The O-Files

I rounded up the photos that (I think) haven’t made it up yet. That little guy gets around…

Soaps at the Westin. Every day they would give me a bunch of soaps and shampoos. I ended up with quite the collection.

The parade on the way to the reception at SIGGRAPH:

SIGGRAPH moments:

The Bean in Chicago. That's me in the lower right holding the camera and O-Berry and that's O-Berry in the upper left - so which is real and which is the reflection?

Hiding in the sculptures at the Met

Hanging out at the Met

In front of the M&M store in NY

Times Square

The Guggenheim

More New York Sketches

View of the city from the lagoon at Central Park:

View out the Window of the Whitney. It's all about the shapes and colors of buildings going off into the distance:

Times Square:

And looking the other way you see Morgan Stanley next to Hershey's and across the street from the M&M store:

The sculpture garden at MOMA. They had these 3 sculptures that you were allowed to climb all over and were big enough for an adult to stand up inside of:

A few random pages from my sketchbook - you can see how many notes I took on the art!

New York sketches

Here's just a few sketches from my New York trip:

The bar at the sushi place I went a few times:

The lamp at the Bryant Park Grill:

The Guggenheim - light and dark:

Rooftops from Bryant Park:

Soft Ketchup by Claes Oldenburg:

New York, New York

I think New York is one of those places that you have to go to once in your life – there’s really nothing else like it. I don’t think I could live here, but it’s a place you’ve got to visit. Much of it is just any old city, but Times Square is one of a kind, as is Central Park. And the experience of New York - it’s practically its own life form. Zillions of people and zillions of cabs all in motion – and they don’t ever seem to collide. There’s a different form of physics at work here.

I came here for the museums, but there is actually more to New York. I didn’t do any plays this time around, but I did see some of the city:

The Subway

You can get anywhere underground. It’s its own city. Stifling in the summer, but a fascinating place.

Central Park

It’s big. It’s got its own lake and ball fields. But the best part is standing there and seeing the city looming over the big trees.

Times Square

Times Square is hard to describe. “Mass of humanity” would be a good place to start. And lights. They’ve closed off part of the street to cars and set up tables and chairs – so you get your morning bagel and sit in the street under all the mega-signs and eat your breakfast in the city. At night, that’s when it really comes alive.

Patience

And fortitude. This is the third time that I’ve been to New York. The first two times the library was closed on the day that I tried to go there. The reading room is supposed to be gorgeous, and I like libraries in general. So this time I checked the website first, and saw that it was opened Sundays from 1-5. So today is a good day to go hang out at Bryant Park and got to the library. Lo and behold, it’s closed anyway. Ah, well. Patience. Or maybe that’s Fortitude. The fox by the lion's foot is Foxy: When I was taking O-Berry’s picture someone was setting the fox up on the lion – he’s a travelling companion as well, and the guy who owns him said that he had met 5 other people who were travelling with friends.

Bryant Park

The library is next to Bryant Park. A nice little park with a reading room (i.e. books and magazines available to anyone who wants to read them while there). There’s the Bryant Park Grill, which is the first place I ever ate in New York – I went there with my brother the first Time I came here several years ago – and it’s where I had lunch today. Oh, and Ruth and Mel, looks like there’s knitting lessons on Tuesday afternoons – yarn and needles provided.

Food

There’s every kind of food. I focused on street food - $2 for two eggs on a roll for breakfast. Why would anyone go to a hotel restaurant for breakfast in this town?

Thunder and lightning

It doesn’t really rain in Seattle – it just sort of spits on you. For my going away present, New York brought me a thunderstorm – real honest-to-goodness thunder and lightning. You have never seen Times Square empty out so quickly.

Tomorrow – Chicago!

The Frick, the park, and the watch

The Frick

The Frick is a museum with lots of furniture that you’re not allowed to sit in. It’s in what was the Frick’s house and the furniture is genuine old furniture. There’s a few less old pieces scattered about in which you are allowed to sit, but most of the chairs are roped off. It also has a ton of fabulous art. The Fricks knew what they were doing when they were collecting, and it’s a Who’s Who in there: Vermeer, Rembrandt, Whistler, Titian, Bellini, the list goes on. Sadly, none of the pieces have proper signage with things like dates and media, but they can be forgiven since I’m not going to complain too much about being able to get that close to Titian and friends.

