspired-paintings

Quotes About Painting  http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/painting

What the Famous Faces From Jeep's Super Bowl Ad Really Had to Do With the Vehicle by Tim Nudd  The 60-second spot used 60 images from around the world.  http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/what-famous-faces-jeeps-super-bowl-ad-really-had-do-vehicle-169489  Link to the 2016 video for Jeep at http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2016/02/07/fiat-chrysler-salutes-jeep-history-super-bowl-50-ad/79985064/

Watch the Super Bowl 50 Halftime Show at http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2016/02/08/super-bowl-50-by-the-music-gaga-slays-  13:01  Watch America the Beautiful by the Armed Forces Chorus and the National Anthem by Lady Gaga at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNT1clodvCE&feature=player_embedded  5:12

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1422  February 8, 2016   On today's date, the New Year rings in across Asia:  China, Malaysia, Indonesia—Chinese New Year; Korea—Soellal; Vietnam—Tết Nguyên Đán; Mongolia—Tsagaan Sar; Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal—Losar.  http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ringing-2016-new-year-s-traditions-you-might-not-have-n487456  

Quote of the Day:  Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. - John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (8 February 1819-1900)