Pop Goes the Artist!

As I was walking to the Metro station today, on my way home from my volunteer job, I was suddenly struck by a perfect composition.  I’ve walked past that corner dozens of times, but it was only today that I noticed the beautiful picture formed by the tops of the buildings.  It’s a small scene full of contrasts: contrasts between modern and traditional architecture, between glass and brick, between stone and sky–even the varying heights of the rooftops added interest.  I’m so angry I didn’t have my camera with me, because the scene would have made a challenging and beautiful drawing.  (I had a small pad of paper, but I didn’t have time to stop and sketch, and a quick sketch wouldn’t have done justice to the detail I’d like to achieve anyway.)

Note to self: get back to the corner of 9th & F St. NW as soon as possible–with my camera.  And hope that whatever it was that grabbed me today is still there next time I am.

Friday morning I visited the National Gallery of Art on a self-guided field trip for two different classes. For my Renaissance class, I had to visit the “Prayers and Portraits” exhibit, which contains more than 30 Netherlandish diptychs from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It’s an especially interesting exhibit because many of the diptychs on display have been seperated over the centuries and only now are the proper halves, through the wonders of modern technology, being temporarily united.

Unfortunately, photography was not allowed in the exhibit, so you’ll have to rely on the NGA’s website for images (there’s actually a downloadable pdf of the exhibition brochure), but almost every piece in the exhibit was stunning. One particularly striking diptych, for example, featured an unusual contrast between the crucified Christ in the arms of God the Father (a common medieval motif) and an image of Christ as a baby on Mary’s lap in a contemporary (for the period) domestic setting. I’ll actually be writing a paper on that one, which I picked because it was unusually packed with theological and symbolic meaning.

There was also a pair of paintings by Jan van Eyck, The Angel Gabriel with The Virgin Annunciate, that made me do a double take because of the unique approach van Eyck took: both Gabriel and Mary were painted as though they were marble statues, with nearly photo-realistic precision. Even their wooden frames were painted to resemble marble. (The photo to which I linked, from Olga’s Gallery, gives an idea of the techinical mastery of this work, but does not remotely do it justice.)

Most of the other diptychs were composed of a portrait of Mary with the Christ child on one said and a portrait of the person who commissioned the work on the other, since diptychs were primarily designed for private, household prayer. The most striking of these portraits, in my mind, was the portrait of Diego de Guevara, which depicts an incredibly delicate sensitivity as well as the subject’s genuine grief at the suffering of Christ. Phenomenal.

All in all, it was a great exhibit, both because of the rare opportunity it presented to see many of these works as they were meant to be displayed, and because it featured both strong portraiture and deeply symbolic and beautiful religious art.

Yesterday I came to the startling realization that the Internet’s continued frustration of my efforts to Pimp My Blog was all to tell me to get back to art, already. So I did, sort of. I had to work all day today, but after I got back and had dinner, I broke out the new sketching toys. Also might put in a little time on “Blue Lucy” (my current painting).

None of tonight’s sketches are particularly inspired; if I am ever a famous artist whose sketchpads are turned into expensive and glossy-paged books, these will be among the sketches excluded for “lack of space.” (However, if I judged all my art and sketches like that, I would be a sad and depressed person.)

I began with the water-soluble crayons, because I had a thirst for color, and drew a mostly-full plastic cup sitting on the shelf above me. It would be a better drawing if I hadn’t added that odd green chunk. Oh well. I really like the way the crayons handle–they’re much more heavily pigmented than the Crayolas of my youth, so they can be layered and built up pretty well. I can’t wait to get some heavier paper and try them out with water and brushes.

After that, I decided to loosen up a bit with a blind contour drawing in marker, which there isn’t much to say about, considering I wasn’t even looking at the paper.

So, tonight’s sketches: they are what they are, but any sketch is better than no sketch at all.

***

And, as if I am being rewarded for sketching, I have finally figured out a tentative solution to all my formatting problems. I figured out thumbnails, I got them nicely integrated with the text, and if you click them, they should open up in their own browser window. Hurrah!

I have spent the last few evenings not studying for finals, but instead beating myself over the head with Wordpress plugins and CSSSSS and PHPHP and HTML and goodness knows what else, all trying to accomplish one small thing:

Making my pictures pretty in my posts.

All I want is to post a picture and not have it eat into the next post if it’s bigger than the text that accompanies it, plus figure out how to make the margins between the picture and the text a comfortable size.  My wildest dream is to have thumbnails that the reader can click on that will open a pop-up window featuring the full-size version of the photo.

(In fact, I found a plug-in that (supposedly) does just that, but it Does. Not. Work.  It gets halfway there and gives up.  Oy.  Also, the thumbnail does not integrate gracefully with the text.)

(Then I found another plugin that (supposedly) makes Wordpress into a nice photoblog and yay and oops!  That has all the same issues that I was previously having without any plugins whatsoever.  Oy.)

So long story (sort of) short, I’ve decided all of this failure and frustration is the Internet’s way of saying, “Jeesey petes, woman!  Enough with all this CSSSSSSSSS crap!  Your blog mostly works, so stop nitpicking and make some gosh darn art, gosh darn it!

And you know what?  I think the Internet has a point for once.  It is now past midnight, so I should go to bed, but tomorrow, after I get off work, I will sketch and maybe write up a brief review of one of the current exhibits at the National Gallery.  But mostly sketch.

I have finished transferring (aka, copying and pasting) the entire archives of my old blog, Adventures in Art, into this blog (although I still have some work to do in gracefully incorporating images into the posts).  I’ve already begun writing new posts here instead of there, and now there will definitely not be any new posts at Adventures in Art.  If you’re coming here from there, update your bookmarks, please, because I’m going to make it disappear in a week or two.

Thanks and welcome again!