Wooden birds

Last week, on the spur of the moment, Jeannine and I -- along with our friends Dan and Jess Berger -- took a trip down to the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT. Jeannine and I had been to this museum once before, to see a show of M. C. Escher's work, but Dan and Jess had not been to it... nor had they eaten at Arugula in West Hartford (our dinner destination after checking out the museum). There were a couple of new exhibits, one featuring a realist painter named Sarah Lamb and another titled "One Man’s Passion: The Art of Carved Birds" which included over sixty objects from the collection of J. Kemler “Kem” Appell, one of the leading collectors of miniature decorative bird carvings.


I expected to be more interested in the former, and the paintings were very nice (especially the still life with olives), but I was blown away by the exhibit of bird carvings. 

The sculpting -- and painting -- talent displayed in these pieces was just astonishing. Not only were the birds accurately rendered in form and color, but the bits of environment in which they were displayed as well. 

And although many of the carved birds appeared to be perched on real branches, those perches were actually carved and painted to APPEAR to be real branches.

But the thing that really impressed me the most was this display.

When I first saw it, I thought it was interesting that the sculptor had found some common objects on which to pose the carved birds. However, when I looked closer and read the display card, I was flabbergasted to find out that ALL of these objects were carved and painted to look like the real things. And they surely did! Check out this detail from the above photo to see what I mean:

After wandering around the museum for a while more, we headed off to Arugula, the Mediterranean restaurant in West Hartford, where Jeannine once again got one of their amazing flatbread "pizzas", this time featuring asparagus and sun-dried tomatoes. 

And yes, it was as yummy as it looked! -- PL

Serendipity 3

A few weeks ago, Jeannine and I took a drive up to White River Junction, Vermont to visit the Center for Cartoon Studies (http://www.cartoonstudies.org/). James Sturm, author of several excellent graphic novels (including "Market Day" and "Satchel Page: Striking Out Jim Crow") created this school for comic book creators a few years ago and had invited us to come up and get a closer look at it.

It's quite an amazing place. Modest in size but bursting with ambition, it's the kind of school which I would have loved to attend in my younger days. We toured the main classroom building, which has a great basement studio filled with all the devices necessary to turn the art created by the students into actual printed books. And in another building, CCS has a wonderful reference library overflowing with just about every graphic novel and comics collection you could imagine.

But we started our tour with a short meeting in James' studio, and that's where the real subject of this blog entry begins. During our talk, James pulled out a large hardcover book featuring the work of a cartoonist I'd never heard of before, Denys Wortman, who'd produced many single-panel cartoons in the latter part of the first half of the twentieth century, mostly featuring urban settings and characters. The drawings were quite lovely, with a lot of painterly effects in the ink and crayon (Wortman did a lot of these drawings on coquille board). James also mentioned in passing that there was a connection between Wortman and the famous painter Thomas Hart Benton.

Fast-forward to the following week. Jeannine and I took a trip that I've been wanting to take for a while, since I'd found out that the New Britain Museum of American Art (in New Britain, CT -- website at http://www.nbmaa.org/), to which neither of us had ever been before, was having an extensive show of M.C.Escher prints and drawings.

So we drove down there, and decided to check out the entire museum (which didn't take too long -- it's not that big). I was surprised to see that one of the first galleries contained an exhibit of pulp magazine cover art, including a Virgil Finlay and a J. Allen St. John, among others. (I think this show is up through October of 2010.) We wandered around the galleries, admiring some wonderful landscapes by painters of the Hudson River School.

Then Jeannine stopped and nudged me. "I can't believe it!" she said. I looked at what she was looking at -- a painted portrait of Thomas Hart Benton by Denys Wortman!



And around the corner, in what you might call the museum's "Thomas Hart Benton Room", was a painted portrait of Denys Wortman by Thomas Hart Benton!



I mean, I'd never heard of this guy before we visited the Center for Cartoon Studies a few days earlier… and now this…!

Definitely one for the book of odd coincidences.

If you want to find out more about Denys Wortman, here's a nice site created by his son:

http://www.dwortman.com/about_denys.htm

By the way, the Escher show was great, and anyone who admires Escher's work should go to see it. I'd never seen an original Escher print, just reproductions in books and on posters -- I think I had at least one in college -- and they were beautiful. There were also some of the original wood blocks he used to do the woodcuts -- or were they wood engravings? One thing I'd never seen anywhere before was the assortment of preliminary sketches in pencil which Escher used to work out his intricate, mathematically complex images. And there were two very cool three-dimensional pieces, one carved from wood and the other made of sheet tin, which were based on some of Escher's tesselated images. -- PL