Tacoma
Et incurventur ante non
- Location
- far enough away
..
It's been going well. I came out for three reasons: Bring some paintings for my marketing juggernaut friend Laura, finish the tattoo design for my friend Cindy (who is giving me a bitchin' industrial sewing machine-- helloooo custom soft tops!), and find two obscure painters in Buffalo, which I will get to starting Sunday.
I flew in on the overnight, with some people who work at the Empress Theater in Magna... and it looks like I may help out w/set painting for them... which I don't really care for but it's good networking, so I'm on it.
Got off the plane 30min early and "Train In Vain" from the Clash started playing in the wonderful, clean new Terminal 5. This is a good omen! so I had some breakfast, hung out sketching people for a little while, then took off for Manhattan.
Rush hour on the subway kind of sucks with big heavy bags, but it's still better than rush hour on I-15, and much more entertaining.
Had some breakfast with Jim and Laura, discussed various interesting software design ideas for Jim's gallery project (he is a software design nut and making a really cool thing for painters that I can't discuss hahah), and showed Laura the paintings. She disappeared for about 10min and came back with 4 people who would be interested to talk to me, so that was pretty sweet. Then I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Park Ave.
It was a beautiful sunny day here in Manhattan, very warm, pleasant. Foot traffic is light in this part of town, and everyone was out enjoying the breeze. I like walking along the Central Park wall, it's rough-hewn stone and frames the park nicely. And of course, I could live at the Met. It's a great old building, built around the original building, which is housed inside of the current one. They will never build buildings like this again and it makes me a little sad to know that.
Had a hot dog from the cart outside, and went in. Normally when I'm here I"m in a huge hurry but this time I really have nothing to do, so I can finally take the time to slow down and look at things I don't usually get to pay attention to. I went through the Egytptian section- there are a ton of really wonderful, tiny sculptures in there that are amazing to look at... and imagining them being made 8trillion years ago is awesome. And of course the mummies and giant granite sarcophagi are pretty amazing as well.
The Japanese Samurai room is another favorite. It's a dark side gallery off the medieval armor gallery, with the various samurai suits, headdresses, and ancient swords lit up in cases. The craftsmanship on the warrior masks is amazing, and the swords! hand-forged in the mountains of Japan, with that beautiful wavy edge. There is a helmet there with a crazy burgundy rabbit on it, I'd love to see someone fighting with that on their head.
My favorite wing, The American Wing, is currently closed for renovation and all the paintings are stuffed into a strange little gallery with aisles full of paintings and frames. You can only get about 4' from any of them, and the glass cases are hell for glare, but it is kind of neat to see them all smushed together like that. I took a little time to make notes on some details, and copy some old frame designs for my use at home. I make my own frames but I hate designing them, and prefer some of the plain, graphic 19th-century stuff, so I love being able to study them in person.
After that I spent some time in the medieval art galleries. These are primarily religious artifacts, since that's basically all that survived from that era... most artwork done back then, in fact, was done for the Catholic Church.... and there is some CRAZY craftsmanship--- tiny clocks and pierced-ivory carvings the size of playing cards... amazing models of the earth with revolving solar paths, all done by hand, very precisely. The Met bought a "choir screen" from somewhere, it's a big screen made of.. like, stair spindles, but it's got thousands of them and it's 50' tall. It separated the choir from teh rest of the church I guess, I'll have to look at that later and see where it's from and what it really was for.
Continuing on I emerged in the lobby and took a second to sketch the main staircase, with is large and impressive, and frames the entrance to the upper galleries very well. It's everything you'd want in a massive stone staircase hahahah, and the rows of Greek columns lining the top, lit fairly dimly, give a great sense of massive space beyond how big the staircase actually is.. and it's pretty big.
Time was running short so I skipped the paintings this time, having seen them a ton, and took a walk through the hallway gallery connecting to the 19c. paintings. It's lined with drawings and etchings, and for a pen-and-ink guy like myself, is a great place to see some of this stuff. There are old German engravings, Italian chalk drawings, and some great British watercolor sketches that are just ridiculously detailed and tiny. I especially like the 3-value studies, using the brown paper, black, red, and white for figure drawings. That's actually a 4-value study, but for some reason no one ever counts the paper... anyway
So that's it so far. Today the Met is open until 9:30 so I'm going to go to some galleries first, and go see about hanging some paintings in some hip bars in Greenwich Village, apparently that's the new Hawtness and people are snapping them up left and right. We'll see. One of the galleries I'm going to is in an apartment on Park Ave, and is filled with $100,000 paintings. I am going to see some very obscure "cheap" paintings (at $3500-5000ea, which actually IS cheap, relatively). Guy that runs it is a very gracious Frenchman.
Tomorrow I am off to New Jersey to see a hardcore band's reunion show, and I'm going mostly to heckle the guitarist and throw teabags at him-- they aren't really that good so the idea of a reunion show, in Jersey, appeals greatly to my sense of mischief. I am currently sporting a Travis Bickle mohawk and it's going to be a good time.
