Sometimes when traveling, you follow the leader. Just this week when the kids and I went to Chicago, my mother led us around the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
I loved the exhibit about infrastructure and public works at this free and open to the public museum, http://www.mocp.org, right off Michigan Avenue.
“How cool is this place?” I asked.
“Not so much,” they answered. One of my kids wanted to shop. Another wanted to swim at the hotel pool. And this one, just wanted out.
The rain is getting to me. I am going to walk the 45 blocks to work today.
Due to some burst pipe at my office building, my noontime yoga and Pilates classes have been cancelled for the last two weeks. I have discovered just how much I need those classes to combat my stress.
Just yesterday, I was walking the girls to school and heading for the subway. After a particularly stressful morning of finishing science projects before 8 am, I was thinking Wouldn’t it be great if I smoked? I could just blow smoke and watch the cars drive by?
And as I thought that, who should I see walking towards me, but my yoga teacher, Shane? Seeing her was a sign to make the healthy choices in handling life’s stresses.
We chatted a few minutes about when our classes will resume. Shane hoped by tomorrow. It’s always funny to bump into someone out of context. And as I’ve said before, my exercise teachers are the most gorgeous and nicest people you will ever meet.
I don’t know why I have been more worried lately — my husband’s Parkinson’s disease, his extended family’s financial situations, paying for the kids’ camps and tuition bills — I don’t know, just worried.
And so here we stand, mid-week through a forecast of rain and gloom every day. If it’s only drizzling, I can walk and think today.
I must remember my 7 Rules. https://mbcoudal.wordpress.com/about/ And the things that always make me happy: travel, parties, museums, art, hanging out with friends, working out, and getting a good night’s sleep. And so I will commit to these things. I’ll start with a walk in the rain.
The Art Students League http://www.theartstudentsleague.org/ smells of oil paint.
The building is an absolute gem on 57th Street.
I have taken two Saturday classes there over the years. They’ve been taught by these wonderful women of quite an advanced age, (one of whom Hilda Terry is no longer with us.) Last month’s watercolor class was taught by Dale Meyers who is still creating, teaching, thinking, and sharing. The other students’ work can be amazingly technically proficient or incredibly primitive (mine falls into the latter category).
It is exceedingly relaxing to be in a room where everyone is painting. My watercolors tend to be an embrace of negative space with a loose and splattered messy style. It’s hard to summarize. But fun to make.
I’m taking a Literature of Art Class with Ephraim Rubenstein on Thursday nights – he is so passionate, smart, provocative about the history of art. On Thursday we discussed the difference between Nude and Naked. We had read (or in my case, skimmed) Kenneth Clark’s “The Nude.” The Greeks, Rubenstein said, had a love of nakedness. Their gods were big and beautiful, not like a formless Yahweh.
We talked about how beauty in art gives one a shiver. That innately and physically we respond to art. We talked about philosophy — how when you think “bed” you have an ideal of “bed-ness” in mind, according to Artistotle. Is that “bedness” more ideal than the artist’s interpretation or an actual bed itself?
We discussed idealism. How, as Americans, we have a love/hate relationship with idealism. Is the nude who comes to model for art class a disappointment? Is he or she any less perfect or ideal than the Victoria Secret airbrushed model?
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When I had inquired with the Eastern European woman security guard at the art school on Thursday whether class was cancelled due to snow. She told me that the school’s motto is Nulla Dies Sine Linea or “No Day Without a Line.” “We are always open.”
The classes at the Art Students League are so cheap and so good. My daughers took a kids’ class with Martha Bloom. They just had a show in the gallery and the hallway outside of the cafeteria.
Yes, there’s a sweet, funky, good cafeteria and a tiny art shop in case you need supplies. The Art Students League has it all. Everyday.
I was at the MoMA for the second time in a couple of weeks this afternoon. The Tim Burton exhibit is amazing and perhaps, addictive. The guy is insane. But you know, in a good way. And in an exceedingly productive way. I love the comic gothic – if that’s what you call it. I also love the preoccupation with the mother and the bloody babies and the monsters and the aliens. And by the way, what does he have against grown ups, holidays, realism?
I love the sculpture of a doll-house sized white house decorated with big bulb Christmas lights and peeking in the window, you see a little person bathed in red (is that blood?) and then you also see long black pant legs sticking out of a doorway. Oh my God! It’s funny and scary and weird!
There are lots of moving images to take in too. A little homage video to Vincent Price narrated by Vincent Price. The whole thing – Priceless!
I am so impressed that the Museum of Modern Art is a place that showcases the work of a living artist. And an artist, like Burton, who crosses over so many mediums.
I just love Burton’s drawings. I love the way he draws a little pool of shadow under a crazy eyeball popping cactus. It is so dream-like and so real. Who hasn’t dreamed of cacti with eyeballs?
MoMA is amazing, totally worth the gulp, $20 admission fee. For a break after the Burton exhibit, plunk yourself down in front of Monet’s lillies. I dare you not to be energized, exhuasted, transformed after taking in these two exhibits.
100 Days of Poems and Pics 