A Visit to the Museum

      Hi everyone. Happy Friday. I hope everyone's temperatures are warming up, and unlike me, every one is feeling great. I came down with a major head cold this past week that has wiped me out. I'm grateful it is just a  cold and nothing more serious, and I'm already on my way to feeling better. 👍  If I haven’t commented on your blog, that’s why  

      Last week (as some of you may have already read earlier this week), I visited Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). Some friends and I drove down to go see the Georgia O'Keeffe and Henry Moore exhibit. 

     The tickets for this exhibit were timed and we arrived  90 minutes early, which was OK since we could visit a few other parts of the museum.  I think everyone had gone to see the O'Keeffe and Moore exhibit (which was a mob scene), so the rest of the museum was  wonderfully empty. 😏 One area I wanted to visit the Egyptian area, which isn't large, but had lots of faces. Here's a few  items I took photos of.

      I'll be these linking up to Gillena's Friday Lunch Break and also to Nicole's Friday Face Off.

     Much of the MFA's collection comes from Dr. George A. Reisner's Egyptian archaeological digs (1905-1942). Reisner worked on behalf of both Harvard and the museum. Some items were gifts from other sources. According to the MFA website, they have an agreement with the Egyptian government to have these finds on display.  

      Some of these items came from around the year 2000 BCE. I never think of the Ancient Egyptian Period lasting that long, but it went on for  a little over 3,000 years.  Add the 2,000 plus years since we went from BCE to CE, and that makes some items 4-5,000 years old. Holy cow. Compare that to our modern world and boy it was a long long time ago.

This next statue was very large, and you can see how it was reassembled.

Below, the inside of a painted wooden coffin. Years ago when I visited I was interested in the eyes on the bottom. I was told that they were so the dead could see outside of their coffin.

      That's all for me today. Hopefully since I wasn't feeling perfect this post makes sense when you read it. 👍And have a super start to your weekend. 

T Stands for Off to the Museum

     Hi everyone. Happy new week to all of you. Seems like so many people are in the cold right now. I hope if you are you're staying warm and toasty. My woodstove has been getting quite the workout this month since this is our second round of arctic weather.

      Since it's Monday I am joining Bleubeard and Elizabeth  for this week's T day.

   Last week I went to the big city on Thursday. I headed out early because some friends and I were going to the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston. It's the last few weeks of a Georgia O'Keeffe and Henry Moore exhibit which was our main point of the trip.  

     We managed to go late enough to beat much of the morning rush but were early enough that we still had to wait for the museum to open at 10. But because the tickets were timed and we arrived early, we were able to see a few other permanent parts of the museum. More about that another time.

  If you don't know about Georgia O'Keeffe, she was an American painter (1887-1986). She particularly liked to paint nature, and she became famous for her southwestern paintings and  close ups of flowers like this one that was on display at the MFA.  You'll have to excuse my photos because it was VERY crowded at the exhibit, and it was hard to get straight for a good photo. In fact, I didn't get a lot of photos because of that.

And this one is a close up of a white rose.

     O'Keeffe painted many many flowers similar to the 2 I've shown, but there weren't many of her flower paintings on display in this exhibit. This show had  more of an eclectic group of pieces. There were some I have never seen before, including these southwestern architecture ones.

The flat topped mountain in these next 2 paintings is called Pedernal. I've been lucky to travel to this part of New Mexico several times, and  Pedernal is a very distinct feature in the landscape.

After seeing these Georgia O'Keefe paintings I really want to go back to New Mexico. 😏

 

     The other artist in this exhibit was Henry Moore. I knew nothing about him, but now I know a bit. He was  a British Artist and Sculptor who lived at the same time as Georgia O'Keeffe (1898-1986).  Like O'Keeffe, one thing he was interested in was bones.This display had a few of his sculptures and some of his paper art work.  I liked his sculptures shown in this exhibit, but with the crowd, it was really hard to appreciate them. Here's a couple of them.

If you're interested, you can read more about Georgia O'Keeffe here: Georgia O'Keeffe Museum  and Henry Moore here: Henry Moore . 

     After the exhibit, we had lunch in the museum. I had a Diet Coke with my sandwich, and this is my ticket to T this week. You can also see my friend's Diet Coke too in this photo.

  

     That's all for me this T day. Hope yours is a super and have a great week ahead too.

