friday: the MoMA

I hit the ground running this trip. Having only just arrived a few hours in New York, my sister and I headed to the Museum of Modern Art. I had not been there in twenty plus years; not since I did a sort of New York farewell tour, before I left the country to be with Nails.
My sisters have corporate passes, as many corporations are major patrons of the arts, and they have been given this as a perk of their employment, but her passes were not needed. Admittance was free that evening, and we sashayed right on in.

I was thrilled to find out once we were there, that the MoMA was hosting an exhibit of Diego Rivera's murals.
The murals are massive freestanding frescos some as much as eight feet tall, and not easily transported. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to see them.
They also had a number of his watercolours and I was inspired by his, to give my watercolours more credibility and not to push that medium to behave as oils do, which is a frustration of mine. I realize instead that I need to embrace the light hand and spare application of colour required for its effective usage.

miró

picasso

dali's famous persistence of memory, so tiny

frida khalo in the background

broadway boogie woogie - mondrian

this is all i need to see to know this is picasso

modigliani

i thought of you here charlie

marc chagall

Francis Picabia. I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie. 1914

i greatly appreciated the skill, colour, painting and energy of this piece

Alan de Botton has mused, Are Museums our New Churches? i could not help but think on the points of his reflections, to see the faces and demeanor of the people viewing Vincent Van Gogh's A Starry Night.

To be honest with you, i have the strong intangible sense of a camaraderie of spirit being in museums. i do feel connection to god, man and nature, and both my smallness and magnitude. Traditional churches hold me now seemingly only in aggravation and boredom by turns. i have cried many times in church, but i have cried hard in a museum also and that most lately. I can't remember ever being bored in museum.

no photo can capture how exquisite a painting is to see up close

As far as i am concerned there is no real need to take photos of a picture in a museum's permanent collection, as a keepsake, everyone ahead of you took a hundred pictures with better cameras, and posted them to flickr, where they are easily googled.
As a photographer i am enjoying experiencing and capturing paintings juxtaposed with the aspect of others, as they experience an artwork.

rousseau

look at that lovely moon

i am gearing myself up for a major painting of the moon

this very famous painting is in an odd spot by the elevators

wyeth

 

Sanja Iveković: Lady Rosa of Luxembourg

 monet

there were times that i thought that i had only dreamed that 

a room like this existed with giant monet canvases lining the wall

 not a dream

 yours

 it is a lovely building

 my other favourite moon
the waxing crescent

 i overheard a very touching story in front of this painting. A twentyish man said that he had come here with family including a small nephew that was about five. After seeing the painting and walking away the boy began to ask, Why is the lady crying? So they brought him back to the painting and explained to him that the lady was sad, and what best they could imagine to answer him. That evening, long after they had left the museum, he still asked, Why was the lady crying? The man said it was a long time, months later the boy would look up and still ask, but why was the lady crying.

And therein i think you can see how profoundly an image can touch a soul. That little guy i think was trying to ask himself existential questions of being and suffering, within the limits of his capacity for vocabulary, but on a deep heart level he was understanding and or trying to understand the delicacy of his own existence and experiencing empathy for the imagined but real suffering of others.

 approaching jackson pollack

 one of my favourite abstract artist's

many of you that got a postcard, got one of this painting

mark rothko

 i don't understand exactly what mark rothko was trying to say but i feel it utterly

 and i understand and empathize with reaching for the unsayable and taking what is perhaps

in you alive and inexpressible and making it manifest

 seeing this up close gave me an appreciation for jasper johns that i never had before

alas, there is so much more to this painting than is typically can be seen in photo reproduction

 i don't know anything about this artist arman, but i know that if he were not dead we would have enjoyed each other's company over drinks, just by virtue of the name of this piece which is:

i still use brushes