There’s three Vermeers, and the gold medal goes to Officer and Girl. It’s a master work of composition, light, and palette. The wall and the map have the same colors but in a different balance, with both getting cooler as they move away from the window. Aside from the map itself being beautiful, the light and the composition of colors is fantastic. Girl at Her Music is not as strong. It doesn’t have the strong lighting, and the look on her face is one of surprise – I think he needed a reason for her to look “at the camera” and the only other choices were for her to look bored or forlorn, and that just wouldn’t do.

Lazzaro Bastiani’s Adoration of the Magi gets an award for having a good-looking baby in it. The adults, on the other hand, look a little odd with their too-big heads. You can’t win them all. He also has these little pods of cherubs on floating platforms. The platforms are drawn in wonderful perspective with both the angle and size changing appropriately, but the effect is rather like a sci-fi Invasion of the Cherubs.

There are a number of landscapes that don’t do it for me – either there is no defined subject or they’ve painting every single leaf on every tree no matter how far back. A few put light where they wanted it, but not very successfully: Rather than strengthening the composition they weaken it by lighting random things. A few paintings are on the verge of Thomas Kinkaid (minus the bubble gum colors).

Perseus and Andromeda by Tiepolo is the one piece of baroque composition in the collection. It’s interesting how “distant” in this case is “up” and the colors are muted appropriately. There’s a lot of drawing in this piece, including on the hands, which is a bit distracting since the fingers are actually too short and the contrast caused by the line accentuates this. But I still love it for its baroque-ness. It’s good to break out of the box.

There are a couple of El Greco’s in the collection. One of them is amazing. Purification of the Temple is not that one. Perhaps in it’s time the colors would be considered “bold” and “dramatic” but in the post-velvet-Elvis days they strike me as tacky. The portrait of St. Jerome, on the other hand, is amazing. The composition, colors, and rendering are amazing.

Degas has such creative composition and The Rehearsal is a good example with the violinist at the bottom, the corner of the room above him and the dancers forming a circle with him. The colors are fantastic as well: Unblended brushstrokes of pinks and greens. Looking at it closely, I think the black neckerchiefs were added later to balance the composition with the dark of the violinist. It’s always nice to know that the masters had to fiddle with it too!

There was a wonderful Corot on view: The Lake. He has such a nice limited palette and sense of atmosphere, I just wish he didn’t add all those random dots of color – it looks like he sneezed! But it reads beautifully across the room like a misty day.

Gary – I checked out the colors in Bellini’s St. Francis for you, and they are weird. The reason all of the reproductions look odd is because the original looks odd! The rocks behind him are this weird light blue-green like the fake ice at a penguin exhibit, and the sky is a darker than cerulean, and he’s too much the same color. The random landscape in the background is normal colors, and the white in the clouds is actually white, but everything else is odd. I think there’s supposed to be some sort of divine light touching him, but you would hope that divine inspiration wouldn’t come in the form of a penguin exhibit. I think you should do a copy of this using a better palette!

There are too many more to mention, but my awards go to Vermeer’s Officer and Girl for sheer genius, Tiepolo’s Perseus and Andromeda for being baroque, Corot for the wonderful palette (minus the sneezed paint), and a special award to Lazzaro for his Invasion of the Body-Snatching Cherubs.

The Park

Like many of the museums, the Frick is right by Central Park, and I wandered by there for the rest of the afternoon. How many people live in New York? And there are 3 stalls in the ladies’ room in Central Park. Clearly this town is run by men. Other than that it was a lovely afternoon to sit in the park by the boat pond and enjoy the day. Quite a few boats out and tons of people. Nice lazy afternoon after days of Deep Art Thoughts.

The Watch

Oh, Mike, this evening I got your Rolex. $30 from a rather nervous-looking fellow selling them out of a briefcase in Times Square. Genuine in its own way. J

MOMA Overload

I do love MOMA, but the new house is so big and has so many things that I love that I just overload. They were open until 8pm tonight, but I was MOMAed out by 5, despite having only done 2 floors.

