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Vacation day 3, Art Museum
Nov. 16th, 2005 07:33 pmToday was art museum day. It turns out that the day that county residents get free admission is Wednesday, so my timing was very good. There is still a small extra fee for the “Rembrandt and His Time: Masterworks from the Albertina, Vienna” exhibit.
There was some remarkable work going on in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The drawings in dark chalk are fascinating. I’ve done a bit of drawing in pencil and charcoal and I think you look at something that is related to something you can do differently than you do the unrelated things, even if the skill level is far beyond your own. It’s similar to the way I listen to a flutist differently than a violinist, and watching guitarists got a lot more interesting when I started playing guitar.
It’s fascinating for an American to see drawings of familiar-sounding cities in the Netherlands made in the seventeenth century. Obviously, things have changed a lot in the intervening centuries, but if someone drew what’s now Milwaukee back in 1650, there would be nothing recognizably Milwaukee about it. The ruins of a castle, drawn in 1650, mean that the castle was built and then ruined a long, long time ago. I slip easily into thinking in geologic time, where a kilometer of ice covering Wisconsin during the last ice age qualifies as recent history, but this time scale is less familiar to me. I kept reminding myself that it’s all from the half-century or so prior to J.S. Bach’s birth.
They were giving away postcards with a photo of the museum’s new building on it. I’m sending it to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ohiblather for her postcard collection.
Also today, temperatures around -5°C and the first noticeable snow of the season. Not enough to accumulate significantly on the ground, but lots of white stuff blowing in the air.
There was some remarkable work going on in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The drawings in dark chalk are fascinating. I’ve done a bit of drawing in pencil and charcoal and I think you look at something that is related to something you can do differently than you do the unrelated things, even if the skill level is far beyond your own. It’s similar to the way I listen to a flutist differently than a violinist, and watching guitarists got a lot more interesting when I started playing guitar.
It’s fascinating for an American to see drawings of familiar-sounding cities in the Netherlands made in the seventeenth century. Obviously, things have changed a lot in the intervening centuries, but if someone drew what’s now Milwaukee back in 1650, there would be nothing recognizably Milwaukee about it. The ruins of a castle, drawn in 1650, mean that the castle was built and then ruined a long, long time ago. I slip easily into thinking in geologic time, where a kilometer of ice covering Wisconsin during the last ice age qualifies as recent history, but this time scale is less familiar to me. I kept reminding myself that it’s all from the half-century or so prior to J.S. Bach’s birth.
They were giving away postcards with a photo of the museum’s new building on it. I’m sending it to
ohiblather for her postcard collection.Also today, temperatures around -5°C and the first noticeable snow of the season. Not enough to accumulate significantly on the ground, but lots of white stuff blowing in the air.
