Our Journal Study Group met yesterday and we all made 3" by 5" books using a prototype that Gwen Diehn sent to me after she spent an afternoon with us in March. The stick goes through 3 loops, keeping the accordion spine closed. There are 8 pages of watercolor paper to use inside. I plan to put more of my pregnant model stamps on the pages inside and then have a surprise hidden on the spine. I'll take photos when I'm finished.
I just LOVE cute little books!
Yesterday I went to see the Watercolor Society of America annual show at Salmagundi several hours before it closed. This is the second year that I went to the exhibit and again I was overwhelmed by the talent of the group and their beautiful handling of watercolor. My fish were inspired by fish that I saw on two of the paintings. Following the show, I walked across 12th Street in the Village to Utrecht art to get a 9B pencil to work on David Rankin's Fast Sketching Techniques and saw this beautiful tulip growing in front of a brownstone.
Sydney and Callum came to our apartment yesterday afternoon while big brother Henry went to the Yankee game with our daughter and son-in-law. The afternoon ended with Cal and I playing with the Play-Doh factory!
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!
