Art Date

Hi My Artist Friends,

Yesterday I took myself to the Vero Beach Museum of Art. It was the best time I've had alone in weeks! There was a fabulous glass show which will be up until Dec 28. There were three Dale Chihuly pieces, one of which I liked very much. The fabulous surprise was "discovering" Jon Kuhn who works in cold-fused glass crystal. His "A Byte of Time" is breathtaking! There was a Benjamin Moore piece that I might have seen at the Met in NYC; it is a magical blue "bowl" with dramatic lip that casts an ethereal shadow. Those were only three of about a dozen lovely works. The show also had some ancient glass pieces that were exquisite little gems. That part of the museum was worth the whole visit.


Then there was "The Greeting", a video installation by Bill Viola which will also be up until Dec 28th. It is the first modern piece that I have ever enjoyed! It was (approximately) a 4' X 8' video that was like a classic painting come to life. The artist staged and shot a meeting of three women, dressed in modern clothes that are reminiscent of old Roman garb. The flowing long dresses and the red scarf of one are a perfect counterpoint to the dramatic, hard-edged perspective of the street behind them. Reading the label outside the darkened room, I learned that the whole scene was actually a 45 second segment. However, the artist had slowed it down so much that it took 10 minutes to watch. It moved so slowly that you could absorb the composition as it changed as well as the emotions that were on the three women's faces. Static classic painting could not include such a dynamic element as the motion the current artist enhanced.


Since reading Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race I'm looking at museum pieces with new eyes. That was fun, too. It was interesting to feel my own reactions to different art pieces - and why. Jon Davis's "Lost Luggage" show was interesting intellectually but it did not grab me the way the other two galleries did. As I was leaving I heard one man say to his wife that a particular large abstract was "very feminine". Why? Because it was in pastels? I shook my head and headed for the gift shop.

I hope you each are having a good art date for yourself now and then.
Florrie