Details and what lies beneath.

  

This month I am learning about bones and muscles, tendons and flexors... here's what I drew today.

What is wrong with me!?

Perhaps this is why I am single... I see this amazingly beautiful painting with sweeping romantic motion and a breathtaking sunset in it and yet this is what I see;

Bahnhof der Kunst

I walked into a building in San Francisco today that made me think about this art gallery Alex and I visited in Berlin... It was tall and filled with odd noises... the building in SF is a ferry building turned into a chocolate factory and has a sparseness coupled with a randomness of objects that took me across the globe in a flash...

I recall finding parts of this museum that was once a train station and wondering if we had accidentally left the museum portion of the building. After a few minutes wandering in dimly lit hallway you turn a corner and find something strange hung on the wall with a plaque and suddenly you find that you're ok...

In retrospect I really like the sense of bewilderment that this building gives you, it is an experience in itself, like wandering the woods and finding discarded treasure.

Sadly we were not allowed to wander through the chocolate factory.  I'm sure the oompa loompas would not have approved such activity.

Brevity/sketchy

Tonight I managed to reserve time to go and draw!  There's a fun live model "anti-art" school thing that happens all over the country called "Dr.Sketchy's" and models are usually burlesque (costumed) models... perfect for me.  They call in all different body types and costumes... plus it is all very low key and no pressure.

This was the first time I've ever drawn from a live model (or at least one who knew they were my model) so I was pretty psyched to be able to do it.  I got through arts high school And earned a BFA in costume design without ever having a life drawing class... it's a rather sad gap in my education.

That Egyptian Dude with all that stuff on Tour

I believe the punishment for taking photos in the King Tut exhibit is dismemberment, death or being forced to watch 8 straight hours of CSPAN 2... something along those lines. So any pictures included here were stolen from google searches.

When I go to popular exhibits like this I often wonder what it is they've expected the public to find exciting. I tend to judge the museum's expectations on what they're selling in the gift shop and what information they have plastered in repetition inside the gallery. Museums never seem to sell the pictures I want to own so it's sad when I cannot take any photos (or make any sketches) of my own. I spent an hour and a half inside, reading every plaque and observing fronts and backs of everything. I took textual notes (thus getting through the "no sketching" loophole). I did get the feeling however that the people who put the exhibit together were not interested in the same things that I am. The major themes to the exhibit seemed to be; 1.Look at the shiny stuff 2. Here's the sociology and genealogy of ancient Egypt. 3. This stuff is really, and we mean REALLY Old! (and well preserved)



On the one hand there is a lot to see and the whole exhibit could get overwhelming easily. However anyone who has seen a TV special on this goes in knowing a lot about it. I felt like there could have been more information provided in addition to what there was because a lot of it was review anyway.

As for the look at the shiny stuff aspect of the display, the shiny stuff was even more impressive than I had anticipated. As an artisan, I was rather blown away by the craftsmanship put into almost every item. Compared to every other culture on Earth at the time (including China) their art was thousands of years ahead of its time. The intricacy of portraiture was amazing. They did have the representational style like most cultures in 14thC BCE did as well, but the items that were meant to be exact were. There were two cow's heads that I'd never seen in photos before that caught my eye... and were not being sold as postcards either.

(oh side note, the exhibit explained that "Amun" was Lower Egypt... but What does Tut Ankh mean?)

What I found most interesting were many large photos of the way Tut's tomb looked upon discovery. Google only provided me with one of them... but the exhibit had a lot. The mere thought of discovering a room that has been undisturbed for 3000 years (give or take) is exciting. The story goes that the first time the tomb was discovered Howard Carter's companions asked him if he could see anything. In what I can only hear in my head as delivered in a dry understated British accent Carter answered "Yes wonderful things". Pip pip I say.



One of Carter's photos showed a stack of wreaked chariots. "Where are the chariots?" I thought, no mention of them in the exhibit at all. Another thing that I kept wondering throughout was "Where are all of the body parts?". There were vessels and sarcophag(i?) all over the place that used to contain this body or that liver but I kept thinking... so where's the liver now? Did they put it in a mason jar somewhere in Egypt? A docent told me that all of the human parts and mummies are still in the Valley of the Kings. I didn't ask what kind of receptacle the livers and lungs went into... let's just imagine mason jars anyway.

Hidden Chamber

The very best part of the sculpture garden at the DeYoung was this weird chamber... out along the edge of the garden it looks like you're about to head out into some sort of service exit. I am not one to be put off by being places I shouldn't be...
First you look down a corridor that looks like this;

and once you've crossed through this door you will find a big cylinder surrounded by wall... walk around it and you'll find another door (phew... this is "art")

through the door is a hidden chamber with benches and ambient light and a hole in the ceiling.
This is my attempt to photoshop several photos together to make a long one but my camera insisted on changing the colors on each of them even though they were taken in succession. Hopefully you get the idea anyway...


