Balancing Exuberance Poem by gershon hepner

Balancing exuberance with restraint,
I make attempts with my poetic talents
to use my words as draughtsmen might use paint,
attempting to achieve artistic balance
between excesses that may captivate
the mind and draw it to excesses, and
the purpose of the world that’s overstated
in the Bible, and can make it bland.


Nicolai Ouroussoff in the NYT on November 15 writes about Frank Gehry's revisions of the Toronto Mouseum of Art (“Gehry Puts a Very Different Signature on His Old Hometown’s Museum, ” NYT,11/15/08:
Frank Gehry has often said that he likes to forge deep emotional bonds with his architecture projects. But the commission to renovate the Art Gallery of Ontario here must have been especially fraught for him. Mr. Gehry grew up on a windy, tree-lined street in a working-class neighborhood not far from the museum. His grandmother lived around the corner, where she kept live carp handy in the bathtub for making her gefilte fish. Given that this is Mr. Gehry’s first commission in his native city, you might expect the building to be a surreal kind of self-reckoning, a voyage through the architect’s subconscious. So the new Art Gallery of Ontario, which opened to the public on Friday, may catch some fans of the architect off guard. Rather than a tumultuous creation, this may be one of Mr. Gehry’s most gentle and self-possessed designs. It is not a perfect building, yet its billowing glass facade, which evokes a crystal ship drifting through the city, is a masterly example of how to breathe life into a staid old structure. And its interiors underscore one of the most underrated dimensions of Mr. Gehry’s immense talent: a supple feel for context and an ability to balance exuberance with delicious moments of restraint. Instead of tearing apart the old museum, Mr. Gehry carefully threaded new ramps, walkways and stairs through the original. As you step from one area to the next, it is as if you were engaging in a playful dance between old and new.


11/15/08