Holiday Park clinic offers affordable tennis training

By DON CRINKLAW | Forum Publishing Group
November 6, 2008

Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, fewer than a dozen preteens walk onto the courts at George English Park in Fort Lauderdale for a relentless and grueling workout. It's part of a tennis clinic organized by Jimmy Evert Tennis Center called High Performance, which has been running for about a year.

The players act like they're having the time of their lives.

Tennis coach Jennifer Wiley, who has been drilling the group since the beginning, describes the High Performance program as top-level training for gifted young players without the high fees other tennis academies charge. In fact, the High Performance program only charges $25 a session.

"The kids who come here are screened," Wiley said. "They have to be tournament players ... [and] they're all ranked high in the state."

Additionally, all the players are girls too, a fact that Wiley explains is unintentional. Boys are certainly welcome, she said. On a recent Tuesday, with the day's heat broken, Wiley warmed up the group by standing on one of the park's seven courts tossing them balls she took from a wheeled basket by her side. The girls took turns charging the net and whacking the balls right back at her.

Then the pressure got cranked up. Nigerian-born coach T.J. Urhobo, in mirror shades and a safari hat, called four of the girls to an adjoining court. He ordered them "all the way back," up against the chain-link fence, and called their names while serving the ball to them in turn.

"This was a deep-ball drill," he said. "I make sure their eye is on the ball."

Urhobo also studied each player's footwork, making sure speed control was worked into the game.

Meanwhile, Wiley worked with others in a "deep forehand" drill. Players had to get to the ball and hit it back before it touched the ground. One by one, players rushed to the net, trying to time it just right. The exercises continued, with only a short break halfway through the session.

Emily Troeneveld of Fort Lauderdale seemed to handle the strain easily.

"I like tennis because it has a lot of fast moves," she said. "I like to move and run, and I'm competitive."

The two-hour workout concluded with set of doubles-play. The girls played with intense focus, concentration and determination.

"If they stay healthy they should be able to play on scholarships at good colleges," Wiley said. "And these girls practice as hard as anybody."

For information about Jimmy Evert Tennis Center's High Performance program call 954-828-5378.

source: sun sentinal

Fort Lauderdale Blog and Real Estate News
Rory Vanucchi
RoryVanucchi@gmail.com

www.LasOlasLifestyles.com
www.FortLauderdaleLiving.net

Christmas coming early to Las Olas Boulevard

By DON CRINKLAW Forum Publishing Group

November 6, 2008

Even with a reputation for nightlife and gourmet dining, one of Fort Lauderdale's most popular events is still the annual Christmas on Las Olas, plans for which are already well under way.

About 50,000 people — if last year is any gauge — will turn up to stroll the four blocks to listen to choirs, snack at the food stalls, take children to see Santa, shop, or even look at the snow.

"It's the snow that does it," said Milton Wolfe, co-owner of Objets d'Art, 813 E. Las Olas Blvd.

Wolfe and his wife, Brigitte, will take part in this year's Christmas on Las Olas event on Dec. 2, when the city closes off Southeast Sixth Avenue to Southeast 10th Avenue.

"A lot of these kids have never seen snow," Wolfe said. "They're fascinated."

Of course, those adults who came to South Florida to escape the snow can also have their memories refreshed via the event's "Snow Mountain," featuring 16 tons of shaved ice trucked in from Royal Palm City Ice in Miami.

"It's big," said Laura Mogilewski, executive director of the Las Olas Association. "You'll have to go upstairs to reach the top, then sit on a saucer-shaped sled to slide to the bottom."

Visitors can also listen to the myriad school and church choirs performing on three stages placed among the olive and palm trees strung with holiday lights.

"The groups who performed last year have first right of refusal for this year's event," entertainment director Stephen Schuster said.

All groups wishing to perform go through Schuster, who uses a lottery system to narrow the field.

"Our stages fill up early every year," he said.

Pride of place belongs to the Riverside Hotel's Ice Bar, sculpted by a real sculptor out of a 1,200-pound block of ice. For the casual stroller, pleasant surprises abound.

Luke Moorman of Carroll's Jewelers, 915 E. Las Olas Blvd., said his shop will be offering free family photographs, while Peter Glenn Ski & Sports in Oakland Park will truck in a ski-instruction machine, which looks sort of like a carpet on rollers.

