Closing of SFMOMA

 The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be closed for two years while an addition is added to the present building. There will still be exhibits, but they will be in other venues around the Bay Area. They decided to close with a celebration! Above is one artwork, which hangs over the main hall. It is made of human hair from around the world.

 Here is another artwork, painted on the wall. To see how big it is, notice the size of the stand holding the rope in front of it.

 This is a model of the present museum.

 On the backside of the above model, is a model of the new addition. Lots more space.

 They had things going on all day. One of the last activities was making tin foil hats. They put out tin foil, glue, scissors, pipe cleaners, etc., and invited people to design their own. Unfortunately, there were no mirrors, so I didn't know what mine looked looked like on my head, but I got lots of complements on it!

 The final performance of the day was a group called Soul Motion. My daughter, Shanna, is one of the dancers!

At first the dancers were mixed with the crowd; gradually they formed a circle in the center. At the end of the dance, they proceeded outside, with the museum staff asking everyone to follow and form a line around the building. About half of us were wearing tin foil hats! Some in the crowd started chanting for us to look up. Then, a drone flew over to take our picture! Quite a finale!

The Girl with the Pearl Earring - De Young Museum

The Girl with the Pearl Earring has come to San Francisco, and I got to see her at the De Young Museum! Going to museums and seeing works by great artists always has a renewing effect on me!

According to the signs on the wall, this painting is not a portrait of an actual person, but instead is a tronie. In other words, the artist was trying to capture a facial expression or historic character, but not the likeness of an actual person. (Wow, how disappointing for those of us who saw the movie, Girl with a Pearl Earring, starring Scarlett Johansson!)

Works by other Dutch artists of the same time period were also part of the exhibit. One thing that immediately stood out was the simplicity of this work. Many of the works by other artists were so highly detailed, it looked like the artists used a 3-hair brush, and maybe a magnifying glass. That was the predominant style of the day. While The Girl with the Pearl Earring was painted very simply, with wide brushes, few strokes and minimal detail. The pearl itself was painted with three brush strokes! The earring probably was not a real pearl, but a glass bead painted to look like a pearl.  

The Girl is the only painting by Vermeer in the show. She looks like she has just turned her head and is about to speak to us. There is a feeling of life and movement in the painting, and her gaze seems directed toward something to the right of us, which makes it even more mysterious.

The painting itself appeared much lighter than the picture above, and the skin tones looked somewhat chalky. The lights and shadows were both painted with cool colors. This gave the painting a modernist look. I wondered if the recent cleaning and removal of yellowed varnish might have changed it. But, I'm glad to have had the opportunity to see it!

El Cerrito Art Show

Evensong - 6 x 12" - oil on canvas  SOLD

This past weekend, I had entered three paintings in the El Cerrito Art Association all media show. I am happy to report that I received a First Place award in the oil painting category! And my painting, Evensong, sold! Unfortunately, I don't have a good photograph of the first place winning painting, but will put one up later.

The show was very well organized, and well attended, and there were lots of sales. A fun event!

The White House Egg

West Virginia Egg - 2009 - (c) Linda Schweitzer

It was June, 2008. George W. Bush was near the end of his second term as president. It looked like the next president would be either Hilary Clinton or John McCain... I was still living in West Virginia.

I received a phone call from a woman, who said she was from the American Egg Board, asking me if I would decorate an Easter Egg, for the White House, to represent the state of West Virginia. Well, the whole thing sounded strange. I was not even aware of a display of Easter Eggs of the States at the White House, and I had never painted an egg, so I turned her down.

Next day, I looked up the White House website. Sure enough, there were egg displays at Easter time every year! Each state sent an egg. This had been going on since Grover Cleveland! Who knew? The artists got to tour the White House and meet the First Lady (sometimes the President too!) While there was no offer of money, or even travel reimbursement, I started getting excited about this as a great opportunity!  I called back and accepted the offer.

She did make it clear that the event might not even happen, with the new president, whoever that might be. But, they had to go ahead with the planning, in case the event would take place. And, there were rules: It had to be a large chicken egg, with the contents removed, and the ends sealed, and decorated to represent some special feature of the state. But here was the zinger:

"There can be no publicity regarding your egg or your participation in the event

prior to the event taking place. This is a White House event, and they are very

strict regarding the publicity originating from them."

So I can't even publicize this! Or blog about it! Dang!

I went out and bought a couple dozen eggs and got some books from the library on egg painting. There was quite a learning curve! (Which means it took a lot of time, and ruined eggs!)

Here is my dining room table, in production mode

In order to paint the egg without touching it, I put a bent coat hanger through the two holes. I decided the view off Cooper's Rock overlook, with mountains and a river between them was an image very representative of the State.

