Jul 30, 2012 | museums, photography
With the Olympics starting this week, the whole world seems focused on London. And that includes the Museum of the City of New York, which just opened a new exhibit London Street Photography this week.
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London Street Photography
Matt Stuart (b.1974), “Trafalgar Square,” 2006 |
The exhibit features over 70 photographs recording the people and streets of London, and you walk through them chronologically from 1860 to present day, watching photography develop alongside the bustling streets.
The room is white and wide open; it’s as if you can see decades of time sprawled out before you in one glance. The late 1800s saw photography in its developmental stages, as exposure times finally became short enough to freeze a city as busy as London. The 1910 photo by Horace Nicholls, “Derby Day,” looks like it came straight out of My Fair Lady, with the man in the foreground chewing merrily on his big cigar opposite a jolly woman in a giant hat.
Jul 27, 2012 | museums, painting, The Morgan Library & Museum
“Juxtaposing two colors puts me in a state of intense excitement” –Josef Albers
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Color Study for Homage to the Square
oil and graphite on blotting paper with varnish |
An exhibition that began in Germany and worked its way around Europe has finally landed in the States at the Morgan Library & Museum. Josef Albers in America gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the work of this German-born artist, most famous for his studies of color and the series, Homage to the Square.
It’s interesting to see what came before that famous colored squares series; how much work went into choosing just the right pigments and color combinations. There are even notes carved into the paint and scribbled in the margins, notes like “Try Again.”
I found the opening pieces most interesting, as squares that play with perspective and color do more than just with color alone. His three “Studies for a Kinetic” placed side-by-side, give three different versions of the same lines becoming squares, each playing with the canvas space in its own way based on the angles and colors chosen. But it wasn’t perspective that most interested Albers, who once described the square as “the dish I serve my craziness about color in.”
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Study for a Kinetic, ca. 1945
oil and graphite on blotting paper
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Jul 25, 2012 | inspiration
Zoomed-out photographs of this great big world are ah-mazing. It kinda makes me wish I didn’t live in the city.
Below you’ll find a rainbow of scenic spaces, mostly found on tumblr, arranged by little ol’ me:
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| Flower Paradise at Hitachi Seaside Park, Japan. More pics here. |
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| ripples in Tuscany, Italy. found here. |
Jul 25, 2012 | news
I was just going to tweet about this, but then I decided it deserved its own post.
Someone out there is a frosting master! And, this just so happens to be my very favorite Van Gogh. I’m looking at the paper version on my wall right now:)
Happy Wednesday!
Jul 24, 2012 | painting, The Frick Collection
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| Oil on canvas. Part of the Frick Collection, see it on the Frick website for more info. |
A fairy-like pink-haired mother sits with her two young children standing beside her. Her little daughter looks up at her, wearing a white cotton dress, matching hat and blue-bowed shoes, her blonde hair shining and cheeks flushed. The little boy stands separate on the left, in his navy colonial-looking jacket with it’s white frill collar. His blonde hair looks just like his sister’s and he stares out at us with the same blue eyes as his mother.
Their features are perfectly synchronized, the family resemblance expertly rendered. The withdrawal behind their expressions makes it seem as if they’re trying to keep the secret of their beauty from getting out.
