Museum days II

kw: photographs, museums, fine art

Convexed by Will Wilson was our window on a different world today at the Brandywine River Museum. My museum-happy relative and I had planned on visiting two museums today, but this one occupied all our time until he had to catch his train in midafternoon. We had gone there specifically to see the Wyeth exhibits of all three generations. That we did, then on the storey below we were quite taken by the exhibit Reality Check: Contemporary American Trompe l'Oeil Painting. Photography is not permitted in the museum galleries, so I obtained these images from the museum's web sites.

This painting typifies what many think of as Trompe l'Oeil ("fool the eye"): photographic detail, an experience of full depth (the frame is painted: everything you see here is on a flat canvas), complex subjects, and a sense that the painting is emerging from the canvas. The next image takes that last verb a step further:

Emergence by Mikel Glass seems to bring the subject right through a canvas, painted on canvas (!), and apparently nailed to a plain frame (but the frame is also painted on). I noticed that many of the paintings in this exhibit had apparent light effects such as the shadow of the man's leg here. The spot lighting in the gallery was placed to enhance the effect; if that leg were really sticking out of the canvas, the light was placed so that the shadow is in the right place.

While we saw a superb exhibit of Howard Pyle's work yesterday in Delaware, The Nation Makers is probably his most famous work, and is at the Brandywine. This is part of the permanent exhibit American Illustrators. Pyle was N. C. Wyeth's mentor and Wyeth's early commissioned canvases for Treasure Island (he was 29) are also on display nearby.

Of course I won't forego showing one Wyeth, The Raven by Jamie Wyeth, who is just a year older than I and has clearly spent those years well. This is my all time favorite Wyeth painting.

At lunch, my wife remarked that this reminded her of the years we spent in South Dakota. We visited Mount Rushmore once on our own, but whenever a relative visited, that is where we would take them, that and other spots that we might never visit without the added stimulus of the visitor(s). It was great to take a day off of work and see a couple lovely, smaller museums with stellar collections of their own.

Museum days

kw: photographs, museums, fine art

A relative is visiting for a couple of days, and he is even more of a museum fanatic than I am. He has already seen everything in Philadelphia and nearby, so we dropped by the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, which has a couple of unique collections. Firstly, starting well before 1910, the museum began collecting works by illustrator Howard Pyle.

Not only do they have The Mermaid, unfinished at his death in 1911, they have this portrait of his studio, made by one of his students shortly after his death, showing The Mermaid as it was when he died. Rather than reproduce a bunch of the paintings here, I'll leave it to readers to search his name in Google Images. Be sure also to check out this Wikipedia article on him.

Howard Pyle inspired two generations of painters and illustrators, including N. C. Wyeth of nearby Chadd's Ford, PA. Among the Pyle works I could also see hints of a style that was developed further by Norman Rockwell. The emotional "bang" of a painting by Pyle, Wyeth or Rockwell simply overwhelms me. It is much more satisfying than the more cerebral art called "Modern". Look here for more by Rockwell, here for more by and about Wyeth, and here for more by and about Pyle.

The British Pre-Raphaelite Brethren (PRB) painted (and produced other works) in styles primarily reminiscent of late Medieval art, rejecting the conventions of their time and anything that was not "pre-Raphael". This is Mother of Moses by Simeon Solomon. The girl is Moses' sister Miriam. It is an earlier example of PRB work, done when they were focusing on classical and biblical themes. The later "stunners", paintings of the beautiful women they gathered as their mistresses, are characteristic of the waning days of the movement.

Ten of the best Pre-Raphaelite works are showcased here. The website discusses the development of the movement, and tells a bit about Samuel Bancroft, the Wilmington industrialist who collected the paintings that form the bulk of the museum's PRB collection. It is the finest collection of these works to be found outside Britain.

Also among the later works by the PRB is this stained glass piece, produced by Tiffany Studios for Dante Gabriel Rosetti, one of the founders of the movement. The museum houses another piece of Tiffany work on a similar scale, by one of Howard Pyle's students.

While a Tiffany window is a spectacular artwork when seen as a whole, what I find most interesting is in the details. Tiffany glass firstly has almost a fractal quality, produced by many sections being "confetti glass", in which chips and shards of multicolored glass were dropped into a molten glass pane and allowed to halfway melt into it before it was cooled, annealed and cut for piecing. Secondly, the layering is quite unique, bulking up some sections to a few cm thick (an inch or more).

This closeup shows both techniques. Lead piping from an underlying layer is visible to the right of center, and the primarily green confetti chips are visible throughout.