Sculpture Garden

They have a wonderful outdoor sculpture garden, which aside from the sculptures is a great place to sit when you’re burnt out. There’s a wonderful Calder (Black Widow) which I knew was a Calder just by looking at it, and that’s a good thing since the signage seems to be little guys stuck in random planters and may or may not be anywhere near the piece (but that’s not Calder’s fault – he’s a genius – wonderful form that flows from every angle). There’s a giant piece with two circles welded onto a square that made me think “Mickey Mouse.” I wasn’t too far off – when I found the sign it is indeed Geometric Mouse by my friend Claus Oldenburg (Mr. Giant French Fries from the Whitney). There were also these brightly colored guys that you were allowed to climb around on, and a nice Picasso and some Matisse works among others. I do love sculpture gardens.

James Ensor (1860 – 1949)

There was a big show by James Ensor, whom I had actually not heard of before, possibly because he’s not in the genius category. He doesn’t have the sense of composition of Hopper or Van Gogh or the other big names, not a genius technical draftsman (the feet in “the Lamp Lighter” are too big, for instance, despite being a realist painting), nor does he define space well. For instance, in The Drunkards the foreground and background are in the same space (done via tertiaries) and the figures and bottle are in another. Throughout his works I felt that they were just short of successful since there was something not quite working, often in the composition. I felt the best piece was Masks Mocking Death.

http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/ensor/#/works/60/

Technically, he leaves lots of bare canvas and underpainting, but when he does use paint he does so with gusto – very thick, and looks like a fair amount of palette knife work. He does do light quite well, and has it falling just right on the objects in his paintings, I just wish his composition and depth were stronger.

The Masters

And there are a lot of them here. There are several Cezannes, and the more you look at them the more you realize that he was a master of composition and color. Boy in a Red Vest has this wonderful triangle of dark behind the figure, and in Still Life with Fruit Dish (aren’t they all – this one is from 1879-80) the colors as well as the shapes are key. There are basically 3 parts: The table, the fruit, and the cloth/bowl and background. Each of those has its own palette and if you really look you’ll notice that the fruit in the bowl is slightly less chromatic than the fruit up front – he is actually defining space in this tiny space.

The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro is a lovely Picasso cubist painting, but for the first time I noticed that he also defines space and models his forms. They may be cubes, but they are cubes that get muted as they go back and are gradated. So he’s not breaking the rules of painting, just breaking the rules of drawing! D.Lisa - you should try this with your eggs - you could have eggs in space! :)

Van Gogh’s Starry Night had the biggest crowd around it – and for good reason. It’s brilliant. I think he painted directly from the tube without a brush because the paint is so thick and the “strokes” evenly sized. Compositionally… the spire of the church reflects the spire of the tree; the swirls in the sky reflect the swirls in the bushes below; the straight and horizontal lines of the houses lay them flat compared to the landscape; the spots of yellow in the houses reflect the spots of yellow in the stars. The tree is wonderful repusage and it and the stars are the only warms and work their way forward – and this gives the sky dimension. Oh, and there’s raw, unprimed canvas showing around the edges and the only signs of drawing are with paint. The more you look at it, the better it gets.

Wyeth’s Christina’s World is sadly located in a hallway. In fact, the hall is an expressway between escalators, elevators, and restrooms – a horrible place for a brilliant painting. It’s that light on the side of the house and the light on her that make it happen. Too bad it’s in such a bad spot. There’s room in my living room if they need a new place for it…

There’s a ton more great paintings and I have pages of notes: de Chirico is great in person – l loved The Duo and his use of harsh lighting. Several Miro’s that I love. And a work by David Alfaro Siqueiros called Collective Suicide that is a beautiful piece done with car lacquer and stencils. There’s also a bottle encrusted with shells, barnacles, coral and metal that reminds me of a lamp my brother has. And there’s a sketchbook that reminds me of a co-worker’s doodles (yes Peter Lewis, I mean you – one day, you could be in MOMA!).

And many many more! You’ve just gotta go…

The Whitney

You step out of the elevators and there are four old Hoover vacuum cleaners in a clear plexi case lit from below by fluorescent bulbs. Ah, The Whitney. There was a wonderful painting by Charles Biederman that was rather Miro-like but had modeling in the shapes. Near it was a ball painted electric green with metallic blue gloved fingers breaking out. Across the room was a painting called “Egg Beater #1” that had no resemblance to an egg beater, but apparently the artist nailed an egg beater, an electric fan, and a rubber glove to a table and abstracted that. There was also a lovely Georgia O-Keefe called “Abstractions.”

