Saturday Arts day

This week we were excited to go see a free presentation of the Washington Ballet Company introducing their newest ballet based on Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow published in 1820 this short story is one that has been a great halloween scary story for many generations. It has lots of "Dutch" influence and kindled my interest in the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam as a youth when I was studying ballet myself.
This presentation was inspired in part by the paintings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum which hosted this presentation in their great Kogod courtyard under the fantastic canopy installed a few years ago over the space between the two buildings of SAAM and National Portrait gallery.

The choreographer told us that the costumes for the laundresses were inspired by this painting of a the  Young Moravian Girl circa 1755-60 in the collection which we found later and photographed. 

 What ever the inspiration these dancers were channeling joy and pilgrim charm... they warmed up for us and later danced for us sections of the ballet with introductions about the various sections. They also introduced themselves and I was surprised to discover that one was Japanese, Ukrainian and the third is Brazilian! They are soon discovered and accused of witchcraft.

Ballet is always a drama with tragic undertones and romance currents run a plenty. 

They apparently get the usual Salem treatment for witches and come back in the second act as spirit witches with great white wigs! Ichabod Crane the protagonist in the short story is a fellow who wears yellow knickers in this production and is set upon by these spirits while reading some ancient book on witch craft he found somewhere in sleepy hollow.

The Ballet has a funny side too with a drunken bartender who has a duet with Ichabod which I got a short video recording of here. It's a nice dance for a couple of guys and Ichabod is the sort of sober one trying to keep the bartender on his feet. 

While we were looking for the two paintings after we saw the show we discovered a few things that brought quilts of old to mind and lo and behold in the next room a Mennonite quilt.

Mennonite Quilt with embroidered flowers about 1880 cotton 

After the ballet and the roaming through the American Art to find these treasures Keith and I enjoyed great gourmet submarine sandwiches at Taylor Gourmet on 400 block of K. St. NW. Another great Saturday of art adventures. 

Saturday out for arts

 A trip to the movies with my partner Keith Stanley weekend before last was to a great Artist film about an artist I didn't care much about but was curious to learn more. It was to see Mr. Turner and the friends who said it's a must see were right it was full of stuff I love, drama, costumes, historic settings and in this case the story of a painter who had a big impact on artists who have followed him.  It's nominated for Oscars and even without that was an educational experience full of beautiful cinematography.

After the movie we went for lunch at our favorite downtown tea house called Teaism where they serve all sorts of teas and Asian influenced foods. We both enjoyed a heaping plate of Korean Beef Barbecue with brown rice and a Chinese Cabbage salad followed by a Salty chocolate pecan oatmeal cookie! Too good so it's a good thing we walked six miles over 12,000 steps around downtown before the movie and after lunch. 

Teaism has great big Koi fish in a pond at the base of the lower level stairs that always want to come greet anyone who comes near their home. After we said hello I suggested we continue down the block and go see some real Turner paintings at National Gallery of Art just a couple blocks away. My favorite Turner in the collection of about six is this one of a moon lit night showing a pier and port where coal ships delivered coal from the mines of United Kingdom to London. 

detail of the lower right corner of the full painting above. 

If you get a chance to see it in a theater it's going to be better than on a small screen with all the spectacular Turner like skies...

Vincent at NGA

 Today I went and looked at the National Gallery of Art's excellent web site and found some of the Vincent Van Gogh paintings and drawings in their collection. They have a free download of thousands of works in their collection to be shared and used by everyone. I thought it would be fun to post some of my favorites here.

Yesterday I posted one of Vincent's self portraits that I photographed a few years ago but it was out of focus. Now you can see what it really looks like here. Or go to the NGA website to see where these are in the collection and many other wonders of our national treasures. 

 Vincent loved drawing and painting people but he was so antisocial that he always had to pay his sitters for the privilege of doing his work. In this one of the "orphan old man" the guy lived in a home for old folks who had no family. This guy was deaf and mute I believe and did the modeling for Vincent in the Hague in Netherlands when he was trying to learn to draw figures.

His pen and landscape ink drawings are remarkable for all the tiny little spots and dots and dashes he drew with hours of repetition to indicate slight changes in texture, they were normally large drawings. The show I attended in NYC at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an amazing experience to see so many of them together. I would love to see that show again and again. It is still vivid memory seven years later. I may have have been influenced to use more brown ink after seeing that show in my daily sketches. Maybe I should go look for their great catalog they printed and buy it to study.

Finished Vincent!

I am so happy to say that I finished reading a big book today.  Vincent Van Gogh The Life. It was s an journey to experience all 850 pages, plus notes and appendix and some online stuff too. This book was a scholarly work with dozens of them working to make it happen and has really filled in all sorts of details about him and his life that we didn't know from his childhood to the miserable end. It was difficult at times because it held a mirror on to my own artistic and emotional disappointments and failures. So some evenings it was hard to keep reading because it was making me feel depressed but I was driven to find out what happened to him. All the way through each new phase was interesting because the story teller keeps pulling one along from one chapter to the next. In this the complete story the only thing missing was a cataloge raisonné of all his art works to illustrate his biography. They do have a good number of illustrations in black and white as well as full color. Now that the work is owned by so many different museums and collectors his work it's impossible due to copyrights but it would enhance the reading to see everything together with the stories. The one thing that is online and was used at the late stages of the writing is a complete collection and new translations of his & brother Theo letters which does have many images in the notes with the texts right there to click and reveal. I hope that is the future of writing to be able to do comprehensive illustration and illumination of all histories.