It was delicious finding this room on a rainy day. The sculpture garden was almost empty because everyone was trying to stay dry. Sitting in this isolation it was tempting to just pull out my book and hope that no one else would find it... the sound inside was amplified so that even the drip drip drops of the rain coming through the ceiling were impressive.


This odd cement and stone structure did what good art is supposed to do... it transports you, it changes your perspective, it makes you aware of that which you would otherwise overlook. It was moving.

Free Tut?

What happens when Target buys San Francisco 40,000 tickets to see the Tutankhamen exhibit at the DeYoung? They sell out in less than an hour. Today I went to go wait in line to get one of them.
(box office opened at 8:30)
9:02am;
I get to the front of the museum

9:13 am;
I find the end of the line by the Rose Garden (if you think about the museum as a city block, I am around three sides and the next street down... The tower with the steam rising from it is the far end of the museum away from the entrance)



9:23 am;
I am at the fountain end of the museum and staff is walking the line telling us that our "chances are slim" for getting tickets... slim is better than nothing so I wait it out listening to the whiny couple behind me talking about how they "should have bla bla bla" and the cackling sisters behind them... I am zen, I came to wait... Tickets are usually over $30 with museum entrance (an extra $7 if you want the audio tour)

10:07 I think there are about 150 people left in front of me when staff finally announce that Tut is 'sold out' but the rest of the museum is free so I take a 20% off coupon and begrudgingly head in.

10:15 I stop at the docent counter and chat with the ladies about the tickets going so fast and ask a few questions about the museum... but wait, one tells me to 'wait here'... and calls me over to receive ... Oh My Dear Tut... a ticket for a 4pm entry (YES!)

-- 6 hours to kill --

I went for a stroll through the permanent collection. I do recall being underwhelmed when they first opened so I held hopes of improvement.

#1 Amish Quilts... pretty, not overly exciting but pretty and brighter than I expected from Amish. I liked a pattern called the Roman Stripe and took a note in my journal about the direction grain lines are in whereon I was jumped upon because "We don't allow sketching!" Ok first off there's no sign on the wall or in the brochure to convey such information and second off all of their patterns are available in the gift shop... apparently the Amish are concerned about copyrights? I feel like publishing my two doodles of squares with arrows here but my laziness trumps my spite.

#2 Meso-American art; impressive, lots of well preserved reliefs and some textiles...


#3 19th Century to modern art; not impressed. The major artists they have don't have good representations of their work... "here we have a canvas Gauguin painted on and then gave to his cat mittens to sleep on for 10 years until the poor feline died upon it..."

#4 The Sculpture garden; still the best part of their permanent collection, although there are a couple of crap-art pieces, for example;
Untitled (really? This looks like freshly quarried rock to me.)
The best part of the sculpture garden was the chamber that I'm giving its own post (HERE)

#5 the look out tower; so cool to see the city from this angle (this photo shows the Golden Gate Park courtyard and the Cal Academy of sciences in the foreground).




--- three and a half hours to kill ---

bla bla, got a lot of coffee, took some pictures of the lookout tower from below...



4pm; King Tut (another post that is yet to come)

---
Sorry for the teaser post but I am exhausted! However it was a goal today to get a blog up so here it is. Blog blog blogety blog.

How to Launch a Cat

I took a quick trip to the museum in LA this weekend...
The best thing I saw at the Getty was this book illustration;



painted circa 1500

Emeryville Marina...

You may recall a post from over a year ago about driftwood art near the Emeryville marina. (I was going to post a link but I cannot find the original post... If I find it, I'll update) The artists make this a habit.


This week they've made a beach shelter.

Folsom and Embarcadero

Here's the view of the bay bridge from the Embarcadero in San Francisco... I love this bow and arrow sculpture. It's literal and campy and not particularly inspired, very safe civic art, and yet appealing and funny.

Nothing much to say about it. Sometimes I get so worked up (like my recent posts) that I need to take a moment to look around... so here we are. We'll see what I'm ranting about later on, enjoy the post card for now.

The 19th Century is scary...

Walking up to the Museum of Natural History in New York, there is a statue of Teddy Roosevelt, our 26th President. He is atop a noble steed and holds a brave daring stance...

Zoom out... and you will see there is a naked er... 'man of the Afric' assisting him.

Walk around his haunches and you will see a leg and some feathers and I thought "oh maybe it's an angel"... my friend who is not quite as hopefully naive as me said "oh no... that's a Native" and sure enough, on the other side; what would have been called at the time; 'a noble savage'... also nearly naked.