That touches on only half of what the museum has to offer. They also have a stellar collection of John Sloan and members of his "Ashcan School" art movement, the Copeland Sculpture Garden on the museum grounds, and two visiting collections.

More museums tomorrow!

Beautiful obsessions

kw: folk art, fine art, photographs

If you define Folk Art as art produced for one's own pleasure, by someone who is not attempting to make a living at it, then most art is folk art. Then what is Fine Art? Here are two definitions:

• art created for purely aesthetic expression, communication, or contemplation.
• the visual arts which include painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and some performance art, as distinct from art forms such as poetry, literature, dance and music.

So I guess my mobiles qualify as both folk art, and as fine art. Note that I didn't say "most fine art is folk art". While this is true, some people's continual clowning or other "day of one's life performance" is a kind of folk art of the acting variety. Is dancing at home with your partner a kind of folk art? I'd say so.

While I am frequently on the lookout for examples of unique folk art (of the fine art sort), the work of Jason deCaires Taylor, while solidly in the professional art arena, is certainly unique. This sculpture, "Man on Fire", is situated in 8m of water off Cancun, Mexico. It has been there long enough for some coral and other sessile sea life to grow. Indeed, getting coral to grow on his sculptures is the point of Taylor's work. They are made from a mixture of concrete and coral sand, to present a surface attractive to coral animals. He is presently involved in an installation to comprise 400 statues, all life casts of whole persons.

I collect fruit stickers (and veggie stickers when they show up), just pasting them at random onto notebook paper. Barry Snyder, the Stickerman, enlists friends to gather them by the thousand so he can produce portraits such as this Sgt Pepper picture. I don't know how he keeps them prior to putting the portraits together; most papers you stick them to, they are hard to remove intact.

It is nothing new to state that all people are artists of one sort or another. What is it about art? In my own case, producing a work of art focuses attention to a rare level. The sense of flow that accompanies the otherwise tedious activity is a timeless state that is quite addicting.

In that regard, planning a road trip, particularly now that mapping software is effectively free (for the modest cost of a computer!), with the bemused contemplation of alternate routes, side trips and sights to see, is a kind of art. I get the same satisfaction from a well-executed road trip that I do from completing a mobile. But the planning is the greatest pleasure. Sometimes the trip itself is anticlimactic!

But we each have our favorites. Producing sticker portraits is probably a great pleasure for Stickerman, whether or not he sells any. But many people would find themselves bored or frustrated by it. I can see myself perhaps making simple decorations with stickers, at most. I suspect, though, that Stickerman would find mobile-making a drag. Stickers are "his thing". What is your thing?

The museum the Wyeths built

kw: museums, paintings, fine art

Today, was free admission day at the Brandywine River Museum, so my wife and I tootled down PA Highway 1 to have a look. All we knew is that it has paintings by members of the Wyeth family. This image, from a published photograph [© A. B. McCoy 1985], is of Old Kris by N.C. Wyeth.

In brief, N.C. is the original Wyeth, mainly an illustrator, who worked from the late 1800s to the early 1940s. He died in 1945. His son Andrew is the currently most famous Wyeth, born in 1917 and still active. Grandson Jamie, born 1946 (and so a year older than I) is the most productive at the moment.

A couple other Wyeth family members also produce art and a piece or two by them are on display. N.C., Andrew and Jamie each have about half a gallery devoted to their work. Also on display is a fine collection of work by Howard Pyle, N.C.'s teacher. Works by other well-known illustrators such as Maxfield Parrish are also shown.

In the non-gallery areas a variety of non-painterly art is on display, such as sculptures large and small, a few carved "wooden Indians", and a large, very ornate Victorian-era doll house. The museum advertises tours led by Victoria Wyeth, but only on weekdays.

I'd called and been told I could not photograph in the galleries, so I didn't bring a camera. It is a pity. In an area where one photography is allowed, three Christmas trees are richly decorated with ornaments made by Museum volunteers, of fanciful animals made from natural materials like thistle and cockle burrs, milkweed pods, gourds, and many other kinds of dried plant material.

On the second floor one gallery is devoted to a delightful model train setup, all O gauge, which is a bit larger than the model train sets that were often given as Christmas gifts to youngsters such as I in the 1950s. Later, HO (half-O) and N (even smaller yet) became more popular, but I've always had a fondness for the larger model sizes.

We had but 90 minutes to spend there, because we could only go late in the day. It was an hour-plus well invested.