I watched Lust For Life  the Academy award winning movie from 1955 with Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn based on a novel written by Irving Stone in the 1934. First time I saw it was when I was a kid in the 1960's on black and white TV. Back then I wished we had a color set then to see the full color of these exciting scenes and paintings. Recently I saw it again on TCM in full color and was a little disappointed in the story and the acting but the color and costumes and scenes were great. The second viewing was while I was waiting to get my hands on the book that was published late in 2011 after I saw the Authors of the new book on 60 Minutes describing their new theory about his death. It is really moving the whole story is really quite amazing. My view of Paul Gauguin is greatly diminished by the stories of his egotism and antics to get Theo to support him and sell his paintings while using Vincent as a pawn and hurting him emotionally a great deal. But to be fair to Gauguin, Vincent was hoping to use him to further his career too, it just happens Gauguin was the stronger more powerful and successful of the two at that time.

Paul Gauguin's portrait of Vincent in the Arles Yellow House where he mocked the size of his manhood with that little thumb in the palette and discredited his love of "copying" nature...

In the end, it was all a good read and cleared up some mysteries in my mind about Vincent Vangogh, his skills, mental problems and challenges. He was a pitiful tormented man living in a time that didn't know what to do about his eccentric behavior  except reject and mock him. Eventually he got treatment for his underlying disorder psychomotor epilepsy and syphilis which are both treatable today. Vincent remains the ultimate outsider, he is a hero in so many ways but his over judgmental times family and cultures made him so doubtful of his visions and accomplishments. This so much undermined his self image in the last months of his life he couldn't really believe the critics finally found him to be a genius and a leader of the post impressionist movement. He sold one painting right near the end and got a number of very influential  reviews and articles on his work published. He was on the verge of getting the financial rewards he hoped for his entire life when the accident with the gun ended it all. One thing I would like to know more about is the story from there to here. Who besides his brother picked up the torch and brought him to the top of the art collector's market? Theo only lived a six months beyond Vincent and died raving mad in an asylum crazy with syphilis but he was determined to see Vincent remembered and his work survive. His nephew named for his uncle Vincent Van Gogh helped but I wish the book told us more about how these paintings became so influential in the modern art era. 

self portrait in the NGA collection

 my morning sketch of sunflowers and calla lily 

my sketch of sunflowers in ceramic vase 

I was inspired by Vincent's fearless manic work ethic that he kept trying over and over to get the images he wanted in spite of his poor skills and he defended his mission to keep practicing until he reached his goals. He was very stubborn, he created a huge volume of work in spite of all sorts of hardships. His depressions often ended in manic recoveries where he worked so fast other painters mocked him for the aggressive way he used the brush to put paint on the canvas. I do not have as many problems as Vincent but health and income are always worries but he is a beacon of inspiration to get busy no matter what; proving showing up at the blank page is always a good idea often rewarded with nothing more than knowing you accomplished something of your own today.

george de forest brush

George de ForestBrush: The Indian Paintings exhibition, 

on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 

September 14, 2008 through January 4, 2009

George de ForestBrush (American, 1855 - 1941) The Head Dress, 1890 oil on canvas Property of the Westervelt Company and displayed in The Westervelt-Warner Museum of American Art, Tuscaloosa, Alabama

George de ForestBrush (American, 1855 - 1941) Indian Hunter, 1890 oil on panel Private Collection

I went to the National Gallery of Art for a lecture on the new show of old works by George de Forest Brush (1854 or 1855-1941) an academically trained artist of the 19th century who studied in New York and Paris. He returned from his Parisian academy training to New York City and found his work needed something to distinguish him from his peers. He accomplished this by painting romanticized paintings of American Indians in his studio with a goal of painting the story of every man by focusing on a single genre of the little known culture of the Indians. He was sympathetic to the plight of the Indian, in the 1880's when they were being hunted down while fighting to save their way of life and lands. He was also sympathetic to the plight of the beautifully plumed birds which were also being slaughtered for ladies hats of the day.  He Incorporated them both in his small studio paintings after about a year or two with his brother in the west living with the Indians studying them. George de Forest Brush created his distinctive series of paintings while teaching students drawing and painting in NYC at the Art Students League to support his growing family.  I was happy to see this American student of the École des Beaux-Arts Paris instructor Jean-Léon Gérome now being shown in our national gallery. He, like Thomas Eakins, learned to paint beautifully accurate detailed textures and live figures. You will see amazing details in every one of his paintings. I have posted two of my favorites from the show lent to me by NGA press office to help get the word out about this show. Be sure to double click them for the larger image blowup.

In the introductory history lecture by Nancy Anderson curator of American and 

British paintings. I learned a lot of things that are not posted on the walls of the gallery and I was astonished at how small the paintings were after seeing them on the huge screen of the auditorium where they held up in every detail. The show of deForest Brush's Indian paintings has 20 works the show was postponed for 10 years because five of these paintings were still lost to the world.  Anderson told us the families of the people who bought the paintings kept them and passed them down, leaving them lost to the greater art historians world for many years. One of the paintings of a white crane and the Indian artist carving a marble rendition of the bird was show to the curator housed in a decaying card board box  it's varnish badly yellowed where it had been for the last 30 years unnoticed in storage it also had a coat of dirty white paint on the old frame. Now it has been restored and reframed and looks brillant.  Brush had 8 children and six of them survived to adulthood and there are many descendents who will be coming to the gallery in a couple weeks for a special "family day" in the exhibit. I sat in the lecture behind a few of his family who revealed themselves to Ms. Anderson at the end of the lecture. These twenty paintings are proudly on display for all of us lucky Washingtonians  to see and revel in one of our skilled American academic painters of the 19th century. I should note here the National Gallery has a fantastic web feature which is a slide show of most of the paintings the exhibit. If you are unable to get to the gallery in person try this link: 

Web feature slide show of Geo. de Forest Brush

Here I  have to note it is a modern marvel that we can enjoy current exhibitions in the comfort of our homes but it doesn't completely replace the experience of marveling at the real thing in front of your own two eyes.