Sunday, April 25, 2010

art fun and museum trip


Art Fun this past Saturday with 5 art journalers at a Meet Up gathering. My first time with the group sharing, creating, laughing.........Everyone brought their journals having 2 pages with prepped backgrounds. We passed our journals around with about 10 minutes to play in each one. Fun, challenging as the pages got more filled, and received our journals back. So great to see the variety of ways of working and thinking about journaling, discovering new tools and meeting friendly and generous people.

Last Tuesday had an Art trip, with artist friend Carole, to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA to see Luis MelĂ©ndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life (1716–1780) Considered the greatest still life painter of 18th-century Spain. While his still lifes are gorgeous, his self-portrait is absolutely stunning!!! The colors glow and the detail on his clothing is exquisite. His dream was to become a court painter. An argument with heads of the Academy got his father fired and him without any support to further his career for portrait painting. Too bad. We managed to get into a tour of the museum and found ourselves in front of Velasquez paintings (1 self-portrait and another of a young girl). While I'm sure the court afficienados of the time thought they were great paintings, I thought they lacked the beautiful glowing colors and warmth of subject that the Melendez self-portrait had. Would have been wonderful to see what Luis would have done.

3 comments:

Tammy Freiborg said...

What a creative way to share journaling and companionship! I wanted to reach into the computer and grab one of Melendez's pears!

Purrplekatt said...

That sounds like it was so much fun Cynthia! Your journal looks great. :)

Creatively Lisa said...

Cynthia, I am just seeing this. That was a fun morning. I posted my page on my blog as well. I also made a journal from one of the wallpaper sheets from the bag. Thanks! I posted the journal as well. Hopefully the Meet-ups will start again soon.