Good Tunes

Last year I stumbled onto the chance to see a live performance of Thievery Corporation, which until then had been unknown to me. Their music immediately entranced me and I went out the next day to buy their last CD, Versions. It has been my favorite CD since then and I play it almost every day without getting tired of it. Highly recommended!

I can't wait for their next CD to come out.

Lost Skills

In the pictures below are some Roman artifacts from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. There is a certain energy and intellectually stimulating liveliness in these fragments, be it the tormented expression of a Herakles, the flow of the robe and subtly inviting body language of a decapitated statue, the introspective gaze of the Emperor Caligula, the innocent pose of an aristocratic youth, the beautiful anatomy of a Centaur's torso, ....

There is an almost surreal beauty to a lot of these sculpture fragments that survived total destruction at the fall of the Roman Empire. One can only wonder how much and what we are missing.

The artists of the Roman Empire had developed unsurpassed skills, borrowed from the Greeks and adding to what they learned from them, leaving what must have been an enormously rich legacy, until Christianity made an end to it, blatantly destroyed whatever it could, and plunged us in the Dark Ages. Until our time, we haven't recovered yet.

Not So Dark

One of my paintings is the focal point of the decor of the master bedroom of a featured home in the Summer 2007 issue of Beautiful Homes - a Better Homes and Gardens Publication. It is is a perfect example of how a painting of a stormy sky can add life, color and visual interest to a well decorated room without a hint of depressiveness or threat, or without disturbing the peacefulness of a bedroom.

Mother Boards

Looking down from the observation dack high on the Empire State Building, the grid of the streets and tops of the surrounding buildings reminded me most of the electronic boards in my computer.

Trend Setter Or Follower?

Pablo Picasso has never held much of my admiration. There are a few of his works here and there that I like, such as the one directly below. Most of his work however is in my opinion vastly overrated. He had a tendency to jump from one style to another, adopting whatever the latest fad of the day was and claiming it as his own. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but there are numerous artists that were much better at it and never made it to the spotlight like Picasso did. His paintings are OK but they certainly are not outstanding enough to deserve all the hype that surrounds his signature.



It is interesting comparing the following three pairs of paintings. The odd numbered ones are each by artists who became known for the style they worked in. The even numbered paintings are by Picasso.


1. Kasimir Malevich Reservist Of The First Division

2. Pablo Picasso Green Still Life

3. Juan Gris Guitar And Glasses

4. Pablo Picasso Student With A Pipe

5. George Braque Road Near L'Estaque

6. Pablo Picasso Landscape

The Opposite End

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, NYC, is another temple in this great city. Opposite to the adoration of crude commercialism at Times Square, this temple is dedicated to the accomplishments of the human race in its pursuit of timeless beauty and true quality in the visual and decorative arts. We spent 6 hours there until our feet were screaming of fatigue and we could not absorb anything more; and haven't still seen half of the displayed collections. It is a gigantic warehouse, filled to the brim with art of all ages and cultures; truly a source of inspiration. We started this culturally enriching tour with a very early lunch at the museum's cafetaria and ended it appropriately in style with a High Tea at the ground floor restaurant.

A Contrast

One evening we went to Times Square... the temple of American wastefulness. A chaotic farce of uncountable people and traffic engulfed by enormous illuminated billboards, smothering the surrounding buildings like poisonous parasites. Blaring useless advertising in such pretentious multitude and scale that it all turns into a psychedelic blur - a cocaine party staged by the big corporations. It's a moving, constantly changing combination of art installation, performing art, commercialism, American culture.... A must see, even as once is plenty enough. And I can't imagine being there on a New Year's Eve!

I returned to the hotel feeling mentally indigested, heavy with sensory overload and somewhat sad. I look at this as an ultimate public display of the decadence and greed of our times - a forebode of the dooming demise of Western Civilization?

Massive Curves

It was a real treat to see Richard Serra's monumental sculptures at the MoMA. I had seen a piece by him earlier this year at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, TX (see Nasher Garden of August 7, 2007) and was quite impressed by the scale and impact of his work. The enormous solid steel plates undulate back and forth at different curved degrees, yet the top line remains consistently horizontal.
Below are pictures of parts of two of his pieces exhibited in the courtyard of the MoMA, while the largest sculptures were on view inside the museum, on the second floor! How did they fit them in there!?