Hopper

And of course there were about a dozen paintings by Edward Hopper. Early Sunday Morning was hung too low, I think, but that’s not Edward’s fault. Technical things for the curious: He has a lot of canvas showing, and the dark windows and doors are just underpainting and canvas. The shadows of the fireplug and the barber pole are a strong blue, and those shadows don’t match the shadows on the building façade. The shadows under the window sills on the 2^nd floor are purple, and it looks like those sills were added later in the painting – in fact the 2 on the left have shadows but the sills are not there. There is impasto on the barber pole, but the rest is basically flat. The center of the canvas the 3 yellow window curtains – are the lightest, and together with the barber pole and fire plug form the triangle of the painting. When you see it in life, you realize that the barber pole is the subject.

Second Story Sunlight was also on display, and is an amazing show of Hopper as a master of composition. The vertical lines of the trees reflect the vertical lines in the houses. The red chimney balances with the red roof and hint of red chair inside. The only thing that is gradated is the sky; the only things modeled are the people; everything else is flat. It’s all about shape and color. A Woman in the Sun was next to it and another masterwork of composition (and the music playing in the next gallery over really added to the experience).

Downstairs they had some early Hopper works from his few years in Paris, and the Quote of the Day is “He spent four years in Paris and this is all he did?” from an elderly gentleman who was apparently not impressed. I was impressed – his early works show his sense of composition, but that he hadn’t moved into being all about form and shape and color. There were four looser pieces that didn’t look like Hopper’s at all, but looked like an art student in Paris doing what art students in Paris were expected to do. I like his other stuff better. My favorite piece of all was “Le Bistro or The Wine Shop.” He has these lovely trees leaning in the wind in the background (which I think were added later) and on the left just a smidgen of a shop corner with two women sitting at a table. It’s a beautiful piece and the fact that the trees are an integral part of it I think separates it from his other works.

Claes Oldenburg

This was a great show of oversized musical instruments and giant French fries. There was a stuffed vinyl electric beater hanging from the ceiling and room full of giant musical instruments. His drawings for these were also there, and featured things like “Violin Island” which I think would look great a finished painting. My personal favorite was a giant ice bag that filled a room and fans inside it cause it to inflate and motors rotated it. Very entertaining in an odd way. Quote from the artist: “I’m creating something which really doesn’t do much.”

Other works

They had a Wyeth on display – “Winter Fields” and you really get a sense that he knew that area and was a part of it. It’s amazing what a technical artist he is and yet still has an artistic beauty. There was a series of Jacob Laurence paintings on war, and he really has his own sense of design language when painting. There was a lonely Henri “Laughing Child” which was an amazing array of loose brush strokes and paint texture that actually formed a painting.

A great show, and pouring now with people on every street corner selling umbrellas.

The Guggenheim

Frank Lloyd Wright

Yesterday was the Guggenheim – that spiral building that looks weird but is actually a really great art venue. The building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and the main show was a Wright retrospective with a nice selection of his drawings and a variety of models (some made for the show). It was actually quite interesting for me to look at. As an architect he thinks about a lot of the same things that an artist does, but in a different way:

• How does the object fit in its space? Does the shape reflect the mountains in the background Does it bridge a space, fill a space, open a space, or reflect a space? Is it hidden or mammoth?
• How do things look from a distance vs close up (Approaching the building vs entering it)
• How do the different elements align (does the master bedroom face north? The main walk point toward Mecca?)
• Can it grow as the population grows (something I worry about in UI design – gotta be even worse in architecture!)
• How will the look change as the trees grow?
• How do the different shapes relate? (squares vs circles vs ovals)
• Light and dark inside the space

He also had music, dance and poetry as a part of his apprentice program, along with working on the farmland in the space – he wanted people to not only have a full appreciation of the building in the space but also a richer understanding of how a building was a part of your life and how it could improve your life.

I was expecting to just breeze through the exhibit but found myself spending an enormous amount of time looking at and thinking about his work and how it relates to fine arts.

The permanent collection

The permanent collection has, of course, quite a few fantastic paintings. I spent time looking at the Cézannes, and in his finished works you can almost feel the autism. He’d spend 5 years on a single painting and the careful brushstrokes make you slow down as you look at it. The unfinished works – the ones he only spent 2 years on – feel “faster” but that may be because the brushstrokes are smaller. It’s interesting, but I wonder what he would have done with Crayons, since his brushstrokes feel a lot like crayons.

