2 posts tagged “art”

Now that Daddy is back home and mostly out of danger, aota and I decided to indulge ourselves with a little roadtrip, a one-day vacation as it were.  We used to venture out quite frequently, but since the cost of gas has risen so much in the past couple of years, we've pretty much stayed put here in Dubuque, only leaving town on family matters.

But today, since it was rainy anyway, we decided to check out the Figge Art Museum down in Davenport.  They were having an exhibit on Japanese Woodblock prints which I have been wanting to see, and another one on American comic-book art that interested Bob, so we drove down to see it.  Davenport is about an hour and a half drive south of Dubuque, so it was an easy trip.  Hwy 61 doesn't see much traffic, so we got there in record time.

The museum is housed in an attractive modern building with a lot of glasswork on one side.  The art is housed on three separate floors.  The paintings in the permanent exhibit were interesting, although there was a great emphasis on religious paintings, especially of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.  They had two rooms of Mexican works (again, mostly religious) that were remarkable--either the museum had a curator who is/was interested in the subject, or a donor gave them a good start and they continued the collection.  On one edge of the permanent collection, they had set up a traditional Catholic-style altar with some very large, visually-striking paintings of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, with a huge painting of the crucifixion in the middle.  Although the one painting in that group that most struck me was one of the Virgin Mary with the Angel Gabriel.  On the opposite side of that hall, they had set up a Voodoo altar.  At first glance, I thought this was some Mexican/Latino set-up (because of the bright colors and crosses), but no, it was actually Voodoo.  There was a small room off to the side of it with paintings of Voodoun dieties.  *blink*  Not sure how a collection of Voodoo art ended up in a gallery in eastern Iowa, but there you go.

There were a couple of medieval manuscript pages, small ones from a Book of Hours.  Being a calligraphy geek, I examined these quite closely.  One was 15th century, with some nice colors and gilding work, and the other was 16th century.  At first, I thought the 16th century one was a woodblock print because of the detail work, but no, it was drawn.  Small, but very impressive.

The Japanese Woodblock print exhibit was smaller than I expected, but it was interesting to see them first hand.  At Beloit, we had been fortunate enough to have one of the curators of their Anthropology museum pull out some examples of their collection, which were very fine.  The Figge's collection was not as impressive in subject matter--rather than famous samurai or actors, their collection focused on travel scenes-- but they were well worth seeing.  There was one that was labelled incorrectly--the blurb said that it was a print of two girls playing, but the print actually depicted a girl and a boy.  (You could tell it was a boy from his hairstyle and the narrow obi he wore.)  However, I didn't think they cared to hear about that, so I didn't say anything to them, although I pointed it out to Bob.

The comic-book art collection (on loan from the University of Nebraska) was much larger, taking up three rooms.  There was a wide variety of original comic art, some from superhero comic books, a few editorial comics, several four-panal comics and a bunch of Sunday pages.  The exhibit covered time periods from the early 1930's to the late 1990's.  It was interesting to see some of the cut-and-paste work that were done on the four-panal and Sunday comics pages.  That (and lettering) are almost a lost art--it's all done on computers nowadays.

The third exhibit involved paintings done by Cedar Rapids artist Thomas Jackson on the subject of politics and the State Fair.  I found them unremarkable.  The only thing of interest was that his paintings of the Democratic candidates campaigning in Iowa were all in bright reds, whites and blues, whereas the one of Dubya was in oppressive browns, grey and black. 

We had thought to have supper in Davenport, but it was still mid-afternoon when we finished at the museum, so we decided to drive back to Dubuque and eat at the Taiko Steakhouse.  The Taiko is a Japanese restaurant (although it's actually owned and staffed by a Chinese family) which has some of the best steak I've ever tried anywhere.  Their sushi is also superb.  It's too expensive for us to eat there often, but we figured since today was our "one-day vacation" that we could afford to treat ourselves.  We arrived a bit early, before they opened for supper, but the owner went ahead and let us come in.  There was talk before that a Japanese restaurant wouldn't survive in such a blue-collar town as Dubuque, but the Taiko's been going strong for two years now.  I was a bad girl and had some plum wine. ;-D  Oishikatta desu!

Now I need to get back to writing--I finally finished the first draft of "Love is Blonde" chapter 10. To be precise, this was the 3rd First Draft of chapter 10, but I finally got it done.  Now it needs some heavy revision.  I may go ahead and bang out a draft of chapter 11 if I get bored of editing, but we'll see.  I really want to finish this story, since there are some other things I want to get writing on!

A friend of mine was asking people to draw pictures of Greek Gods.  Here was his request:

1) Pick a Greek God.
2) Draw your interpretation of that god, however you see fit.
3) Post it to your LJ or blog.
4) Notify me, either here or via e-mail at 'xemnu squiggle yahoo pip com'.
5) Tell all your artist friends to do the same!

So I include two pictures for him.  Goddesses rather than Gods per se, since I draw men badly.  Actually, I don't draw women that well either, come to think of it.  However, it's the thought that counts, right?  So, behold, rough sketches of Hera and Hestia, my two favorite Greek God(desses)!

Hera1

Hestia1