Fuller Craft Museum

There are so many wonderful things to write about. My paintings are going well and I have photos of progress on all of them ready to post, but later. First I want to tell you about an exciting trip I had yesterday to the Fuller Craft Museum - New England's foremost exhibition space for the genre of craft. (Think handmade objects, wearable art, and domestic craft gone wild.) Not only is the building and setting amazing - a twisting wood shingling house seemingly built upon a large pond littered with lily pads. (It was made all the more surreal by the fine mist falling off and on all day.) The museum itself actually housed a collection of very finely crafted and stunning exhibits which meandered much more closely to the category of "fine art" than the museum's title would have you think. My favourites are pictured here, and here.

Antonio lopez garcia

I finally made it to the Museum of Fine Arts last night. Phew. It was free from 4 until close which was the biggest carrot. The admission price is normally $17 Wuh? So expensive. The collection was gorgeous and I will have to spend many more Wednesday nights with the work soaking it all in. But the highlight of the evening was the special exhibition of Spanish artist, Antonio Lopez Garcia. (Yes, you can get into the special exhibit for free as well! What a coup!)

I would encourage you to Google the artist to view other images of his work and get a better sense of his style and subject matter. Most of his paintings were near photographic in their observation. The subjects were not always rendered with the definite edges and finite shapes that film could provide. Instead there was the sense that he was painting - as one got close to the canvas and realized the information provided was merely an impression, an imperfect blot of paint, a ragged edge indicative of brush work. But the work was exhaustive. Lopez Garcia is not working from photograph! He is spending years sometimes visiting sites and painstakingly making accommodations for changes in light and objects. I was overwhelmed. His courage to take seemingly endless cityscapes and work them out building by building; tone by tone. Truly inspiring.

Wonderful weekend.

I didn't paint today, but I was reminded of how fiercely I want to continue making art, and how much I have to say. I visited the DeCordova museum outside Concord, MA. this weekend. Tyler was fishing on Walden Pond, seriously, and I trotted out to Thoreau's cottage and pondered the wonderful words of the transcendentalist before hightailing it indoors at the museum up the street. I was quite immediately greeted by the installation pictured at the right. Now I was very, very, naughty to take photographs of this. It is typically frowned upon because of a few reasons not least of which is the fact that a flash can damage the often light sensitive surfaces of artworks overtime, but there is also that whole sticky issue of copyright and intellectual property.

Bah...

I loved this - positively swooned over it. And felt that I absolutely had to capture it for further scrutiny back home in the studio. As I talked about the piece to Tyler I realized I was interested in how the botanical subjects were turned into flat symbols and then grouped according to a mood or subject to create these crazy motifs - sort of Victorian, sort of fanciful, grotesque. Yes, this piece was grotesque in the way that the grotesque becomes the sublime...I loved it.

On another note, I was lucky enough to find four tintypes as I sorted through bins of antique photos in a shop in Gloucester MA this weekend. The owner was a collector of other people's snapshots as were some of his close friends. And I was immediately fascinated by that as well. What a wonderful and strange obsession - very voyeuristic in a way. Love it!