Artist Date: Prado Nudes at the Clark... 021016

I think we may have just established a new birthday tradition: travel to see one special art show per year for my birthday... and I couldn't imagine a better way to spend it. Last year's show was to visit the Kandinsky Gallery at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC and this year it was an early birthday trip to see Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA.

The Clark is located approximately 2 hours and 40 minutes from where we live, traveling mostly on scenic Route 2 / Mohawk Trail. We decided to make this an overnight trip and spent the Saturday afternoon hunting for treasures at no less than two book sales and three book stores, adding to my growing collection of art books and biographies. Fall is book sale season and I couldn't be happier - you never know what out-of-print or rare art book you may come home with :)



This trip to the Clark was long overdue, it has been on my to-do wish list for a long time and when an opportunity to see 28 Old Master paintings from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid...well it was hard to resist a chance to go... especially when "24 of the paintings have never been shown in America", according to the Clark's website: 

http://clarkart.edu/



Next time, we'll be able to snag a couple of chairs!

We arrived just as the Clark opened at noon and got immediately concerned that the show would be overcrowded as the parking lot was pretty full. It soon became apparent that not everyone was there for the show and that people who live in the area fully enjoy the 140 acres and walking trails surrounding the Clark. I wish now that we knew that the grounds were so extensive and popular or we would have budgeted more time to spend there and explore the grounds... but there is always next time!

 

I especially loved the entrance - you walk into the Clark through floor to ceiling glass doors and walls and the first thing you see is the brand-new three-tier reflecting pool surrounded by their amazing landscape views and Adirondack chairs that are just inviting you to sink down in them and soak up the sun and the scenery. It makes you feel immediately welcome and gives you the feeling that they are encouraging you to linger.

 



A beautiful afternoon and an amazing view



 

 

The opportunity to see these Master paintings in person as opposed to a print in a book or an image online is incredible. Some of these paintings are wall sized and to be able  to study them up close, see the brushstrokes and the attention to detail, you can fully appreciate the amount of time that was put into their creation.

 

 

 


The entrance to the show and museum shop with enlargement of Jan Breughel the Elder, Frans Francken II, Hendrik van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Younger, "Sight and Smell"





Some highlights from Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado:

Pietro Negri, "Vanitas"

Tintoretto, "Lady Revealing Her Breast"



Jan Breughel the Elder and Hendrik van Balen, "Abundance with the Four Elements"


 

Titian, "Venus with an Organist and Cupid"



Francesco Furini, "Lot and his Daughters"




Peter Paul Rubens, "Rape of Europa"

Guido Reni, "Cleopatra"

 

 There is still a couple of days left to catch Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado - it will be up until October 10th, 2016 and well worth the drive if you are in the New England area. The Clark Art Institute is located on 225 South Street in Williamstown, MA.
 
Jenn White
White Rooster Studios

 

Journal Project #5: Lean on Me... 09.16.2016

Function at Alpine Grove, 1991

I have been thinking a lot about my college days these past couple of weeks – with our 25^th reunion happening next weekend, it IS kind of hard not to.

 

Lately, it seems that just about everything has some kind of connection with Riv.

 

For example, I was at the grocery store last Sunday and I came to a complete stop when Club Nouveau's "Lean on Me" came over the speakers. I haven't heard that song in years, but it still takes me back to 1991, to Rivier... and I remember some of the best women I would ever know as if we just parted days ago.

 

"Lean on Me" was never a song that I would have listened to on my own, I am and have always been a alternative rock girl. But... this song took on a life of it's own at Rivier functions. As Rivier was an all-women college at the time, most of the functions had very little or no men in attendance. So dances ended up being  group dances and this song would be the one in which everyone would gather in a circle, put their arms around each other's waists and dance together.

 

I remember it as a song about friendship. Of unbreakable bonds. Of sisterhood.

Shoreline at Wachusett Reservoir

 

I still feel that way today.

I will not have an opportunity to see everyone at next week's reunion, but I do have plans to meet up with several friends very soon - for some, it has been far, far too long between visits. It will be great to reconnect, catch up and have some laughs about our college days... and for those I will not be able to see next weekend, there will be other reunions and, I hope, other chances to meet again...

I created most of Journal #5: Lean on Me at the Wachusett Reservoir. I had the entire shoreline to myself for most of the afternoon and I wanted this week's picture to remind me of the feeling of just being... and of the eternal nature of water.

A couple of years ago I saw the 2007 mini-series "Riverworld" based on Jose Philip Farmer's story about a fictional world that is essentially one endless river and that you could meet anyone from any point in time along it's shores. For some reason, I thought of Riverworld that afternoon and the ideas that have fascinated me since I first saw the mini-series.

 

 

 

The final piece did not come out as I had intended, but, then again, they rarely do. This one was another "happy accident" and the ideas behind it will have a chance to develop in another piece.

