Today’s theme is work. Lot’s of it. I’ve just accepted a full time (plus!) job, and will be posting less frequently, at least for the foreseeable future. I hope that you will continue exploring art, and let me know about works you find engaging. Dig through the archives if you haven’t been reading along every…
Hello young man. I see you are staring me down. How can I help you? Oh, you are looking over there, sorry to interrupt. Here let me get out of your way. What—is here not a good place? No? oh. um….how about…. There. is that better? Whew! For a minute, I was concerned. You were…
Sometimes “old” art doesn’t have that wow! fresh! impact that “new” art can. Contemporary art is often designed to have shock value that can make old masters feel, well, sedate. I don’t feel that way about this one, though: Oh, and if you hadn’t deduced it already, this is a religious work, “The Conversion of…
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Emile Bernard. Never heard of him, you say? Me neither (well, until I went to the MFAH recently). But doesn’t he seem fascinating? There he is, staring off into the distance, red hair framing a serious expression. He was painted by his friend, Emile Schuffenecker. The odd diagonal lines and bits…
Letters From Texas is exuberant! Also, it is wide—really wide. So wide that the only photo I could get of all of it in the shallow room where it hangs in the Blanton is an extreme angle: It is actually four paintings, hung side by side. They are numbered 20, 21, 22, and 23, but…
I love to be in nature. Well, some nature…not the 94 degrees, 100% humidity and the mosquitos are eating me alive nature I have out my back door most of the time. I love to be in the 40-85 degree nature with a nice breeze and lovely trees. I grew up on a prairie 18…
I’ve seen plenty of fancy golden altarpieces that are shiny, and that’s their sole allure. Simone Martini’s The Angel and the Annunciation, painted in 1333 in Sienna, now Italy, had a different affect on me. Forget for a moment, if you already know, what the “annunciation” story is. Just look at these folks, er, I…
“I like that art we jumped through. It tickled me!” proclaimed one of my three year old sons when asked about the art we saw recently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His twin promptly chimed in “it tickled me!” We went to the MFAH to view Jesús Rafael Soto’s Houston Penetrable. This is…
I decided I was sorely lacking in knowledge about the history of art here in the US of A, so I checked out “Smithsonian Q&A: American Art and Artists” from the library. In my mind, America had western art (cowboys & Indians), landscape art (Niagara Falls & geysers in Yellowstone), modern art (Pollock’s drip paintings…
This painting, El Jaleo by John Singer Sargent, stirs up an odd mix of sadness, joy, and memory of inebriated abandon in me, partly because it reminds me of spring break my senior year of high school. At 18 years old, I found myself in a tiny restaurant in Madrid with an empty glass and…
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