The Metropolitan Museum of Art

NYC Boroughs Art

Breakfast Still Life

 I started this piece by placing three eggs in a small bowl where sunlight could hit it. It was early morning when I started so I took advantage of the sunlight. Afterwards, I arranged complimentary items beside the eggs which I used to make my eggs-in-a-bowl more believable. I incorporated a loaf of Italian bread, a bottle of orange juice and a small glass filled with it, and a 'lucky bamboo' plant I have at home. Some of the items that I normally see around breakfast time. I intentionally left out the brand of orange juice assuring I don't patronize any particular brand, (No matter how much I use it.) 

I used titanium white and mars and ivory blacks to vary the closer warmth and the distant coolness of the shapes. I varied the intensity of the grays to reflect optical hue changes. The orange bottle cap and the green bamboo for example, are much grayer than the neutral shades of the see through surfaces, the bowl, and the bread.

I continued to the second phase of my piece which involved collage. Initially, I wanted to vary between the polish of the surfaces, but circumstances made me stick to matte print. I cut paper accordingly and arranged it around the previously painted items to fill the negative spaces and create an eclectic table cloth. 

I enjoyed painting and designing this piece mainly because I was able to craft and explore two of my favorite manifestations.

September 11 @ MoMA PS1

 This was one of my favorite pieces because it displays the bright colors of our precocious nation.

Now Showing @ Moma PS1 through January 9th, 2012

 

George Segal - American artist - 1924-2000 

'Woman on a park Bench' 1998 (bronze w/ white patina & metal bench)

         

In the room seen above one could reminisce about September 11th 2011, as we see various pieces incorporated into a brightly-lit room. There is a woman seated carelessly on a bench minding her own business. She holds dearly to her purse and seems as if she were about to smile, but not quite. There is material scattered along the center of the floor which resembles ashes done by Roger Hiorns a British artist born in 1978. It is an 'atomized passenger aircraft engine' and he left his work Untitled. In addition, the theme from Patriot (a solo by Mark O'Connor) can be heard playing in the background to add to the mood. The audio is 6:40 minutes long and it was incorporated by John Williams an American artist born in 1932.

 Filmmaker Jem Cohen's addition to the show is in the form of a 6:00 minute video with sound & in black and white. Little Flags (1991-2000) is an excerpt of a film made by Cohen who was recording a parade that was lead along Broadway to celebrate the end of the Golf War. In the film we can observe the crowd maneuvering around lower Manhattan in a sward of paper. Looking at the picture above (from the film) we can see the similarities between the film and the city on that September 11, 2001 morning.


Another piece (not shown) is a canopy of black bunting which welcomes the visitors to the 2nd floor of the museum. It was created in 2001 by Fiona Banner an English artist born in 1966 by using vinyl and rope. Black Bunting (2008) can be interpreted as a touch of celebration to this one-decade-after tribute without robbing from the mourning sensation implied by the color black.

Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity

Lee Ufan is a Korean artist-philosopher whose work was on exhibition for the first time in the United States at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum. This man has made it his business to bring nature into non-traditional spaces. He uses his philosophical background to invoke tranquility and gentleness into normally thought of as rough materials. He is fond of using stones beside steel (as seen below) and hard edges beside soft textures like cotton and fabric. Another of his great techniques involve using his brush while full of paint and tapping the canvas until the medium runs out. It creates a very interesting pattern which can be a metaphor for how uncertain we are about life itself and really not knowing where it might lead us. The bottom-most picture shows large brush strokes featuring a very difficult to make value scale which the artist achieves by layering. These same squares can be appreciated on a wall in a symmetric room at the museum in which the artist intentionally chooses to place the shapes on the sides of the wall instead of the center. Honoring nature's asymmetry in a mathematically square room.

Relatum (formerly Phenomena & Perception B) 1968/2011, steel, glass & stone

Relatum - residence, 1988. steel & stones

de kooning: A Retrospective at MoMA

Now Showing at MoMA de Kooning: A Retrospective September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012

De Kooning: A Retrospective is an exhibition at MoMA which shows some of the works of Willem de Kooning a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist. It presents a sort of chronological example of the artist's growth in a span of about 70 years. In exhibition you will find de Kooning's famous Women series making present the familiarity de Kooning had with the female body and its movements. There are also paintings like Seated Woman C. 1940 and his well known Pink Angels. c. 1945 (both seen below). I personally liked Woman With Bicycle (also below) for the careless happiness possessed by the woman which he emphasizes by painting twice and its ambiguity when it comes to the bike. The "bike's" simple shapes left many of the visitors I encountered at the museum wondering how to spot it. This ambiguity is fluent in many of de Kooning's paintings.

Woman and Bicycle, 1952–53. Oil on canvas, (194.3 × 124.5 cm)

Seated Woman, c. 1940. Oil and charcoal on masonite 54 1/16 x 36" (137.3 x 91.4 cm)

Pink Angels c. 1945 Oil and charcoal on canvas
52 x 40" (132.1 x 101.6 cm)

Color Wheel

"The color wheel palette"