 

Happy 25th Reunion, Rivier Class of 1991

 

Jenn White

White Rooster Studios

 

ArtistDate: The Kandinsky Galley... 26.08.2016

Like most people, I have the best intentions. And, like most people, there are times in which those intentions don't always get accomplished. Like this blog post. I had every intention of sitting down and writing it within a week of returning from our visit to New York City at the end of March... and, here we are, at the end of AUGUST, and it is just getting posted… and, quite frankly, I am not quite sure why it was not completed in the first place.

 I will admit to toying with the idea of simply deleting this draft, but I absolutely HATE having things only half done, so I decided that since what I most want to talk about was our visit to the Kandinsky Gallery at the Guggenheim Museum and that although the Kandinskys we went to see are currently not in said Gallery, the experience and the trip itself is still worth writing about.

 The New York City trip was, for me, long overdue. I enjoy NYC, but in small doses, so there has to be a reason for going there... Something there worth making the trip... and, there it was: an advertisement in a national art magazine last fall announcing that the Guggenheim Museum would have seven Vasily Kandinsky paintings on view in the Kandinsky Galley until the Spring (yeah, pretty vague, I know). The paintings would trace Kandinsky's "aesthetic evolution: his early beginnings in Munich at the start of the century, the return to his native Moscow with the outbreak of World war I, his interwar years in Germany as a teacher at the Bauhaus, and his final chapter in Paris". 

I should also state that I am a Frank Lloyd Wright fan and I had never had an opportunity to visit the Guggenheim Museum, so this was technically a fan-girl double-bill for me. I only wish that I had a chance to see it in better weather – we visited on a dark, raw, drizzling morning… and it was PACKED, the queue snaked around the building waiting to get in when we arrived shortly after the museum opened.

 

We chose to start in the spiral and decided to start at the top and work our way down to the Kandinsky Gallery. The galleries located in the spiral are a creative use of space, and as much as I wanted to slow down and take in all that was on view, what I really wanted was to head directly to the Kandinsky Gallery. 

The Kandinsky Gallery was pretty much wall-to-wall people. The Gallery is small, there really isn’t a lot of room to walk around and view the work as I would have liked and, to top it off, a small group of grade school children were doing EXACTLY what I wanted to be doing: sitting on the gallery floor, enjoying the paintings and creating a collaborative piece of art based on Kandinsky’s geometric designs. 

 

 One of the pleasures of viewing art in person as opposed to on-line is that you can get relatively close to the work and study how it was created: the brush strokes, the thickness of the paint, the weave of the canvas, and how all these elements work together to create these amazing pieces of art. So, what I thought I would do to illustrate this is to have a picture of the original work and a picture I took of a detail of the work side-by-side:

"Small Pleasures"



"Small Pleasures", detail







"Blue Mountain", detail

"Blue Mountain"

"Black Lines", detail



"Black Lines"




"Several Circles", detail



"Several Circles"

 

"Various Actions", detail

"Various Actions"



"Circles in Black" detail



"Circles in Black"

"Improvisation 28 2nd version", detail

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Improvisation 28 2nd version"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As much as I enjoyed seeing the progression of Kandinsky's work, I am most partial to works like "Improvisation 28 2nd version" which was painted in 1912. I am especially attracted to Kandinsky's idea of "painting music" and how different instruments and tones have their own unique shape and color. The evolution of this personal language is intriguing and something that I have been researching on my own for many years now.

 

 I'm happy that I had an opportunity see the seven Kandinsky's, but I will admit that there is a part of me that wishes that there had been more. The Guggenheim Museum has a collection of "more than one hundred and fifty" of Kandinsky's work. December 4, 2016 will mark Kandinsky's 150th birthday and I am hoping that somewhere, someone is planning a celebration show for him. I have a vision of ALL of the Guggenheim's Kandinsky's out for one blockbuster show, the entire museum showing just Kandinskys. Now, that would make me drive into NYC again :)

"Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body." - Vasily Kandinsky

Jenn White
White Rooster Studio

Journal Project #4: King of Birds... 26.08.16

So, this is the 4th entry in the Journal Project and I am almost a week late posting. I have been re-thinking my original timeline that I had set for this project - creating and posting every two weeks - and suspect that the solution is to push the "due date" out to every three weeks.

I have been noticing that this project is more time-consuming that I had originally anticipated and I don't want to neglect my other projects or stress out about making a deadline, so the three week test will begin with #4.

Last week I was indulging in some REM at work and one of my favorite songs came up: King of Birds. There is something about that song that immediately makes me think of working in my college studio, especially the line about "standing on the shoulders of giants" - which fits into how I have been feeling since my visit to the Peabody Essex Museum a couple of weekends ago. While at the PEM, we saw the "American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isles of Shoals" exhibit and I fell completely in love with Hassam's work, especially the Appledore Island paintings.

So I started thinking about artistic lineage and how each generation builds on the one before and how much we still have to learn about those artists who came before us. Admittedly, I am not familiar with Hassam or any of his work prior to this show, but I am very fascinated by what I saw and have added him to my list of artists to research. A very quick search revealed that Hassam was part of the art group The Ten - a group that I have heard about, but hadn't had a chance to look into yet, so here is my excuse to bump both Hassam and The Ten to the top of my list.

