Regarding Art Thoughts

As we all know these days, everyday happenings are now major events, so it felt very adventurous to get onto the 1 California bus and ride part way (I walked the rest) to the de Young Museum’s Frida Kahlo show.  It was hung in early March and had already been sold out so anticipation was high for huge attendance and rave critical reviews.  And...

A friend asked for my thoughts on the Asian Art Museum’s current show Looking East, How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists.  Certainly, it’s a very high quality show, broad-based from fine art to clothing, furniture, photography, the decorative arts. The signage is thorough and informative and the crowds it is attracting would be...

If you wish to collect art, your walls needn’t look like this picture.  In fact, you can buy just one artistic object, learn from it that you have no interest in collecting and be done.  And that piece can be from an art or craft fair, an artist friend, a rummage sale. It can cost only a few dollars. However you begin, I guarantee you that your life will be...

My recent romp through a few new tech gadgets put me in mind of the French artist Fernand Leger.  The Impressionists flirted with statements about technology, but Leger was one of, perhaps the, first to directly address the human and social effects as well as the scientific understandings that accompanied it.  Along with several other French artists and painting...

Someone recently got another of his serial 15 minutes of fame organizing a Renoir protest at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  It was a nothing event except that it has given me an excuse to revisit Pierre Renoir, many of whose works warm my heart every time I encounter them, even in pictures, posters and greeting cards. So, I am a fan of Impressionist painter...

Oh Goodie!!  A Vermeer painting I didn’t know existed until today! And being (always) a homebody and (now) a city person, I was instantly taken by this naturalistic townscape.  It is a slice of daily, domestic 17th century life in Delft so exquisitely rendered that it captures the poetic beauty of and reverence for everyday life throughout Holland. In its...