There’s a lot more of course, but I need to get ready to go to the Whitney!

Metropolitan Museum of Art

You would think that a world-class museum with a huge collection and tons of visitors every day would have more restrooms, but you would be wrong. I think it was designed by men. Anyway…

The Landscape Report

My main goal was to look at landscapes and specifically take a look at the American Landscapes. Guess what? That section is closed! And it reopens the day after I leave. Fart. The rest of the American Wing was open, so I did get to see some great Thomas Cole paintings. I loved The Titan’s Goblet. Tres Gary Faigin – it’s a titan-sized goblet in a landscape and very cool. A little perspective issue in the ellipses, which was distracting, but still excellent for me to look at. You are actually looking down at the goblet, but he makes it appear huge by having teeny-tiny people and buildings in there. There’s also mountain ranges, and the goblet is larger than them and has waterfalls coming off of it. There’s also an interesting use of color and warm/cool: The painting is essentially darker on the bottom (foreground) and lighter at the top. This makes the top of the goblet stand out since there’s a lot of contrast in the rim of the goblet vs. the sky. There’s a lot of warms and greens in the foreground, and everything past the goblet is cooler and bluer.

I did go hunting throughout the museum for landscapes and focused my time looking at them. The main thing that I learned: Put the light where you want it and the heck with reality. There are quite a number of beautiful landscapes with light that doesn’t quite make sense but looks great. Little spots of light on whatever you want to spotlight, or if you just want to move the viewer’s eye around.

There’s a good deal of variety in terms of detail: Some folks put tons of detail everywhere (even in the distance) and use color or warms or size to indicate distance. Some folks put less detail in the distance. I find that I like the latter better. The detail work is brilliant and successful, but I like when the artist guides me through the painting and makes active choices about what’s important and what isn’t.

There’s also variety in color: Some folks have tons of it and some have a more selective palette. I personally like the latter, so long as there’s a richness to it (i.e. there’s actually a lot of blues and yellows and pinks in those clouds, they just look gray).

Lots of repusage, and lots of layers beyond just foreground/middle ground/background – there’s at least 5 layers and sometimes many more. I’ve gotta do that. I spent hours looking at them and took a lot of notes and made a lot of little sketches and I’ll do some simple master copies when I get home – probably drawings/watercolors – just enough for me to really understand the depth and drawing without fussing too much..

Ilia Repin

Gary, you will be glad to know that the Repin painting is indeed on the wall, and I took a good, close look at it. I started with the caption, and apparently this guy modeled for the son in the painting of Ivan the Terrible! The painting itself is an interesting example of the fact that you don’t need to fuss over everything in order to make a great painting: The lower left corner of the painting – where the table is – is completely unfinished; his paints/legs are just sort of blopped in; and the background is a generic light blue that was put there but not painstakingly (you can see where he doesn’t worry about bringing it right up to the figure). The books look as though they were added after the rest of the painting was done – only the book in his hand was original – and those books are beyond loose and sometimes just outlines. I noticed that there’s a drink on the table by his hands and I wonder if that was added to put in a spot of red to balance out the warms in his face. Even after you notice all of the unfinished business it’s still an amazing painting – Repin knew what he was doing!

Other goodies

Let’s see, there’s Michelangelo’s fist painting – a swirling mass of demons with a lovely little landscape down below (I believe this was in the age of putting generic landscapes in the background of everything).

Lots of ugly babies and hideous angels with great plants.

A special Bacon exhibit – doesn’t quite go with the rest and I poked my nose in an walked out again to get back to the Dutch masters.

The Death of Sophocles – which is much more melodramatic in real life, and I noticed that there’s even someone in the background waving goodbye.

Some medieval Bibles with fancy leather binding and decoration – and if you think about it we do the same thing with our iPods now so nothing much has really changed.

A poster on the Heimlich maneuver in the café – makes you wonder if people choke often.

A really cool painting of a Gothic chapel by Charles-Marie Bouton with a warm interior and cool exterior in the background, and the same use of light-where-you-want it.

Oh, and Melody, there’s a siren here too. Remind you of anything?

I might do MOMA tomorrow for a change of pace!

M