My original idea for Journal #4 was to see if I could take my existing style and make it look more "painterly"... it didn't come out as planned, but I see this as a possible evolution of my work and am planning on doing a series of tests to see if there is a way to develop this idea.

I am looking at the final result of this experiment as Phase 1 and will be working to evolve my work even further:

Jenn White
White Rooster Studio

ArtistDate: PEM Visit - Rodin, Hassam and Agha... 21.08.16

There are a couple of "don't miss" art shows going on around New England right now and there are three of them at the Peabody Essex Museum located in East India Square in Salem, MA.

1) Rodin: Transforming Sculpture is on view only until September 5th, 2016. If you are a fan of Rodin's work and are in the area, please stop by and check it out. According to the PEM's website, the show was originally titled "Metamorphoses: In Rodin's Studio" and was put together with the help of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, Paris.

The show is a mix of plaster work, bronze castings and works in marble and has all of the works that you would expect to see in a Rodin exhibit: the Thinker, the Kiss, and three members of the Burghers of Calais grouping. I especially enjoyed viewing all three versions of his Balzac sculpture:






Camille Claudel's "Abandonment"

Another thrill, for me, was seeing Rodin's head of Camille Claudel and even one of Claudel's own work, "Abandonment":

Head of Camille Claudel

2) American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isles of Shoals will be on view until November 6th and I will admit to not being very familiar with Hassam at all prior to seeing this show. Pretty much the only thing I did know what that he was an American Impressionist, but when I saw his work from the Isles of Shoals, I fell completely in love with them and the idea of creating art on an island and have added Hassam to my research list:

 

3) Intersections: Anila Quayyum Agha will be on view until October 16th and, as much as I was entranced with Hassam's show, this installation piece stole my imagination and has inspired me to push my own work to another level:

 

Jenn White
White Rooster Studio
  

Journal Project #3: The Spirit of '76 (Sidewalk Sam)... 09.08.16

I had this illusion that I would be able to complete my 3rd Journal entry within the time limits that I have set up for the project, but I was not counting on one thing: I had not expected my theme for this entry - to talk about my one of mentors: Sidewalk Sam - to be so difficult to talk about. 

 

There are a lot of things that I could say about Sidewalk Sam - and all of them are great and inspirational - but the thing that I remember most about my limited time with him was his smile, his humor and the fact that he believed that art was for the people and should be accessible to everyone.

 

I first met Sidewalk Sam at Rivier College in the very early 1990's. I remember working alongside him and my fellow Rivier Fine Art Society members, making a chalk mural of Eugene Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People"... OK, it didn't come  out as great as the original (pictured below), but it was my 1st experience with chalk drawing and working side-by-side a more experienced artist and I was hooked:

 

A couple of months later, the Rivier Fine art Society joined Sidewalk Sam on Storrow Drive in Boston, MA to celebrate Earth Day in 1990 (I am in the top row, 4th one from the left, right above Sidewalk Sam). What I will always remember about that day was how surreal it was to be creating chalk drawings on a green painted Storrow Drive with some absolutely incredible artists:

 

A couple of years later, Stacey (pictured 2nd in the top row) and I joined Sidewalk Sam at an event in Boston where we could create our own chalk drawing... Stacey and I chose to recreate a painting by Gabriele Munter of Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky... again, not quite as amazing as the original, but still as much fun as the one we worked on with Sidewalk Sam at college:

 

And then, later on in the 1990's, I ran into Sidewalk Sam at a singles event held on a Friday evening at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Sidewalk Sam and I spent a magical evening talking about art and the art world in general in the museums' courtyard... I was loving every minute and was wishing it would never end.

 

Even though we only met sporadically throughout a 15 year period, he always remembered who I was... perhaps not always by name - he tended to refer to me as "Mark's girl" (a reference to another art mentor who introduced us), still, Sidewalk Sam was an unforgettable mentor and I don't think I will ever be able to describe how much he influenced my life or inspired me... and I don't think I will stop missing him.

 

We lost Sidewalk Sam last year - you can see his obituary at: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/01/27/sidewalk-sam-boston-street-artist-robert-guillemin-created-murals-and-magic-city-walkways/4rjhqwEvn8BbUtMW4VLT7K/story.html

 

I was lucky enough to have known him before and after the accident that left him in a wheelchair, but that didn't stop him from creating art on a daily basis. Sidewalk Sam's legacy is strong, please check out http://sidewalksam.com/ if you are interested in learning more about Art Street.

 

I wanted to express something of the serenity that I felt when talking to Sidewalk Sam in Journal Project #3:

 

I chose The Alarm's song, "The Spirit of '76" because I have always felt nostalgic after listening to it and it reminded me of my college days and the amazing women I shared them with: 



The Journal Project #3 Final

Jenn White
White Rooster Studios