Even though this is embarrassing, I am sharing my painting here.
Last Friday I went to the Friday workshop as described below. The workshop was really fun and well-organized. After a brief overview in the auditorium, the participants are given a docent’s tour of some of the Asian pieces in the permanent collection of the Kimbell. Although I admire the work, I have to admit I have never paid much attention to the actual details of these scrolls and screens. The color on silk has remained so true for hundreds of years because of their use of pigments, something I actually knew a little about after my one-day workshop with John Marshal! The screens utilized gold leaf on paper, with painted pigments on top.
After the tour, we went to our tables to begin work. Each table had a small vase of flowers. Mine had an orchid spray. We were to use the paper provided to sketch our flowers. Then we placed a thin piece of silk paper over the sketch and painted with gouache paints. What fun! After all was done, out pieces could be mounted on a larger piece of handmade paper to form the “frame” around our creation.
Seasonal Change in Asian Painting
Friday, April 23
2–4 p.m.
Snow on blossoming branches or abundant displays of harvest fruits are among the most beloved evocations of seasonal transformation in Chinese and Japanese paintings. Gallery tours highlight examples in the Kimbell’s collection before participants begin a related studio art activity.
I’m looking forward to the workshops that will be presented to go with the exhibit below, especially so after seeing so many ruins recently.
Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea
August 29, 2010–January 2, 2011Rarely does an exhibition offer an entirely fresh way of viewing the art of a great civilization. Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea does exactly that. Over 90 works, many recently excavated and never before seen in the United States, offer exciting insights into the culture of the ancient Maya, focusing on the sea as a defining feature of the spiritual realm and the inspiration for powerful visual imagery.
The exhibition reflects the broad range of media used by Maya artists: massive carved stone monuments and delicate hieroglyphs, exquisite painted pottery vessels, charming sculpted human and animal figurines, and a lavish assortment of precious goods crafted from jade, gold, and turquoise. It is divided into four sections. The first, Water and Cosmos, explores water as the vital medium from which the world emerged, gods arose, and ancestors communicated. The objects in the second section, Creatures of the Fiery Pool, portray a wide array of fish, frogs, birds, and mythic beasts inhabiting the sea and conveying spiritual concepts. The section Navigating the Cosmos explores water as a source of material wealth and spiritual power. The final section of the exhibition, Birth to Rebirth addresses the cyclical motion of the cosmos as the Maya pictured it.
Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea was organized by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, and has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Because democracy demands wisdom. Additional support is provided by ECHO (Education through Cultural and Historical organizations), a program of the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.