Sunday I'll be heading upstate to see my brothers and then off to Buffalo and Arcade.
end transmission
It's been going well. I came out for three reasons: Bring some paintings for my marketing juggernaut friend Laura, finish the tattoo design for my friend Cindy (who is giving me a bitchin' industrial sewing machine-- helloooo custom soft tops!), and find two obscure painters in Buffalo, which I will get to starting Sunday.
I flew in on the overnight, with some people who work at the Empress Theater in Magna... and it looks like I may help out w/set painting for them... which I don't really care for but it's good networking, so I'm on it.
Got off the plane 30min early and "Train In Vain" from the Clash started playing in the wonderful, clean new Terminal 5. This is a good omen! so I had some breakfast, hung out sketching people for a little while, then took off for Manhattan. Rush hour on the subway kind of sucks with big heavy bags, but it's still better than rush hour on I-15, and much more entertaining.
Had some breakfast with Jim and Laura, discussed various interesting software design ideas for Jim's gallery project (he is a software design nut and making a really cool thing for painters that I can't discuss hahah), and showed Laura the paintings. She disappeared for about 10min and came back with 4 people who would be interested to talk to me, so that was pretty sweet. Then I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Park Ave.
It was a beautiful sunny day here in Manhattan, very warm, pleasant. Foot traffic is light in this part of town, and everyone was out enjoying the breeze. I like walking along the Central Park wall, it's rough-hewn stone and frames the park nicely. And of course, I could live at the Met. It's a great old building, built around the original building, which is housed inside of the current one. They will never build buildings like this again and it makes me a little sad to know that.
Had a hot dog from the cart outside, and went in. Normally when I'm here I"m in a huge hurry but this time I really have nothing to do, so I can finally take the time to slow down and look at things I don't usually get to pay attention to. I went through the Egytptian section- there are a ton of really wonderful, tiny sculptures in there that are amazing to look at... and imagining them being made 8trillion years ago is awesome. And of course the mummies and giant granite sarcophagi are pretty amazing as well.
The Japanese Samurai room is another favorite. It's a dark side gallery off the medieval armor gallery, with the various samurai suits, headdresses, and ancient swords lit up in cases. The craftsmanship on the warrior masks is amazing, and the swords! hand-forged in the mountains of Japan, with that beautiful wavy edge. There is a helmet there with a crazy burgundy rabbit on it, I'd love to see someone fighting with that on their head.
My favorite wing, The American Wing, is currently closed for renovation and all the paintings are stuffed into a strange little gallery with aisles full of paintings and frames. You can only get about 4' from any of them, and the glass cases are hell for glare, but it is kind of neat to see them all smushed together like that. I took a little time to make notes on some details, and copy some old frame designs for my use at home. I make my own frames but I hate designing them, and prefer some of the plain, graphic 19th-century stuff, so I love being able to study them in person.
After that I spent some time in the medieval art galleries. These are primarily religious artifacts, since that's basically all that survived from that era... most artwork done back then, in fact, was done for the Catholic Church.... and there is some CRAZY craftsmanship--- tiny clocks and pierced-ivory carvings the size of playing cards... amazing models of the earth with revolving solar paths, all done by hand, very precisely. The Met bought a "choir screen" from somewhere, it's a big screen made of.. like, stair spindles, but it's got thousands of them and it's 50' tall. It separated the choir from teh rest of the church I guess, I'll have to look at that later and see where it's from and what it really was for.
Continuing on I emerged in the lobby and took a second to sketch the main staircase, with is large and impressive, and frames the entrance to the upper galleries very well. It's everything you'd want in a massive stone staircase hahahah, and the rows of Greek columns lining the top, lit fairly dimly, give a great sense of massive space beyond how big the staircase actually is.. and it's pretty big.
Time was running short so I skipped the paintings this time, having seen them a ton, and took a walk through the hallway gallery connecting to the 19c. paintings. It's lined with drawings and etchings, and for a pen-and-ink guy like myself, is a great place to see some of this stuff. There are old German engravings, Italian chalk drawings, and some great British watercolor sketches that are just ridiculously detailed and tiny. I especially like the 3-value studies, using the brown paper, black, red, and white for figure drawings. That's actually a 4-value study, but for some reason no one ever counts the paper... anyway
So that's it so far. Today the Met is open until 9:30 so I'm going to go to some galleries first, and go see about hanging some paintings in some hip bars in Greenwich Village, apparently that's the new Hawtness and people are snapping them up left and right. We'll see. One of the galleries I'm going to is in an apartment on Park Ave, and is filled with $100,000 paintings. I am going to see some very obscure "cheap" paintings (at $3500-5000ea, which actually IS cheap, relatively). Guy that runs it is a very gracious Frenchman.
Tomorrow I am off to New Jersey to see a hardcore band's reunion show, and I'm going mostly to heckle the guitarist and throw teabags at him-- they aren't really that good so the idea of a reunion show, in Jersey, appeals greatly to my sense of mischief. I am currently sporting a Travis Bickle mohawk and it's going to be a good time.
Sunday I'll be heading upstate to see my brothers and then off to Buffalo and Arcade.
end transmission