Here is the egg on the coat hanger wire

reverse side

The egg was painted all the way around. This is the reverse side. The egg had to be received at the American Egg Board Office by Nov. 1, 2008. I shipped it off, and waited to hear if the event would take place.

Two weeks before Easter, I found out it would not happen... The White House has continued the Egg Roll on the White House lawn, but not the egg display. Sigh... all that work, for something that wouldn't even be seen.
Well, you're seeing it now! Displayed in public, for the first time!

Exhibit--William Keith and the California Oak

I went recently to an exhibit at St Mary's College, William Keith and the California Oak. At first I thought I'd try to talk about Keith's life and the exhibit as a whole... But, you can get a brief overview of his life here, at the St. Mary's website. He was a California painter and a friend of John Muir, and a contemporary of George Inness. He started out painting large, romanticized Hudson River School Landscapes, but later realized there was no way a painter could capture the grandeur of nature. So he began painting smaller, more intimate scenes, characteristic of tonalism, that suggested a fleeting moment, and a reality beyond the surface. Here is one of his later paintings. It is just a moment at dusk, and appears so insubstantial, the paint is like a mist.

Here is a closer view of the foreground. There are no hard edges. It has a dream-like quality. If you step onto that grass, it looks so soft, you would probably just sink in. The cows in the upper left are barely distinguishable. The paint is translucent, with several layers visible.

This is the sky. The color here is more true to the actual painting. The sky is painted solidly, with opaque paint, and that little rugged edge at the top of the trees is the most definite edge in the whole piece. Even the tree trunks are transparent! The warm colors and distant light give a sense of spirituality and comfort.

Edgar Payne Exhibit at the Crocker Museum

 

Wednesday, I went to Sacramento for the Edgar Payne exhibit. Payne wrote THE book on composition: Composition of Outdoor Painting. First printed in 1941, it is a classic, and still in print. My own copy is underlined and well read. This is a great exhibit, and many artists are returning to see it a second time. Unfortunately, it is not scheduled for any museums in the East.

When you are looking at the photos of his paintings in his book, they are only 2" square. So, seeing the originals at 4' square is surprising! The colors are vibrant and stunning. I tried to take a close-up photo of the brushwork, but a guard informed me no photography was allowed. In some cases, especially the early works, the paint was very thick, with short, straight horizontal and vertical strokes. Brushstrokes were less pronounced on the later works.

Payne got his start in painting as a scene painter for the theater, and he really could set a scene. You can see on some paintings, that the figures were added later, after the paint had dried. He used the square format very frequently, while most landscape painters use rectangles. He often painted monumental scenes of canyons or mountains with little tiny figures on horseback almost lost at the bottom of the canvas. The grandeur of nature, with man being just a tiny part of the whole.

He was an avid amateur photographer, and developed his own film. He also made treks into remote areas and set-up his easel to make "plein air" studies. These paintings were for reference and were hardly ever signed or shown.

Usually, when we look at a landscape painting, it is as if the picture frame is a window, and we are looking out onto the scene of the painting. Payne, however, pulls the scene up close, so his mountains are almost on top of us. His boats are so close you could almost touch them. If I could sum up his art with one word, it would be "monumental."

If you live near any of the cities where this exhibit is showing, it is certainly worth seeing!

Exhibit in El Cerrito

...Deepening Shadows...

8" x 10" - oil

I am participating in the ECAA Plein Air Artists Exhibit at El Cerrito City Hall Gallery. This is an Art in Public Places gallery. It is new and really nice! There will be a reception on January 21, which I'd really like to attend... But I'll be at the California Art Club Winter Art Symposium

Ah, so many wonderful things!

A Great Evening!

Sunday night. First of all, we (myself, my daughter and two friends), arrived at the reception for the Crockett Paintout, at Epperson Gallery. All the artists had framed their works, and they were beautifully displayed on the gallery walls. Here are mine:

I checked the sign beside my top painting... an award! Honorable Mention!

The paintings were being sold by silent auction. I checked the bidding... My painting, Carquinez Nocturne, was sold!  and for higher than the price I put on it!

Here I am with one of the happy new owners holding the painting! That's my daughter, Shanna in the pink shirt. I'm sorry about the glare on the painting. See my previous post for a better view. I don't know many of the other artists here in California, so I cruised around talking to people. They all were very friendly, and we had a great time!

After that, we went to dinner at a local restaurant called The Dead Fish. Well, by chance, it overlooks the very same view I had painted in the painting that was sold! We were seated in a sort of tent, at a table with a heater and a large candelabra, holding three very drippy candles. We were given bibs, and assorted dead things were brought to the table for us to eat, all delicious! We had to eat the crabs with our hands, and had butter all over our fingers. It's fun to be so messy in public! Then, as it get dark, the scene before us turned into the painting. (Well, almost... actually it was painted from the scenic overlook above the restaurant.)

Here is the scene from the restaurant.