Why is a visit to the art museum blog-worthy? After all, my near-weekly museum visits are a longstanding habit. The headline is that this is my first visit to the Cleveland Art museum since the COVID mess started. I haven’t visited a museum or cut my hair since March 2020. (Yes, I now look like…
My next video about painter’s paintings is on van Goyen’s painting titled View of Emmerich in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Van Goyen is another artist from the Dutch Golden Age. He is a contemporary of Rembrandt and is from Rembrandt’s hometown, Leiden. I started making art-related podcasts a couple of years ago. Discussing artworks…
Jacques-Louis David is one of my favorite artists. David’s reputation was cemented for me the first time I visited the Louvre. David made a career revitalizing well-known stories and allegories. From the beginning of his career, David transformed shopworn subjects into works of startling originality. In David’s masterful hands, familiar themes, such as the Death of Socrates,…
I completed a new video about the great Flemish artist, David Teniers. I was inspired to create the video by my memory of the Cleveland art museum’s painting by Teniers. Because of Covid, I still haven’t resumed my weekly visits to art museums. I miss it.
We’re back home from a week-long vacation. Like all vacations, it was simultaneously relaxing and exhausting. I plan several posts about our virus-shadowed adventure through the south. Among other things, we visited the Knoxville Museum of Art. Today, I had time to clean this painting in preparation for its final varnishing.
The Cleveland Museums of Art’s Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe is the best show I’ve seen at the museum since I started my near-weekly visits six years ago. As good as the show is, however, the theme–artists as eyewitnesses to history–is a stretch. The paintings are souvenirs of public events in (equally important)…
At the Whitney Biennal last spring, protestors made headlines when they demanded that the museum destroy an artwork they found offensive. The protesters didn’t want the painting removed from the Biennial, they wanted it destroyed. The painting by Dana Schutz, Open Casket, is based on a well-known photograph of Emmett Till in his coffin. Till was an African American…
I worked on The Picnic and nothing else for the past few days. The Picnic has a painting surface that is difficult. This doesn’t happen often anymore but it’s annoying when it does happen. It slows everything down. Luckily, an intermediate varnish solved the problem and things are more to my liking and moving swiftly…