Cay Denise

         The works are wonderful and exactly what you'd expect to see including those by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, Millais, Stanhope, Botticelli, Raphael and Fra Angelica among others. Such a wonderful art excursion.  Now at the San Francisco Legion of Honor!

A wonderful salvaged metal sculpture of a robotic female buddha stands atop a platform overlooking the expanse of our downtown park as if she is practicing a walking meditation.  Once a beacon for the Burning Man community, locals now have the opportunity to see this sensual creation by Dana Albany through August 13th.  Dana has made other sculptures including a youth educational mosaic spacecraft that was also displayed at Burning Man.  Some of the most amazing art work in ingenuity and quality is created by artists for each Burning Man gathering (an annual event in the Neveda desert).  We are fortunate that pieces from various gatherings are and will be making brief stops as they tour a number of locations over the next few years!

There can be no comparison between these movies, even though they are about artists. 'Big Eyes' with Amy Adams was disappointing.  Amy plays an artist is the 1950s who doesn't make her own mark because her husband sells her art as if he was its creator and she goes along with it (for years).  It isn't until she leaves the husband/marriage that she finds some backbone and strength to tell the truth about what happened.     'Loving Vincent' is a truly exquisite movie!  The animation of the numerous paintings made for this movie is amazing, and the paintings themselves are incredible!!  What an accomplishment to have made such an impressive and beautifully crafted movie.  If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it!!

As part of the module on Egon Schiele that I posted about yesterday, I took the second painting of my facial bones to work on.  As you can tell from this photo compared to yesterday's post, I've changed the background, reduced the width of the face at the jaw line, neck and shoulders, done some additional painting of the face, and added a hand (in an attempt at a Schiele-like hand though mine is not as boney as he would have done) plus a stem.  I don't have any plan for what to put on top of the stem--that's still a mystery--so I'm going to leave it without anything for now.  What you can see in the face is additional depth and more clarification of facial elements that weren't there before.  The striped background provides contrast with the face as well as the hand.  Its not a pretty image, but I learned a lot by doing the exercise in the first place and then working with it further to form something else.

Week 30's instructor led us through a great exercise of getting to know our facial bone structure (a way in which Schiele painted).  That is what the first two images above are about. Using a paintbrush with our dominant hand, the other hand was used to feel the facial bones as we painted what we felt with our eyes closed. This was done three different times with a different color each time. These were considered warm-up exercises to get into an expressive mode of painting. The images to the left are separate paintings done from the same photo after the warm-up exercises.  The figure on the right is in acrylic; the one on the left is in watercolor crayon and markers. What I learned is not to be afraid of work that looks unpleasant or strange, or fearful of applying paint with free-form brush stokes. and that painting and drawing loosely has its own character and charm.