Another Friday rolls around

What with the snow day the week seems to have come to an end really quickly and unexpectedly.

I took my "model" to photography last night. We were doing portraiture and lighting. I was quite pleased with the photos at the time but think one is slightly out of focus- ah pride goeth before a fall!
But they are still nice shots I reckon ... thank Bernadette for agreeing to be my model.

 Another day at work and so a nice round about walk home. I had forgotten that in walking from 59th and Lex that I would cross Park Avenue near 57th St and there I came across the public art work of Will Ryman. I'd seen and heard things about it in the media. Here is part of how it was reported in the Wall Street Journal

Beginning on  Tuesday 25 January, Will Ryman's first public art installation, "The Roses,"  appeared along the Park Avenue Malls between 57th and 67th Streets. For many New Yorkers, its 38 colossal red and pink blossoms, blooming from stems up to 25 feet tall, will serve as an uplifting reminder of the tulips that sprout there each spring.
But to Mr. Ryman, 41 years old, they represent something else. A former playwright with an absurdist edge, he turned to sculpture in 2004 out of a desire to "let the play's scenery tell the whole story," he said recently at his Bowery studio. "I wanted to create theater with no lines or actors, but just the world itself."
"The Roses," presented by the Paul Kasmin Gallery is running through to the end of May.
"I like public sculpture because it exists outside of the gallery world, which can be pretty elitist," Mr. Ryman said, adding that outdoor installations reach a broader audience, and "the focus tends to be more on personal interaction than intellectualization."
Indeed, one can interact with "The Roses" from a variety of perspectives: the sidewalk, the surrounding apartment buildings, the seat of a car. People below the roses, Mr. Ryman said, will have a completely different experience than those above.
Of course, with greater exposure come tighter restrictions, especially in Midtown. City Hall, the Borough Hall Commissioners Office and the Park Avenue Sculpture Committee all rigorously reviewed Mr. Ryman's proposal. They accepted the dog-sized brass bugs—aphids, ladybugs, beetles, ants—that will adorn the steel stems and fiberglass petals, but rejected the coffee cup, Doritos bag and extinguished matches he envisioned strewn about the medians.
"We liked the idea," said Jennifer Lantzas, public art coordinator for the city's Department of Parks and Recreation. "But City Hall is doing a big anti-trash initiative, and we wanted to respect that."
Twenty giant petals will appear in place of the litter, she said, six of which will serve as lawn chairs. 
Unlike Christo's fabric panels, Mr. Ryman's roses are handmade. He showed up every day at KB Projects—the Greenpoint-based art fabricator whose clients include Paul McCarthy, Richard Prince and Louise Bourgeois—to shape and paint each petal. "If it has my name on it, I need to be intimately involved in its creation," he said.
As a result, the blossoms have a delicate quality up close, despite weighing approximately 250 pounds each. They're also intentionally out of proportion, lumpy and shiny—an effect created using several coats of industrial-strength boat paint.
Mr. Ryman admitted that the meaning of a rose changes when it's 25 feet tall, with thorns the size of dinosaur teeth. And so to the art work itself...

I had to wait for the tooting cars to separate to snap this first view

I got into the swing of photographing by walking to the centre median and then back straight away from whence I came

Some fellow pedestrians found it odd but I like the colour and chirpiness of them all

The walk along Fifth Avenue and the snow "capped" facades of churches.

enpoint-based art fabricator whose clients include Paul McCarthy, Richard Prince and Louise Bourgeois—to shape and paint each petal. "If it has my name on it, I need to be intimately involved in its creation," he said.As a result, the blossoms have a delicate quality up close, despite weighing approximately 250 pounds each. They're also intentionally out of proportion, lumpy and shiny—an effect created using several coats of industrial-strength boat pI walked along 5th Avenue- avoiding those nasty icy melting slushy ugly puddles as much as I could but view of the snow "capped" facades made it worth while.