"You can warm up your moves before you head to Vail [Colorado]," Moorman said with a smile.

If that's not enough, organizers have planned an ice-skating rink, live models and various raffles.

Wolfe also said he will be discounting his biggest seller: Items by the French artist Rosario will be marked down 10 percent.

Christmas on Las Olas will take place from 6 to 10 p.m. Dec. 2 along Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. Any donated unwrapped toys will be delivered to the Children's Home Society of Florida.

For information call 954-937-7386 or visit http://www.lasolasboulevard.com/.

source: sun sentinal

Rory Vanucchi
Fort Lauderdale Blog & Real Estate News
www.LasOlasLifestyles.com

www.FortLauderdaleLiving.net
RoryVanucchi@gmail.com

Iconic American painters from 1850s to 1950s at Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art

By Bob Weinberg |Special Correspondent

10:45 AM EDT, October 31, 2008

The contrast is striking.

On the front cover of the catalog for "Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s-1950s" -- an exhibition opening at Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art on Thursday -- Asher B. Durand's Study of a Wood Interior (ca. 1855) details a quiet forest glade. Soft green lichen carpets rocks and trees, adding to the hushed, reverent atmosphere.

However, if readers follow the bumblebee stripes that creep over the spine of the book to the back cover, they will encounter Frank Stella's East Broadway (1958), a gritty, industrial abstraction of New York City's Lower East Side. The image's flatness, harsh coloration, smeary paint and repeated horizontal lines hardly invite viewers to enter the nonetheless compelling picture plane.

What a difference a century makes.

The time period examined by "Coming of Age," which spotlights a portion of the collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., begins before the Civil War and ends just after World War II. The world as it appeared to artists in the mid-1800s differed dramatically from that of the mid-1900s, as concepts of time and space transformed in radical ways thanks to ever-developing technology.

"That is really what I find fascinating," says Irvin Lippman, the museum's executive director. "It's that historical view over that important 100 years and what's important to these artists. ... What are they capturing about American life during that period?"

The century also produced some of the nation's finest and most enduring artists. With those on exhibit including Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O'Keeffe and Jackson Pollock, the show, as its title implies, surveys how American painters were developing an aesthetic at once inextricably tied to and distinct from their European forebears and contemporaries.

American artists in the mid-19th century were trekking to Paris and other European art centers, taking inspiration from both classic works and new schools of painting. But, this exhibit argues, they returned home with a renewed determination to apply what they had learned to their own surroundings.

However, Lippman cautions, viewers of the show should not make too much of American artists breaking away from their Continental counterparts, who likewise were shedding tradition and coming to grips with the modern world. Rather, he says, it should be seen as an ongoing conversation between the Old World and the New.

"Far more important about this show is its extraordinary quality," Lippman says. "The Addison, over the course of decades, has amassed one of the great collections of American art. The Eakins, the Homer, the [ Edward] Hopper are all extraordinary examples of these artists' works. This is really a show of icons, where everything is an American masterpiece."

Susan C. Faxon, the Addison's associate director and curator of art before 1950, makes a compelling argument for the development of an American aesthetic. In a "Coming of Age" catalog essay, she examines the seeds of a national vision that were flowering by midcentury. Whether in the meticulous detail of Martin Johnson Heade's Apple Blossoms and Hummingbird (1871) or the impressionistic vision of John Henry Twachtman's Hemlock Pool (ca. 1900), Faxon writes, American artists were attempting to communicate something unique about the character of the country, as well as about its flora and fauna.

"Certainly, they had technique that could be seen in European painting, as well, but they were looking with pristine, fresh eyes at pristine, fresh landscapes," Faxon says. "In many of the earliest works in this collection, they are looking at the landscape through the lens of mid-19th century thought, where the landscape is the reflection of the hand of God. And I think they probably would extrapolate that this American landscape was God-given."

Inarguably influenced by European developments such as Impressionism, American artists developed a more rugged sensibility that seemed to eschew the merely decorative, even as important critics such as George Sheldon continued to hew to the belief that "the sole end of art is the expression of beauty."

Homer (1836-1910) found himself at the center of aesthetic debate with his attempts at bolder, more personal imagery. Critic and novelist Henry James called Homer's work unimaginative, "barbarously simple" and "horribly ugly," even as he allowed that "there is nevertheless something one likes about him."

