Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Wild Moon<\/p>\n
Into the Walker today to pick up doggie meds from Mark O. who brought them back from Mexico last week.\u00a0 He’s a wounded traveler, struck down by a bug and a bum knee.<\/p>\n
Mark went with us on the first round of our tour.\u00a0 Grace Jiang-Goggins gave us a tour of the Walker’s new installation of its permanent collection.\u00a0 Ginny Wheeler, Morry, Allison, Bill, Jane McKenzie and Merritt were along.<\/p>\n
Grace has such a nice, unassuming way of treating the art, her knowledge and the participants in her tours.\u00a0 We began with a multi-colored object that looked like wooden cylinders 4-5″ high strung on a long central shaft.\u00a0 Which, it turns out, was essentially what they were.\u00a0 What a great story Grace told about them.\u00a0 This guy, I forget his name, couldn’t break into the art world.\u00a0 He was self taught and made these walking sticks, working the patterns in permutation after permutation, always putting in a mistake, just like the ancient Greeks and their architecture.\u00a0 Anyhow, he’d wander around with these sticks through various cities in Europe, go into museums and then leave one behind.\u00a0 You gotta love this guy.<\/p>\n
Next we saw a German artist who loved white and nails.\u00a0 Loved them so much that he pounded many nails into a board and painted the board and the nails white.\u00a0 Trust me it looks better than I’ve made it sound.\u00a0 Somehow there are patterns, waves, fields of grain, motion in this mass of nails.<\/p>\n
Onto Andy Warhol’s Jackie.\u00a0 16 portraits of Jackie Kennedy, related either to the immediacy of the assassination or the funeral.\u00a0 When I looked at them, I didn’t reference the whole grassy knoll death of camelot moment, but the Marilyn Monroe multiples or the Mao Tse Tung’s portraits brightly colored.\u00a0 When we got into the specificity of it, there were those layers there, but I didn’t see it at first, nor did I feel it was the most important visual aspect of the piece.<\/p>\n
A shattered mirror, a circular mirror divided into long thin slivers all broken and replaced.\u00a0 Broken images, like pixels.\u00a0 A play off a vanity mirror in which the reflections are more distorted fun house than Vogue.<\/p>\n
A Fool’s House by jasper johns.\u00a0 An old broom hung on a hook.\u00a0 A cup from his studio.\u00a0 A canvas stretcher marked stretcher.\u00a0 A towel marked towel.\u00a0 The broom.\u00a0 The cup.\u00a0 Words and references.\u00a0 Playing with proverbs?\u00a0 A new broom sweeps clean.\u00a0 Merritt pointed out that the hook was not named.<\/p>\n
A complex piece by a Thai artist who taught himself English by each morning taking a marker and blacking out the words he already knew.\u00a0 Then he pasted strips from these newspapers on an old bed sheet and painted over all but the a’s and p’s with a blue field.\u00a0 The a’s and p’s he filled in with an orange paint. A luminous work, like stars in the heavens or Australian aborigines.<\/p>\n
We stopped, too, at a work by an Iranian artist who lives in the twin cities.\u00a0 He wrote excerpts from Rumi and Hafiz all over a large canvas, at various angles and in various shapes.\u00a0 A Prayer, he called it.<\/p>\n
The tour ended in a room with about 75 paintings hung salon style, a large portion apparently of the Walker’s holdings.\u00a0 Paintings make up 20% of the Walker’s collection.\u00a0 This is a great collection of works from the well-known to the obscure:\u00a0 Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keefe, Franz Marc, Max Beckmann, Morris Louis, Mark Rothko, DeKooning….and on and on and on.<\/p>\n
Seeing art with friends is a rich experience.\u00a0 A valuable experience.\u00a0 Reminds me of my seminary years when I would come to the MIA every Sunday with my friend David Grotrian, himself an abstract expressionist and his wife, Carol, an art historian.\u00a0 It was fun then and it’s fun now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Wild Moon Into the Walker today to pick up doggie meds from Mark O. who brought them back from Mexico last week.\u00a0 He’s a wounded traveler, struck down by a bug and a bum knee. Mark went with us on the first round of our tour.\u00a0 Grace Jiang-Goggins gave us a tour of … Continue reading Contemporaries and Art<\/span>