Nature's Best

Hope everyone is having a nice weekend. I enjoyed a productive Saturday and had lots of art time. One thing I made was a tag to share over at Tag Tuesday and Wendy's mushroom challenge.

I had previously mentioned how yesterday I took a personal day off from work and went to Boston with a couple of friends. We went to the Museum of Fine Arts (known as the MFA) to see a photography exhibit featuring Ansel Adams, people who inspired him and some art inspired by him. It was a fun day out, and a very nice change of pace from work and winter.

For those of you who might not be familiar with Ansel Adams, he was a 20th century American photographer (1902-1984). He is known for his black and white nature photographs. He  liked shooting photos of the west , and his photographs of Yosemite National Park in California are especially famous. 

 One thing I learned at this exhibit was that sometimes Adams modified his negatives to remove signs of people, like removing roads that run through a scene. I'm not sure how he did it since he lived before digital photography.

It was definitely difficult for me to photograph some of these photos between  the exhibit lighting and the reflections on the glass. Plus this exhibit was quite crowded so you couldn't always get a photo standing directly in front of the image.

But there was one photo I snapped that had a lot of reflection in it that I actually like.

This is a great photo in its original form. In the photo the front mountain is dark and and in that darkness is reflected  people in the exhibit space. But see those 3 ladies in the front? That's me holding up my phone to take the picture (in the center) and my 2 friends, one to the left and one to the right of me studying the photo.

I have more to show you another day. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Happy Friday

Its Friday! Hurrah!

Its been a long week, maybe because I've had a HUGE to do list before I finish up today. I shouldn't jinx myself,  but I still have several things I need to do before I leave work today.

Seeing I shouldn't be back to work on Monday. Wrapping up grading and organizing and all that.

But spring is really here. :)

Love it.

 So are tulips. I took these 2 photos in a landscaped parking lot.

 And here's a spread I made in my drawing journal this week.

OK, not just for drawing.

And this is the art side of the spread for next week on my calendar journal.

I'm using a couple of the postcards I bought at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in both pieces of art. The postcards  in both  pieces of my art is art I saw in the Matisse exhibit.

When I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

I also saw the traveling Botticelli exhibit which will only be shown at 2 museums in the US. Before it came to Boston, the exhibit was in Virginia at the  Muscarelle Museum of Art. Also exhibited with the Botticelli's was some work of art from Fra Lippo Lippi.

This was one of my favorites. The front is amazing,

but the back stopped my breath even more so. I didn't expect this sketch on the back.

 The exhibit was crowded and it was sometimes hard to take photos straight on.

Especially the Venus. The crowds in front of this piece never emptied out.

I can say many good things about this exhibit. I think if I say it was wonderful you get what I mean.

Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend.

Just About a New Month

Just about a new month. I can't believe April has come and gone in such a blink of the eye.

I made this week's calendar journal page using a postcard I picked up at the Museum of Fine Arts last week and some words from a travel brochure that came in the mail.

Vacation is over and its back to work in the morning. But this is my last week as I have surgery  coming up on the 9th.

Kind of weird to think about school ending so early for me. Usually at this time I still have 6-7 weeks left of the year.

I feel like I spent most of my vacation doing chores. But I'm glad to get so many of the spring projects finished. 

But I was happy to make it to the Matisse exhibit at the MFA art museum in Boston. Here's a few views from this exhibit.

The theme if the exhibit was to show some of the artifacts Matisse included in his work, and then show the art that included that piece.

For example, this is a screen that Matisse had in his studio.

I thought the carpet was so well painted I took a close up.

And these chocolate pots.

More of his painting up close.  I found that fascinating.

I love how his paint work wasn't perfect yet he still painted these fantastic pieces.

Full of color. 

 He had some African figures that he also used.

 And this statue.

It was an interesting exhibit because you showed so much about his inspirations.

Every time I look at this piece I see more than before. They did have some of his vases on display, but I didn't photograph any. 

They also had pieces from his entire career. Including the cut outs he made at the end of his life when painting was too difficult.

 The close up details were really fascinating to me again.

And this is only a little bit of the exhibit. If your interested I'll show you some more another day.

Plus there's still the Botticelli's and one of my favorite childhood authors. 

And now its May (or just about) with some new adventures.

Hope yours will be a good one.