Constable

Right now the Frist Center for the Visual Arts has the honor of hosting an exhibition of eighty-five works by John Constable from the Victoria and Albert Museum in England. Apart from one "exhibition" oil painting, the rest of the works are sketches, watercolors, and drawings. The two giants in the exhibition are the six foot oil mock-ups for The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse. How many artists are so particularistic that they would do a full scale mock-up before doing their final piece? I have enjoyed comparing The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse to the final works. Especially The Hay Wain, which has a beautifully free and loose style missing from the completed artwork. This collection shows the process and principles intrinsic to Constable's working methods. Many of the vignettes that he sketched and sketched repeatedly, for example Lott's cottage, ended up in his completed works. What was enlightening for me was that he predated the Impressionists with his plein air painting methods. Also, their is a sepia sketch built up from ink stains—a technique that is associated with the Surrealists and Dadaists. This work is from his late period and represents a contradiction of opinions that he had held earlier in his life where he stated that the imagination did not have the same power in art that direct observation had. Overall, his work represents an idealized, picturesque, man-made landscape that shows the breadth of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement especially when one compares Constable's work to that of Turner, his contemporary.

Pinterest

I discovered pinterest and am obsessed. Okay, I have to go now…see you on pinterest. http://pinterest.com/susanstriepe/

Georgia O'Keefe Museum

Today I visited the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe, NM. What I enjoyed about the exhibit was seeing work that I was not previously acquainted with, like her charcoal and pencil drawings, as well as her watercolors. There were two pen and ink studies of windmills that were totally different from everything else in the museum. I still love her attention to shadows and how she captures their mysterious and abstract qualities.

Dark Fairy Tales

We have an awesome new exhibit at the Frist called Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination. Our chief curator, Mark Scala, conceptualized this exhibit. It took about three years to realize. Fairy Tales, with their presumed innocent nature, actually convey many disturbing qualities about people, behavior, and society. Many convey moral and instructional guideposts for initiates into a culture. One such story, that is represented in the collection, is Kiki Smith's renditions of the Little Red Riding Hood tales.

Digitization

Some of the amazing iphone apps that I have been exploring over the last two weeks are: stopmotion and 8mm vintage camera. I have developed some interesting ideas while playing with the stopmotion and have done quite a bit of footage. None that I like so far. As soon as I have something viable, I will post it. My vintage camera app worked out well for the globalization topic. It captured the homogenizing effect of the highway. It could be anywhere in the world, right? Here's a link to my vintage movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCHtjRZo03c

This week teaching goes digital too. Here is my link to an instructional video on using the historic egg tempera medium: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngzmdl112w0

Human Dignity, Social Justice, and Globalization

What global issues are important to me? Human dignity is at the top of my list. Respect, grace, and compassion are qualities that can create an environment where human dignity prevails. Of course, this is an utopian wish. The reality is that individuals are powerless when in conflict with individuals who have acquired power in some collective capacity. There are many artists and organizations that have formed to try to counterbalance the negative aspects that have arisen from these circumstances. I explore these in an essay and have critiqued one outcome of this dysfunction in a poster. You can check this out on my website:

http://susanstriepe.weebly.com/posters.html

Sir Ken Robinson in Nashville!

Today Sir Ken Robinson was in Nashville and I was lucky enough to get to hear him talk. He is amazingly witty. I recorded the lecture, but unfortunately anyone who listens to it will have to contend with my obnoxious laughter. I used my iphone microphone app. and I am trying to work out how to get it off my phone and into my itunes. I tried to share it, but it it said the file was too big. I am working on solutions and hope to post it to my podcast site. As soon as I have it, I'll post a link to the my site. Here's a pic. of me & Sir Ken.