I think this is possibly the most offensive statue I have ever seen.

Reading

You know that feeling you have for the radio when you get dumped? Suddenly you realize that every song is about love or heartbreak. I find myself listening to nothing but 24/7 classical and NPR because it's safe. I've been feeling like that with all printed media and news sources these days. I don't want to hear about the next thing I'm supposed to be freaked out about, I don't want to hear about the crappy economy because I KNOW. Yes, my bank account and I are well aware of the economic slump. It seems like there is just so much conflict in everyday life that I can't even read fiction these days.
All of the books on my "to read" pile have been gathering dust.
All I do these days is draw.
Obsessive compulsive doodles, graphic weirdness... I guess it's a way to work my brain without giving me another thing to worry about. If the hero will survive or not is just one more problem my brain doesn't care to deal with these days.

Ouroboros

There are times,

          there are times,
you get stuck in your head,
and all you can see there is blue and there's red.

The red sweeps over with passion and wants,
while the blue tries to swallow with sorrow.
Blue haunts your dreams and the back of your head.
Sometimes life is just blue and just red.

The Fashion Machine

This is a painting by fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo...

...it's nice to never take your work too seriously

art matters

Sometimes it's easy to think that art doesn't matter. Although it's what drives me on and what I seek all around me. Although without art our lives would be lived in plain boxes with blank walls listening to talk radio. Without art there are no picture books for children, and nothing but non-fiction books for adults, there is no reaching for that which can only be reached through imagination. Without art we live lives with text-book context. No video games, no quilts, no painting... it's everywhere and somehow even I sometimes think it's not 'useful'...

 but then I see something like this;

and I think again.

(it says "a revolution without art is like wanting to change the system with money, power, violence and greed")

The Crocker Art Museum

On Tuesday I also visited the Crocker Art Museum, which was small but surprisingly good for a modest museum. Most of the works were part of the Mrs. and Mr. Crocker's personal collection donated to the city. The building alone was worth the price of admission...
Here's the front of the mansion;

The foyer;

They had a display on nude figure drawing. I did a nerdy jump for joy when I spotted this original sketch by Albrecht Durer;
There was a room of dishes... I Really don't get why every museum seems to have a room or twelve dedicated to plates... so not interesting.

a sketch by Peter Paul Rubens (also really impressive to see in a small collection)
They had a modern art wing with pieces that weren't your standard MOMA fare... I liked this one, titled "Crowd Control"

... and this cool walk through sculpture mirror house

I also loved the salon style hanging of the genre paintings... although the lights weren't hung very well (there was a lot of glare and they weren't pointed in the proper directions for the paintings)

Mostly it's a neat little art museum that was worth the visit.

Governors on canvas

Today it was 110 degrees farighenheight (that's about 44C to the rest of the world)... now it is nearly 8pm and it is 103F (39C)... but it was my day off and one of the few that I didn't need to be tending to business in Berkeley or Carmel so I went out and saw the sights in Sacramento anyway. I went to see the state Capitol building, I went to the Crocker Art Museum and barely saw old Sacramento before fearing that I would burst into flames and made my way back to the hotel on a heated walk (or is that wok) that seamed to take three times longer than the way there. More Blogs of my walk today are forthcoming but I thought I would start with the Governor's portraits I saw today in the State Capitol.
It is the tradition for California governors to have their portrait painted as they leave office. For the most part this one of governor George Dukmejian is typical of them. They're realistic portraits of men in suits with conservative lawyer-esque backgrounds or sometimes a simple black scumble. Usually tasteful and very finely crafted, but not really interesting art. I couldn't find any info on the painters so I suppose that is the point.

I did like that Grey Davis had his portrait done with a background of California poppies and the coast line. For those who don't know; he was actually ousted from office because of the State's anger over California's budget woes... no matter what his record as a whole reflects, he was a good environmentalist and therefore not so bad in my book.

Now although I don't have a lot of knowledge about the gammut of California governors... I have a favorite based on his portrait. Governor Edmund "Jerry" Brown was the only governor of the state (that's out of 38 men) to have a non-realistic portrait done. with further research I learned that he also refused to live in the fancy governor's mansion or ride in the governor's limo because of his deep convictions for social equality... Yay Jerry Brown!

...turns out this is the same Jerry Brown who served as in the mayor of Oakland up to 2006 and is currently the Attorney General of California... oh! That Jerry Brown! Yea, he's cool.
Don't you have to like a man (a politician nonetheless) who would get a portrait like this?

Pooh!

