Day 315 — Elvis Altar

FearlessVK and I met up today at the Brooks to check out the Pissarro exhibit, which we made our way through diligently and dutifully, paying homage and respect to the father of Impressionism and his dappled landscapes. Fearless isn't the biggest fan of Impressionism, largely because of the ubiquity of its style throughout bland hotel rooms and flowery foyers all over the world. I'm a little more warm toward the style — even if I'm not crazy about landscapes — but just because I find it amazing that people can stand in front of a canvas, clumping and glooping oils of different colors together to make something that, if you stand back a bit, looks fairly true to life.

Who was it who said "modern art is all about the paint"? I think the same could be said for Impressionism, in a way.

Anyway, I particularly liked "Effect of Snow," painted in the city streets of Pontoise, as well as "Cote des Jalais," depicting the varied planes of the Pontoise countryside. The former is one of the rare city scenes in the collection, so that was a nice treat, and the latter is a striking landscape that really grabs hold of you when you see it in person. Not so much on a computer screen, though.

Sigh. I wish I could talk about art in a way that sounded half-educated.

The disembodied voice in my ear told me all sorts of neat things about some of the paintings. Like, look in the top left corner of this one at an angle and you can see that Pissarro had originally painted a large tree in the foreground, but edited it out, though you can still make out the brush strokes of the branches. Or, X-Ray technology tells us that this painting was at one time a horizontal barn scene, not this vertical tree-porn landscape that it is now.

Neat. I'd say it was worth the $12 admission. Those paintings are extremely old and still so beautiful. They glisten, in some ways mimicking dew on all those lefty Pissarro trees. It's amazing.

After the Pissarro exhibition, we turned in our headsets and headed back downstairs to look at the Dia de los Muertos altars made by kids at some local schools (a somewhat controversial concept). I was blown away by a few of them, particularly the Elvis one, done by Bolton High art students.

We never did anything that cool in ANY of my art classes — elementary, junior high, high or college. These kids draped that alter in sexy magenta fabric, cast and painted skulls, and sculpted a peanut butter and banana sandwich. And Krispy Kreme doughnuts! And made a tiny Zippin Pippin! We decided we'd have to make our own Day of the Dead altars next year. I'm thinking mine might be for HST, RIP. It's gonna be all cigarettes and typewriters. And lots of mescaline.

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