Homer's lengthy visits to France and England proved profound in his post-Civil War output, as seen in Eight Bells (1886) and The West Wind (1891), both of which are featured in the exhibit. In the former, a pair of rain-slickered mariners study their sextants on the deck of a ship; large and significant in the painting's center, the sailors remain calm and confident as whitecaps churn the ocean and clouds either darken the sky or are clearing from a passing storm, depending on the viewer's perspective.

"Homer was a logical progression," Faxon says, noting the relaxation of technique and an increased emphasis on painterliness and brush strokes that were happening on both sides of the Atlantic. "I've actually hung Eight Bells as the beginning point of a whole trajectory that goes through American painting into abstraction. Just look at the composition of Eight Bells; it's very reduced, the geometry is completely visible."

Homer's artistic ambition, says Lippman, reflects the nation's continued rewarding of innovation.

"Here's a time when people were finding that they could express themselves in new, inventive ways that had a profound impact on the course of creating art, the same way Thomas Edison made great headway with electricity or the Wrights made great headway by lifting a pile of wood into the air," he says. "So that was the genius of America during those 100 years."

Social reportage also creeps into American painting in the early 20th century, as artists of the Ashcan School chronicled the rapidly changing vistas of urban America. John Sloan's Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair (1912) captures an intimate moment among a trio of women casually primping atop a tenement building, with wash hanging on the line and the gray, smoky skyline their backdrop.

Modernism and realism were not contradictory concepts, as artists /like Stuart Davis/ strove to get to deeper truths, even in the most abstract works. In his essay American Art, 1910-1950s: Themes, Traditions, Continuities, which appears in the catalog for the exhibit, William C. Agee explains this imperative as stemming from "the modern artist's desire to engage the viewer as directly as possible .ƒ|.ƒ|. by removing all visual or narrative elements between the artist and painting, and between the viewer and the painting."

The exacting, poured-„fpaint tangle of Pollock's Phosphorescence (1947) was as much a reaction to the natural light in the sky over Long Island as Stella's aforementioned East Broadway was an attempt to limn the steel and dirt of the Lower East Side a decade later. Although it had European antecedents, abstract Expressionism blossomed in the United States, pulling the art world's center of gravity from Paris to New York City.

"Part of it is the power of the United States to be inventive," Lippman says. "So you have Pollock really creating something that is, in fact, a great breakthrough in the visual arts that was going to change how we looked at things for some decades to come."

Adds Faxon: "I think the freshness and the youngness and the aggressiveness of any of those abstract paintings certainly is as American as anything. But it's also a tremendous amount of confidence in the ability to make paintings that transcend nationality.

"That's really the story: By the time you get to the mid-20th century, these are international expressions; they're not isolated and they're not provincial. They are, in fact, leading world art."

If you go

"Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s-1950s" opens Nov. 6 at Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., and runs through March 23. 954-525-5500 or www.moafl.org

source: sun sentinal

Fort Lauderdale Real Estate Blog & Homes for Sale

Dropping knowledge at Bartlett house

Historic places certainly have their own ideas about how to celebrate a family day.

And when you think of historic Fort Lauderdale, few places come to mind quicker than Bonnet House Museum & Gardens, 900 N. Birch Road. At this gorgeous estate, Family Day rarely includes picnics, carnivals or perilous rides. In fact, it's much more of a learning experience.

Birdwatching is the theme of the day for the Museum's Family Day on Nov. 1, with lecture times set for 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. Experts on the subject will begin short lectures on birding, as the pros call it, while visitors get a casual tour through the Bonnet House grounds. Bonnet House deserves to be seen, even on bright days the grounds hold crannies and shadows and the postcard beauty can drip decadence and a hint of menace.

Visitors also get a chance to look inside the historic house, and you’ll be surprised at how entertaining this look at the manners of the well-heeled a century ago can be. Ask about the lady’s special drink – it involved a killer slug of rum. And there’s a carnival touch after all: the gentleman of the house collected carousel animals from the 1800s. If that's not enough, admission is half-price on Family Days.

source: sun sentinal

Fort Lauderdale Real Estate Blog & Homes for Sale