Trip to the Museum
This past weekend, my wife and I visited the North Carolina Museum of Art in
Raleigh. For Christmas this year, we were gifted some money from our
grandparents and so we decided to become members of our local art museum. The
North Carolina Museum of art is, I believe, the largest art museum in this area
of North Carolina, containing a surprising amount of wonderful Renaissance
work, some Romantic and Impressionist pieces, and a robust number of Modern artworks as well. By becoming members of the NCMA, we will be able to attend all of the special
exhibits put on by the museum, like the exhibit we visited this weekend, as
well as the summer movies on the lawn that are projected onto a large 50-60 ft.
screen (looking forward to that)!
This
particular special presentation was and a double feature and was titled,
respectively: “The Worlds of M. C. Escher: Nature, Science, and Imagination + Leonardo
da Vinci’s Codex Leicester and the Creative Mind.” We began our visit with the
latter, seeing selected pages from Da Vinci’s Codex: a treatise on his
observations and speculations about water. He accompanied each page with
diagrams to illustrate his ideas.
Leonardo
da Vinci, Codex Leicester (Sheet 1A, folio 1r) (detail),
1508–10, ink on paper, 11 2⁄3 x 8 1⁄2 in.,
Courtesy of Bill Gates, © 1994 bgC3
As you can see in the picture above, in the text he is using his distinctive writing style: Italian but composed in mirror image. Some
of the pages that we viewed contained observations on how water flows in straight versus
bending rivers, diagrams for mechanical devices for the transportation of
water, dams and more.
While it was amazing to see in person these 16th
century artifacts, the lighting was very low in the room, making it difficult
to see. Because it was the near the end of this exhibit run, as well as the end of the holiday season, the museum was packed with people. My wife and I were both a
little disappointed that the museum was not staggering the starting times for
these exhibits so that one group at a time could go in, but we enjoyed seeing
all the great art anyway!
I
love the works of the Dutch graphic artist, M.C. Escher (1898-1972), and so I
was very excited to see this exhibition – the largest presentation of his works
in North America, containing nearly all of his most famous pieces. I unfortunately cannot post images of any of his works here on the blog due to copyright
infringement; however, you can view them legally here at the M.C. Escher
Foundation Website.
Escher is master of perspective and tricks of the eye,
especially in his middle and later periods, in which he produced his most
famous works. Among such pieces, we were able to see: Hand with Reflecting Sphere, 1935, Metamorphose II, 1940, Drawing
Hands, 1948, Relativity, 1958, Ascending and Descending, 1960, among many
others.
After walking through and enjoying see all of the magnificent pieces in these two
displays, my wife and I decided to stroll along the walking paths in the park
maintained by the museum. Here are a few photographs that I took of the scenery
as we went along.
NCMA Park Pond. Photo by Charles Wolf. Charles Wolf Studio © 2016
Trees on a Hill. Photo by Charles Wolf. Charles Wolf Studio © 2016
Clouds Above the NCMA Park. Photo by Charles Wolf. Charles Wolf Studio © 2016
What
artist really inspires your imagination? Did you recently visit a museum as
well? Tell me about your experience in the comments below! Thank you, as always, for
reading,
—Charles
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