Posted on 10/07/2004 2:23:02 PM PDT by Southside_Chicago_Republican
LIVERMORE, Calif. - It didn't take a nuclear physicist to realize changes were needed after a $40,000 ceramic mural was unveiled outside the city's new library and everyone could see the misspelled names of Einstein, Shakespeare, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo and seven other historical figures.
"Our library director is very frustrated that she has this lovely new library and it has all these misspellings in front," said city councilwoman Lorraine Dietrich, one of three council members who voted Monday to authorize paying another $6,000, plus expenses, to fly the artist up from Miami to fix the errors.
Reached at her Miami studio Wednesday by The Associated Press, Maria Alquilar said she was willing to fix the brightly colored 16-foot-wide circular work, but offered no apologizes for the 11 misspellings among the 175 names.
"The importance of this work is that it is supposed to unite people," Alquilar said. "They are denigrating my work and the purpose of this work."
Alquilar said it took her quite a bit of her own time and money to create and install the work, and that it sat idle at her Santa Cruz studio for two years until the city cleared the way for its installation.
There were plenty of people around during the installation who could and should have seen the missing and misplaced letters, she said. "Even though I was on my hands and knees laying the installation out, I didn't see it," she said.
The mistakes wouldn't even register with a true artisan, Alquilar said.
"The people that are into humanities, and are into Blake's concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words," she said. "In their mind the words register correctly."
I think the public is being overly critical on this. Everyone knows you can't run a mural through Spellcheck.
Damn! You mean "Democrat" doesn't start with an "R"?
That's what we would call "fugly."
Damn - she made Einstein look like Susan Estrich. Poor Albert...
Thanks for the pic. After reading about this earlier I wondered what it looked like. Your pic has confirmed my suspicions - it looks like a child did it. Liberals call this "art", I call it crap.
Yesterday's thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1237474/posts
But "EISTEIN" . . . now there's no excuse I can think of for that one.
AMEN!
Especially when you're an artiste who can't spell worth a damn.
She's a 3rd world multi culti artiste. Courageously creating art right in the belly of the beast. Therefor she is not responsible for any boneheaded English misspellings, the language of the oppressive dead white male patriarchy that assassinates all indigenous peoples.
Actually I like primative folk art though hers seems artificial and contrived. Definitely not a good fit for a library and how the heck does a public library get permission to squander $40,000 of taxpayer money?
In that case her check should read: $0. Let her mind register the rest, then she can be a billionaire.
Thank you.
Parrots show up in a lot of artwork, including advertisements, and one of my pet peeves is that nine times out of ten they're depicted with "chicken feet" -- three toes forward, one toe back. I see this even in artwork which is otherwise accurate as to anatomy and plumage.
Unfortunately, all birds in the parrot family are zygodactyl -- their feet have two toes (the first and fourth) facing forward and two toes (second and third) facing backwards. Woodpeckers have feet configured the same way.
All the following are wrong:
Oops! Correction:
their feet have two toes (the second and third ) facing forward and two toes (first and fourth) facing backwards.
Why? The picture doesn't bear much resemblence to playwright and poet William Shakespeare, so perhaps it's supposed to be a picture of Fred Shakespere, a maker of frozen drinks.
The gravestone for James Fennimore Cooper's wife features, on the last line, the word "grteful" with a little ^a inserted. I don't think that stone cost $40,000 in its day, though it may have cost close to the modern equivalent. Huge piece of stone with a lot of text. I would not want to have been the stone cutter who did that, though I would be curious to know whether Mr. Cooper got a discount. Probably nobody alive today knows that, though.
I'm pretty much sure, however, that it DOES have the word "Dog" in it.
You're certainly unusual, piasa, for being so scrupulous about doing your homework.
I've hired many artists to illustrate books over 20 years in the publishing business, and learned to never trust artists with spelling...they could misspell cat in the hot if you didn't watch them. It was always an editor's job to check their spelling. My editors would have loved you!
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