Visual Nocturne, Musical Nocturne

The last little while I've been really inspired by this painting by James McNeil Whistler.
It's called Nocturne in Black and Gold : The Falling Rocket.
It's an impressionist piece depicting fireworks and the resulting smoke lingering over the Thames.

Also, this website will create a reproduction in any size starting at about $150. Hello. If I had any money, this would be on my wall. ANd I would stare at it while listening to this:

Research Proposal

For my research proposal, I decided to compare and contrast The Return of the Prodigal Son as depicted by three different artists: Rembrandt, Tissot, and Chagall. I'm going to talk about their religious backgrounds briefly so there is some personal context, and then I will address their artistic style and a few formal elements--most likely color, lighting, and perspective.

Fun, right? :) You probably don't think so, but I am actually really looking forward to seeing how the paper turns out. My rough draft is due tomorrow, so I'll be spending a few hours on it tonight and polishing it up over the next few weeks. The concept of a rough draft is weird for me--I usually just sit down and write it out in one sitting or two straight from beginning to end and then have a couple of people look over it. This will be a new adventure in disciplining myself to just getting the general ideas down and getting the structure and flow together without worrying about my exact word choice and whatnot from the get-go.

These are the paintings I'll be discussing:

Tissot's

Chagall's

Rembrandt's



Ooh, they just give me chills.

Change

I like change. I crave it. It's refreshing and renewing to me.

My college roommates used to joke about me being pregnant all the time because I always wanted to move our furniture around in different configurations. When I owned a house, the artwork on the walls changed about every 6 months.

So. Why bring this up? Well, I just realized today that it is an important factor to consider as I'm weighing different career options.

My most recent career decision is Museum Studies. And I happen to think it's a perfect fit for me.

For the past 6 months or more, I've been trying to decide between art, education, and public administration.

Museum Studies combines them all. I decided I would really love to be the education director of a museum--coordinating workshops, seminars, school tours, creating curriculum based on permanent and temporary exhibits.

Think about it: I would be involved in education (check), surrounded by art and constantly thinking about/researching/talking about art (check), and the content I develop would change regularly, as would the people to whom the information is presented (check). Art, education, public administration, and change.

It's been a long time coming... but I feel really good about it!

So, to help get some experience under my belt, I am volunteering as a docent at both the Springville Museum of Art and the BYU Museum of Art. I'm really excited.

(I just hope it doesn't mean another 4 years of undergrad studies before I can do a Museum Studies Certification.)

Keep your fingers crossed for me! ('Cause I'm going to do it all while working full time.)

SOLD! (or, 17/101)

So, last night I sold my first paining ever! It was #17 in my list of goals to accomplish before fall 2011, and now I can check it off the list!
Jessica saw this painting hanging around in my room, and offered to buy it outright. She picked it up on Thursday when she came for dinner.

Thanks, Jessica!

Eglise St-Eustache by the Forum des Halles

I had never heard of the Eglise St-Eustache until some friends took me there after Institute one night.
I think it's really beautiful.

The cathedral is behind Les Halles. If you explore back behind all of the trees near the Chatelet-Les Halles RER or the Les Halles Metro stop, you'll find the church.

And the best part?

The cool little plaza out in front of the church that houses this cool sculpture.

You can't see it in the pictures, but to the right and behind where I was standing there were tiered rows of grass where people would lay out and read, make out, walk their dogs, or have a smoke and chat. I think it's a great spot.

Elles @ Centre Pompidou

So, this post is one of the reasons I even brought up the cookie story.

I went to the Centre Pompidou one last time because there was a Kandinsky Exhibit I wanted to see before it or I was no longer in Paris.

While there I noticed that there was also a new primary exhibit in the Pompidou Center. "Elles @ Centre Pompidou."

Elles doesn't have a direct translation in English that makes its meaning apparent. It could be translated as they, but it loses its inherent meaning, because elles is the third-person plural, but strictly feminine. So, I guess you could translate is as "the female they" or "the women" (though "the women" would just be les femmes).

So the exhibit is essentially "They (females only) at the Pompidou Center." Got it? Good.

I thought maybe it was just a special exhibit focusing on the existing art in the Pompidou by female artists.

Well, I was kind of right.

Take a look at some of the things I found in the exhibit.

