Art Tidbits

Today we visited two art museums; one is the New Britain Museum of American Art and the other was the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. Both of these museums had excellent, wide-ranging examples of American and French Impressionists but there were some other art works that we came upon which were fun to see in their own way. First of all, there was an entire room of Jamie Wyeth paintings of ..... da da ta da.... Rudolf Nureyev. It turns out that Jamie begged Nureyev for three years to let him paint him at the theatre, rehearsing and performing. Finally Nureyev conceded and Jamie worked on sketches and paintings for over a year including studio paintings where Nureyev came to Maine to visit. They remained friends for over twenty years after that until Nureyev died. The portrait upper left was later made into a poster for the ballet "Don Quixote". There were several studies in charcoal and paint of the dancer including one of him in the nudie, sorry ladies (or should I say gentlemen) there is no photo of that sketch since I did not want to contribute to internet porn i.e. Rep. Weiner. In the same museum we also saw some unusual paintings by both of the older Wyeths. Andrew (Jamie's father) had a self portrait, he only painted two of these in his lifetime as he usually painted landscapes or barns, most famously the painting of Christina's House. The paintings by N.C. Wyeth (Jamie's grandfather) were also unusual as he was mostly an illustrator and rarely did paintings for his own enjoyment. The painting entitled "Sun Glint" was considered the best painting he had ever done that was not an illustration. . . . . . When we were in DC, I blogged about a Renoir painting that we saw at the Phillips Museum. I mentioned the young lady on the extreme left of the painting who later became his wife. Today we were able to fast forward a number of years to a portrait of Aline as Mme. Renoir where she looks much more matronly than she did for the portrait of the Luncheon. She had been a model for him in a number of the intervening years prior to becoming married and I noticed that in this painting she also has a little dog just as she did when she was younger. . . . . . . And just a little farther back in my blogging history. . . last year Allan and I visited D.H. Lawrence's gravesite in New Mexico where we saw a very faded beatup photo of a painting by Georgia O'Keefe of a mighty tree in the patio of his little cabin. She lay on her back and painted the tree at night with the stars all around. She said that she painted "Lawrence's Tree" so that it could be hung in any direction but today we saw that painting and it was hung on its head which was the direction that she had preferred above all the others.

Used Bookstore in Niantic

Yesterday we headed "South" to East Lyme to visit the Florence Griswold Museum and after we left the museum we decided to check out Old Saybrook which is along the coast and see if we could find a quaint little town or a public beach. As it turned out, the coastline of Connecticut seems to be the same as Rhode Island, private homes line the edge of the water and there are signs everywhere indicating that it is all private, no parking allowed. As we continued on the coast road, it turned inland toward a town called Niantic, and as I was using the Droid Maps, I saw that there was a bookstore coming up on the left called The Book Barn. We started looking out for it, but there was no worry that we would have passed it as it was a huge piece of property, someone's home and barn with book stalls and book huts and book sheds, even book wagons, in addition to the books in the barn. For all you Kindle users out there... you are missing the bookfinding experience of beating the spiders off of the mystery books and side stepping the children sitting in wagons reading Madeline In Paris. When we leave the premises, Allan is still talking about all the treasures he had to pass up on this visit in order to purchase the Naval Histories of Samuel Elliot Morrison he found and I can't wait to show him the little book of travels that I happened to find about The Queen's Messenger, a man who traveled the world delivering personal dispatches from the Queen to her embassies around the globe and all of his experiences along the way.

Mystic, Connecticut

On Sunday we headed out to the supermarket to restock the larder and then in the afternoon we drove into New London to the Lyman Allyn Art Museum where we saw a small but interesting collection of American artists over the last century. Lyman Allyn was a ship captain who raised his family on what is now the University of Connecticut campus and after his death, his daughter had the museum built to house his collection of art. There were several Hudson River School paintings, mainly by Church or Cole, although there was one Bierstadt painting of the Alps. There were numerous portraits of austere people from the 1700's and early 1800's and a sprinkling of American Impressionists, most of which we did not know. The painting to the right is by Charles H. Davis and is called "Sky". It reminded me of the cloud painting we did during the Liz Heywood-Sullivan workshop at IAPS. In a separate gallery of the museum, they had an exhibition of William Wegner paintings. He paints portraits using his weineramer dog as the face and adds different wigs or other clothing in each painting. No photos were allowed in that gallery unfortunately. Sunday evening we strolled through historical downtown Mystic and it is extremely charming with numerous shops and restaurants on either bank of the river linked by a drawbridge which rises every hour for the boats to pass underneath. Everyone is walking around eating ice cream cones and taking photos. We saw the famous Mystic Pizza (see left photo) which has been touted for the movie of the same name but is not as famous for the quality of the pizzas. Today we headed over to Rhode Island as their coastline is lined with beaches and we packed up our plein air stuff and some beach chairs and set off early to have a beach day. Oh woe is me. Were we ever disappointed. We arrived in Watch Hill which has a beautiful beach that curves out into the Atlantic and there was no parking except if you were a member of the yacht club or owned a "changing room". A changing room looks like little mini condos all connected together and runs along the edge of the beach with a large fence between you and them. If you own a changing room, you have a numbered parking spot and a key card to enter the fence and a room where you can hang out or change clothes or whatever. The photo to the right was taken from the yacht club parking lot where we loitered for about ten minutes before heading further up the coast looking for an available beach. We passed through Misquamicut with no view of the ocean, just tall fences with signs indicating who owned a particular portion of beach. We got to Weekapaug and found that even the State Beach had a fence and an exorbitant fee for out of state visitors. Allan was incensed. In Australia where he was born, the beaches are for everyone and people are playing volleyball and sunbathing and it is practically a national sport.... going to the beach. I felt the same way, hailing from L.A., where we all headed to Malibu every weekend. Allan thought it was terrible that the people could not get to the beach here, but I had to remind him that if you were a Weekapaug person, you could go to the Weekapaug designated beach and meet up with your Weekapaug neighbors and all the little Weekapaug children would play together on the beach. In the meantime they would not have to put up with any Arizona Foreigners on their beach or parking in their parking lots. We headed back to Mystic to console ourselves at The Oyster Restaurant (above left) where I had some of the best butternut squash risotto and shrimp scampi I have ever tasted in my life.