Today I am recovering from my visit yesterday with a friend to the MFA (Museum of Fine Arts) in Boston, MA. The main focus of the visit for me was to see the Chihuly glass exhibit. I am including a few photographs from the exhibit. You are allowed to make photos as long as you don't use a flash. It took me a bit to realize that I needed to switch to manual settings and then had to play with the Fstop to get a few semi good photographs. The glass exhibit was dark with only spot lighting on the glass. Not the best conditions for photography, a tripod and no people would have been better. Still I hope the photos will sort of give you a feel for the exhibit.
The Chihuly exhibit is arranged as rooms each with a theme, the first area the glass looked like flowers arraigned on the wall and on a platform. The next room was a long boat filled with glass objects. The written commentary said that he had gotten the idea from when he had been in Finland and had been throwing pieces into the river to see if they would break. Needless to say once thrown they had to be collected and that was done by young men in boats.
In the room above the glass was arranged on the ceiling with the light shining down through the pieces. It looked like an upside down view of a reef that contained lots of multicolored sea life. I lucked out and was able to photograph a fairly empty room so you can see the patterns of light on the wall.
The photo above is of the 4th or 5th exhibit room (right now I don't recall exactly which). In this case the room contains these shelves with Native American woven and his blown glass baskets. There was also a long table set with blown glass baskets. Against the rear wall was a large display of Native American woven blankets. Needless to say the room was amazing and this one photo doesn't really give you the idea of how beautiful it was.
This is a close up photograph of one of the chandeliers in the Chandelier room. There were 5 or 6 of these structures made in various colors. They all hang from the ceiling, but aren't strictly speaking chandeliers since the lighting isn't from within the structure but is provided by spot lights. The glass is blown into various long organic tube shapes and then attached separately to a supporting structure.
The above photograph is of the last room in the exhibit. The purple glass tubes are attached to the logs, obviously the spot lighting is part of the effect. Very lovely, and I am not sure the photograph does it justice.
After going through this exhibit we had some lunch and chat to recover our energy and then went on to visit other areas of the museum. We went through several special exhibits, one with photographs from Cuba, another of Fantasy Prints, Dutch Drawings (I enjoyed that one) and on into the European Art Wing. We visited a couple of Turner's, several Monet's and Van Gogh's, and strolled though several other galleries containing paintings by painters I recognized.
I don't even try to photograph paintings or drawings or photographs on display so don't have any images from those Galleries. I will photograph other artifacts if they have designs or patterns that interest me.
The photograph below is of a beaded figure that was part of a special exhibit of Dress and Textile patterns created in Africa. This guy is made up of seed beads strung together, he was about 14 inches tall.
The exhibit also contained examples of textiles dyed in several African regions and other examples of beadwork. The beadwork was amazing.
The last image for today is of a jar to be found on the lowest floor of the new American Wing. It is an example of pottery created by Southwest tribes. I am always on the lookout for patterns that I can use in my own art and the patterns on this jar interested me, simple but beautifully drawn.
That is it for today. I need to go work on some art so I have something to show in my next blog update. Per usual comments are always welcome. But sure to check out the link to the MFA to read more about the exhibits I viewed.
No comments:
Post a Comment