At the entrance there was this display that featured the names of prominent male artists, but the names had been changed into a feminine version of the name (La Corbusier, Annie Warhol, Jacqueline Pollock). I thought that was pretty clever.



Barbara Kruger


Sylvie Fanchon

Sylvia Bachli

Lee Bontecou

Koo Jeong-A (An example of contemporary art that I doesn't appeal to me. Everything else I took pictures of I really liked).

More Barbara Kruger. (I love this, by the way. Maybe too much. I think it's really funny.)

Helen Frankenthaler

(I don't know who the artist was here. Just liked the look of them.)


Marthe Wery

Details of a Kristin Baker painting. Her subjects (inspired by car racing) aren't really my thing, but her technique is really cool.

I don't know who made this, but it was kind of interesting--a dress all covered in light bulbs.

Vera Molnar

I found a lot of pieces that I really loved in the exhibit. And then I saw this (you might want to click on it to see a bigger version):


This really annoyed me. I can understand that the curators probably wanted to make a point about how women artists were just as good as men. But here's the thing. I think you can do that without coming across as whiny little kids who are basically saying, "Hey, look at me, too!"

Why not give the exhibit another title, and then once everyone has gone through, have some sort of big reveal at the end that tells them how all of the works in the exhibit were by women?

Anyway. This was just one of the pieces of art, but it was at the beginning of the exhibit and I felt that it set the stage in a way that kind of tainted everything else that was featured.

It was still a really great exhibit, and I discovered several artists that I had never heard of whose work I really liked.

Le Jardin Ephémère à l'Hôtel de Ville

So, since arriving in Paris January 21st, I had seen the square in front of the Hotel de Ville turned into an ice skating rink and a tennis court/arena. So, truth be told, I shouldn't have been surprised to walk out of the Metro and see this:

The Ephemeral Gardens at Town Hall

Featuring...

Scarecrows

Grass you can actually sit on!!

Planter "boxes" that I wanted to steal (along with so many of the other things I'm going to show you. It made me want to garden).

This took my breath away. Clever and beautiful. Art made out of terra cotta pots drilled to a wall. Who'dathunk?

And the ever-present statues keeping tabs on everything...

I like to call these "succulent paintings." They are hanging on a wall, just so we're clear. This isn't just a really awkward shot of succulents in planter boxes on the ground.

Close up succulent painting. Nice, right? Is it weird that I think I might want succulents to be included in my wedding flowers? Maybe? At least they're hardy and would last through all of the festivities...

Because grass is often off-limits in Paris, even in public parks, there were signs posted on the patches of sod that had been lain for the exposition. "Pelouse Accessible" let everyone know that they could kick back and enjoy...

This was another display that just took my breath away. Who comes UP with this stuff?

More plant artwork. I absolutely love this idea.

And they covered an entire wall with it!

Wide shot

Hotel de Ville

Whoever originially had the idea to bring all of these different things to the Town Hall square is brilliant. Brilliant, I tell you.

Paintings

Did I ever mention how most of the paintings I did in Paris got ruined on the flight home?

Yep.

Except for like three of them (don't worry that there were probably thirty).


But, not to worry* I have repurposed them into new collage-style paintings.


I took the ruined paintings like the one below




cut them into strips, and stuck them to an unfinished canvas with varnish.


Ta-da.

This is one of several I am going to make that are all the same size, but the collage elements will be different shapes.

And I finally got around to finishing Happy's 2008 birthday painting.


Here it is. This is the actual color. So, basically, one main color with tons o' texture. She wanted a blue painting--and that's what she got. :)





A detail.








And two more detail shots in bad kitchen lighting. The painting wasn't this yellow-ish, though there were some purple splashes throughout.


I love modeling paste. :)

Another detail I added which you can see in the main photo is some split reeds that I affixed to the canvas with modeling paste.



I was really happy with how it turned out--so much so that I almost didn't give it to Hap for her bday.



But I did. And she loved it. (Which is good, 'cause I would have absolutely taken it back and just given her earrings if she hadn't sincerely loved it.)



Oh, yeah. And my dad told me he wouldn't let me leave the house with it unless it was signed. I resisted at first, but then figured I could compromise. Signing on the front of the canvas seems arrogant to me since no one really cares. So I signed on the frame on the bottom right corner.

*Well, "not to worry" may be a little generous. I was pretty stinkin' upset.