I got to see the original sketches for the House on Pooh Corner by E.H. Shepard at the Victoria & Albert Museum...
When I see original sketches like these it makes me really excited. Usually (as was the case with these) they are in some small hallway, not really in a place of prominence but still lovingly displayed. I think that seeing the actual document gives me a sense of intimate connection with the artist. E.H. Shepard is rather a big celebrity in the world of children's book illustrators. Looking at the actual graphite shows me how he thought, how we are similar, how we are different... he becomes a peer more than an idol... and then after a moment of technical criticisim... the nostalgia planted in my being at an early stage of life bursts from my depths and into a smile that says "Pooh!!!" finally I am reduced to the excitement of finding an old friend in an unexpected place.

He had murmured this to himself three times in a singing sort of way, when suddenly he remembered. He had put it into the Cunning trap to catch the Heffalump. "Bother" said Pooh. "It all comes to trying to be kind to Heffalumps." and he got back into bed. But he couldn't sleep... he tried counting sheep and as that was no good, he tried counting Heffalumps. And that was worse. because every Heffalump that he counted was making straight for a pot of Pooh's honey, and eating it all.

"My tail is getting cold. I don't want to mention it, but I mention it. I don't want to complain but there it is. My tail's cold"

There was also a sketch by Edward Lear...

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

Lear's "pussy" looks a little peeved...reminds me of my old cat that I had (very cleverly) named "Hissy"

The Creepy Eyes Gallery

Hey Kelly,
Check out the new art I found down by tourist's pier... I know your birthday is coming up. These will go great hanging over your precious moments diorama and Hallmark display...

Attend the tale...

of Sweeney Todd!

Tonight I saw Sweeney Todd at ACT. It was the John Doyle version that had been the 2006 revival on Broadway. It was BEAUTIFUL. I hadn't known that it wasn't an all new version and had done no research on it in advance so I was mostly curious to see if they had changed the old Eugene Lee set, which is usually essentially a big box where the barber shop is located on top and the pie shop is the lower level. The coolest effect that the box usually does is where Sweeney slices a customer's throat who then slides down a chute while the box is rotating and shoots through into the meat processing room in the back and is promptly moved into a storage unit or furnice or giant meat grinder (depending on the show). The "box" was really a very elegant solution that has been used in countless productions since the original in (1973? I think.) Here is a clip of it, you really only need to watch the beginning to get the idea... couldn't find the throat slitting scene though;


The Revival version is stunning. The whole show takes place in a room made with a slatted floor and back wall. In the center of the back wall is a shelf that reaches towards the ceiling with a piano at the base.



When the curtian rises at the top of the show, we see a room filled with Victorian-esque musicians and a man in striped pajamas and a straight jacket staring out at the house. The man is ungagged and the straight jacket is removed just in time for him to sing the first line... "Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd..." In the center of the stage is a black slatted coffin. The lid is lifted and from inside the coffin rises Sweeney Todd. Throughout the show they use the coffin as Joanna's room, Sweeney's office, the pub table, and so on and so forth.

I had initially been looking forward to seeing a bloodbath that I would not have to clean up but after seeing the very first scene I knew that it was going to be stylized. A throat being slit was made gruesome by red light and a bucket of blood being poured into another bucket, real foley sound.

I was so happy to see this show. There were no "pie" props, there was no literal blood, there were no realistic backdrops or fog. It was all in your imagination. This director actually wanted to take his audience on a journey that engaged the audience and made us meet them on the way there. I get so sick of theater that tries to be as realistic as humanly possible. It's just spoon feeding the audience and doesn't make them get involved. Film does verisimilitude pretty well, theater is a totally different medium and I am of the school that thinks we don't need to try to compete with film. I thought that the new version lacked some of the human connections that the traditional staging did very well. It wasn't as tragic when the beggar woman was killed or clear about the relationship between Mrs. Lovett and Toby (which is usually heart-wrenching). I think that it was partially a little more stilted with connections because the actors spent a lot of time facing out towards the audience rather than looking at who they were singing to. An added element to this production however was that every actor with the exception of Sweeney played an instrument. (The Sweeney in the Broadway version looks like he played acoustic guitar, but ours didn't) The casting was amazing because each performer had to play the appropriate instrument, look the part and sing the range of their character. It wasn't %100 on the money. Antony was a little tubby but had the most amazing tenor that it was fully forgiven, and the Beadle who is usually a 50ish fat guy was played by a drop dead georgious 30-something, but again between his acting and voice, all was forgiven. The judge played a muted trumpet, the lovers both played cello, Toby played violin... this was all live sound and as a former violin student it was obvious that everyone holding a stringed instrument had been TRAINED for years on their instruments, I can only assume the wind instruments were also played with expertise. I'll say it again; It was Beautiful.

Here is the clip from the Tony's of the revival production. I think it gives you a good sampler of the show. I wish I could have taken you all with me because most of you that I know read my blog would have loved it as much as I did. Sometimes it's nice to just be an audience member.