The Broken Obelisk

At the MoMA it was impossible to take an unobstructed picture of Barnett Newman's intriguing Broken Obelisk. So I moved around it a little bit until the voluminous rounded form of the man in the white shirt created a perfect counterbalance in this photo. I doubt he was a New Yorker because I have seldom seen such a concentration of fit people anywhere in the US. Walking is the number one mode for getting around and I was impressed by the number of gyms.

But to go back to the sculpture:

Barnett Newman was one of the most influential New York abstract expressionists. Like his friend Mark Rothko, he was beset by profound religious and philosophical concerns with which he struggled throughout his life to translate into visual form. Barnett Newman died in 1970.
This Broken Obelisk is one of three in existence, the second sited in front of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX, the third in the quadrangle of the University of Washington, Seattle. It is 26 feet high and made of cor–ten steel. It consists of a square base plate beneath a four–sided pyramid whose tip meets and supports the upended broken obelisk. The two tips have exactly the same angle (53 degrees, borrowed from the Egyptian pyramids which had long fascinated the artist) so that their juncture forms a perfect “x.”

Artfully

New York City inspires. Despite an often badly stereotyped reputation, New Yorkers deserve at least one major credit: they possess an unequaled level of cultural sophistication among Americans. My visit to the Museum of Modern Art clearly illustrates this observation. The collections at the museum are incredible. It is shockingly full of world-famous masterpieces, one after the other after the other. These works are invariably in all the publications about modern art because of their importance in quality and groundbreaking invention.

I was at the museum on a Friday afternoon, and it was packed with people. People were lining up in four rows to view the Van Gogh's, I stood waiting for my turn to get in front of the Gustav Klimt's. I was constantly shifting my focus from the art treasures on the walls to the show of people filling the halls and could't decide which was more interesting. In Texas it would take a major football game to attract such a crowd, in New York, as many people simply enjoy good art. Bravo!

Crazy NYC

I just returned from a trip to New York City. My first time in that crazy city, so vibrant and bursting with energy. It was overwhelming. A real workout for the visual and olfactory senses. The latter being mostly stimulated in the subway. Everything I saw was beyond my wildest expectations. The concentration of people, the wealth of interesting and varied architectural styles, the fabulous shops, the impressive quality of the collections at the museums, the restaurants, ...... it has the best, the biggest, the most of everything. It's undescribable. It left a very strong impression. Not a place where I could live - it's way too hectic, too crowded, too fast paced. Certainly worth visiting again. If it's all you see of the US, just don't think that the whole country is like that.

Options - the sequel

Mule Ears oil on canvas 48" X 48" Chris De Dier

The second choice in this commission is again a somewhat stylized landscape at Big Bend National Park by the Mexican border in deep south Texas. The two peaks of rock breaking the horizon line are almost twins and are known as the Mule Ears.

Options

Expanse oil on canvas 48" X 48" Chris De Dier

This painting is a commission for a client who wants to pair it with Brighter. Since I don't know what precisely they have in mind nor haven't seen the space where it will be hanging, and to give them a choice, I am still working on a second painting of the same dimensions, which will be posted as soon as it is finished. But that will be after my trip to New York.

Dallas Art

The Dallas Museum Of Art is big. Its size befits that of the city it is located in. Yet, nothing that I saw there was exceptional enough to be worth remembering. Oh wait, I saw an extremely poor curated exhibit about Roman architectural artifacts found under the ashes of the Vesuvius. The tacky polyester bird bath surrounded by fake foliage around its base as the center piece in one of the halls of the exhibit was totally inapropriate also.
I must admit however, they have a fine selection of Piet Mondrian's work, spanning his entire career. It is always interesting to observe the dramatic evolution in groundbreaking artists' body of work from before and after they experimented with drugs.



On the return to Austin, TX, the skies were breathtaking. Those heavy clouds were the last remnants of the prolonged period of rain showers that inundated our area.

Nasher Garden