Let’s get some culture on!

I thought it was time that I got some culture in my diet, I’ve been lacking a little, so I took myself to the Denver Art Museum.

I have been wanting to go to the museum for a while and today I looked it up and saw a Lichtenstein, I knew today was the day! I absolutely love Lichtenstein, it stems from when I was in high school and in my art class, I was assigned an artist and had to report on them and an artist before and after and Lichtenstein was who I got and it’s been a love affair ever since.

http://www.denverartmuseum.org/

Once there, I decided to become a member of the museum so I could go any time, get advanced invitations to special showings, just like I had with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. I also got the dual membership so I can get others in for free, who’s coming with me next time?

I wasn’t able to take pictures, but there were some fantastic quotes on the walls and I would love to share them with you as well as some of my favorite artists. I’ll try to find some pictures on the web.  Some time it would be great to sit down with you and talk about artists and techniques and emotions, I might just touch on things as we go along.

“Each age finds its own technique” Jackson Pollack

The first painting I saw was by Pissaro. I love seeing Camile Pissaro’s work; I find pointillism fascinating, up close it’s just a bunch of dots but when you take a step back, an amazing image starts to take form and evokes a range of emotions.
http://www.camille-pissarro.org/

“Follow the masters!
But why should we follow them?
The only reason they’re masters is that they didn’t follow anyone!”
Paul Gaugin

“A new art! But what for? We do the best we can, and when we do as well as an masters, that’s all we can hope for.”
William Adolphe Bouguereau

“Splashes of raw color juxtaposed without rhyme or reason…their art is either raving madness or a bad joke.” critic Marcel Nicolle 1905

“We were always intoxicated with color,with wordsthat speak ofcolorand With the sun that maKescolors live.” Andre Derain

The next three paintings spoke to me
Picasso, la toilette

Matisse, La musique 1935

Andre Derain The trees 1906

There was a bronze statue by Jacques Lipchitz ‘Sailor with a Guitar. It reminded me of  Leger and Picasso, cubism period.

“All the earth colors of the painter’s pallet there in the many miles of badlands.” Georgia Okeefe

Yves Tanguy “I found that If I planned a picture beforehand, it never surprised me, and surprises are my pleasure in painting.”

http://www.matta-art.com/tanguy/tanguy.htm

“The Role of the Artist is always to deepen the mystery” Francis Bacon

“Art is an experience, not an object.” Robert Motherwell

I love Motherwell’s art, the bold statements. http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/1394

Jackson Pollack is another artist that I enjoy and admire and if you know his work, even though it looks like splatter, there is a method to his madness. He said about his technique “I feel nearer, more apart of the painting, since this way I Can walk around… and literally be in the paiI can controlthe flow of the Paint. there is no accident. just as there is no beginning and no end.”

”I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.” Jackson Pollack

“Mere unorganized explosions of random energy, And therefore meaningless.” critic Robert Coates on Jackson Pollack’s work 1948

Lee Krasner- Pollack’s wife, self critical and began destroying some of her paintings in the 1950’s. She saved some pieces from those canvases and used them in collages like Milkweed. She lived on Long Island with her husband and often remarked on her connection to nature. “My painting is so autobiographical… If anyone can take the trouble to read it.”

Phillip Gaston Voyage 1955
“Sometimes I scrape off a lot. you have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint, and its just a lot of inert matter, inert paint, then I look back at the canvas, and it’s not inert-it’s active, living ..If a year or two later I look back at some of the work and try to start judging it, and its impossible . you can’t judge it because it was felt.”

Mark Rothko Orange and Yellow 1956
To counteract viewers’ natural tendencies to stand back from his large canvases, Rothko sometimes included signage asking them to stand close. that way, viewers Could experience the depth of each color and the basic human emotions the Could evoke like “tragedy, ecstasy, doom.The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them-And if you are moved only by their Color relationships, then you miss the point.”

“[my art] is not about facts, its about feelings” Agnes martin

Claes Oldenburg – “I am for an art…that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. I am for an art that grows up no knowing It is art at all.”

“Reproduction was really the subject matter of my work” Roy Lichtenstein