The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a new fashion exhibit called the American Woman. It was crowded, and I sketched two garments quickly and then painted them at home - mostly from memory. The whitish stripe down the center of the page is from Photoshop removal of the gutter between the two pages.
Yesterday was our monthly Saturday Meet-up Central Park Drawing and Art Group - and we met at Columbus Circle. It was a beautiful day but very windy. My eye immediately went to these purple flowers. I'll add several photos so I can get help identifying them. The entire circle was surrounded by these long stem beauties.
We then moved into Central Park to the area around the childrens' playground and the big climbing rock. It was much less windy and more pleasant for 30 minutes of sketching. I chose to do a painting of the top of the GM building over the park trees.
Finally we moved further into Central Park and climbed to the Chess and Checker House. There were only a few people playing, I was sitting too close to this couple, so I have a semi-caricature because I couldn't really stare at them long enough to sketch anything accurately.
This is a preliminary drawing that I did of an apartment building on the Upper Westside of Manhattan. I promised a larger painting and just wanted to play with the angles and perspective in my sketch book.
I'd love some suggestions for mixing a really good dirty brick color.
Our Meet-up Group is now meeting twice each month - and because of a very rainy Sunday, we met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this week. I went over early so I could see the Members Preview of the new Picasso exhibit. It is a collection of the Met's Picasso holdings and it is really impressive. In the second room they have the collection of small caricatures that he did of his artist friends in Barcelona ca 1900. I fell in love with these when they were in the Barcelona Modernity exhibit several years ago and took a few minutes to sketch one.
Our Meet-up group then did several 30 minute sketching sessions in the American Wing of the Museum and shared our sketchbooks after each one. I sketched a sculpture in the Atrium, an art nouveau Roseville Vase on the Mezzanine, and a painting by Robert Reid in the Gallery.
I spent several hours at the Museum of Modern Art today - primarily to see the Tim Burton exhibit before it closes on Sunday. There are hundreds of drawings and many sculptures. Many of the drawings are from sketchbooks and many are preparative pieces for his movies. The exhibit was sold out today, and the crowd was young and enthusiastic as noted in the NY Times piece below.
Tim Burton Retrospective: THE mouth of a giant monster, its razor-sharp teeth glaring overhead and its tongue forming a long red carpet, ushers visitors into the Tim Burton retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Although the intentionally lighthearted chronicle of the filmmaker’s work received only mixed reviews when it opened in November, Mr. Burton’s fans don’t seem to care. More than 450,000 people have already attended the show, and by the time it closes on April 26, attendance is expected to exceed that of recent blockbusters like the museum’s “Van Gogh: The Colors of the Night” last year and “Dali: Painting and Film,” in 2008.
From The New York Times March 11, 2010 "She’s scheduled to sit there all day, every day, during museum hours, for the run of her show. The museum estimates that, if she can stick to the plan, she will sit for 716 hours and 30 minutes, earning her a record for endurance in the performance art sweepstakes. And every now and then someone will slip into that chair across from her — that’s what it’s there for — and spend some time exchanging stares, or energy, or going blank, or thinking, maybe for the first time, about that hard, high-flown, funny word “endure.”
Today there was a line of people who wanted to sit and stare at her - usually for 30-45 minutes each. Someone I spoke to said that she sat with her 3 times already since the show started- it is like meditation! I don't get it, but it was fun to sit there and sketch her. She never moved a muscle!
