Art report / Denmark 1

When I visit a big-time museum I always like to look for fiber.  The fiber art you find in such venues hardly ever looks like any fiber art you would see at a dedicated fiber show in the U.S.; more inscrutable, often more casual in construction.  Many times you'll find fiber constructions made by artists whose major reputations are in other mediums.

Here's a major work from the Statens Museum for Kunst (the Danish National Gallery) in Copenhagen, by Yvette Brackman, a Danish-American sculptor.  It's a series of five cloaks or garments, made in 2014, titled The Troublemaker, Father America, The Chorus, The Good Mothers & Hitler-Stalin.  Inexplicably I have photos for only four of the five, and don't know which is which.

As you can see from the details, the construction is indeed on the casual side.  The pink and green one is drooping, without any interior structure to hold the layers flat.  The blue and white one looks like it was folded into a box for storage or shipping, and put directly on the wall without a touch of pressing.  The red and black one appears to have its smaller shapes fused on, with fraying edges.

To my eye, the way these pieces are slapped together is so distracting that I have a hard time focusing on the meaning.  When I do, I'm still mystified. 

I recognize the fragmented shapes on the red and black one as bits of swastikas and sickles (that must be the Hitler-Stalin cloak) and I suppose the meaning is that totalitarian regimes, whether left or right, are all the same.  I suppose the yellow cloak with the strange maroon joined sleeves is The Good Mother -- are her arms permanently joined to cradle her child or because she's locked in a straitjacket?  I get no clues from the other pieces, and I feel as though each cloak might be stronger displayed by itself instead of in with the others. 

I hate to not like fiber work when I see it in a mainstream museum venue, but this batch left me cold.

Fixing the curvy quilt

I wrote several weeks ago about a quilt that I sold after it had been hanging in a medical office for several months.  I was unhappy to see that it had warped away from the wall, as much as four inches out.  Clearly this was something that needed to be fixed before it went off to its new owners.



Thanks to all my blog readers who made suggestions!

After much thought, I decided to sew three additional sleeves horizontally across the quilt, with slats that extend practically to the edge.  A trip to Home Depot introduced me to a new product that I had not been familiar with -- PVC plastic lattice.  I decided that would be better than wood because it's not acid.  It cut like butter with my little pull saw, but the cut ends, of course, were white, which would be jarringly visible in the sleeves.

I suppose I could have experimented with paint, but my default mechanism for fixing things always involves the sewing machine.  So I stitched one end of the sleeves shut, and made a little flap on the other end to tuck in and conceal the white slat.

The quilt reached its new home yesterday afternoon.  I hope it's happy there, and that its edges will hug the wall in perpetuity.

At the craft store

I was teaching a workshop on hand-stitching over the weekend and had to provide all the materials, so I went to the store to pick up a new supply of embroidery needles.  When I think that centuries ago, a woman might own only two needles in her lifetime, I feel a great culture shock.  I go through needles by the dozens; not that I lose them, but they mysteriously distribute themselves among my various sewing kits, pincushions, pin dishes, embroidery bags and so forth, and occasionally go to live with my friends and family.

I picked up a couple of packs of needles in the sewing department, along with some fabric, and then went toward the yarn/embroidery section to get a new bag of floss.  And to my surprise, found the same embroidery needles in a different color package, with a different logo -- and a considerably lower price.

That's right, in the sewing department, 12 needles for $2.49; in the embroidery department, 16 needles for $1.79!

In the immortal words of Smokey Robinson, you better shop around.

Found poetry 25

Art report / Russia 4

Some people who have heard about my disappointment at the Hermitage have wondered why we got stuck in that bad situation.  Here's more info, which you might keep in mind if you're planning a trip to Russia.

There are two kinds of tourist visas to Russia: a regular visa, which allows you to wander about as you wish, and a 72-hour-tourist visa, available for people who come on cruise ships.  The regular visa costs about $160, so tour operators don't want to buy it for a day stop.  The cruise ship visa comes with the requirement that people must take the official tour offered by the cruise ship, set up as part of the package when the ship arranges its docking.  So you get the tour provided by the official tourist people, visa price included.

Our guide was a former schoolteacher and had good English -- during a longish bus ride he entertained us by reciting poetry in both Russian and English -- and our own tour leader was able to negotiate a few minor changes in the itinerary (we didn't have to stop in the souvenir shop) but we were pretty much stuck with the official plan of two museums, one church inside, one church outside, lunch, and driving around and around St. Petersburg.  That didn't leave much time for any one attraction.

Our "church inside" was the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, built over the spot where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881.  The inside surfaces are entirely paved with elaborate mosaics; the outside features an array of colorful onion domes.  It was our favorite site of the entire tour and we could easily have spent a lot more time there.

In case you ever find yourself in Russia on a regular visa and get to visit the Hermitage on your own, be prepared for two different admission prices: one for Russian and Ukrainian citizens, and a much higher one for everybody else.  But at least you will have a chance to see some art!!  Give yourself at least one full day, maybe three!

Art report / Russia 3

I am a lover of cold weather, but on so many of my foreign travels I bring a heat wave with me.  We just about melted in Greece and Turkey in 2008; when we spent a month in Germany in 2010 it was so hot across Northern Europe that 11,000 people died in Moscow and many of us wanted to die in Berlin; when I went to Antarctica with a suitcase full of heavy-duty winter gear it was 52 degrees one afternoon.

The day before we left for the Baltic I checked weather.com to get the forecasts for every city on our route, and didn't find a single one with a high of more than 60 degrees.  Ha ha.  Perhaps once it got below 60 degrees; our jackets and scarves stayed in the suitcases and we wished for shorts.  It was 87 degrees in St. Petersburg, and that is not a city known for its air conditioning.  Fortunately the big palaces were built with plenty of insulation and stayed tolerably warm-but-not-to-die.  But it was kind of unpleasant in the restaurant and as we strolled through the streets and parks .

We were unimpressed by the time we spent standing on line, not just to get in (three separate lines at the Hermitage)  but to get your passport checked on the way off the ship and to get it checked again on the way back to the ship.

There were crowds everywhere.  Fortunately none of us had things to check in the cloakrooms.

In practically every room of the museums you would see a dour lady sitting on a chair in the corner.  Occasionally one would rise and shout at somebody who committed an infraction, but mostly they just sat there looking glum. 

As we waited on line to get back on the ship we noticed that there were two glum ladies sitting together; at least they got to wear semi-sharp uniforms and had somebody to talk to.

Found poetry 24

Art report / Russia 2

After they hustled us out of the Hermitage without letting us see very much art, we went to Catherine the Great's Palace, a 45-minute bus ride out of St. Petersburg.  It's a palace -- really big, full of gold trim and baroque trim on everything.  From arrival at the front door to actually entering a room with something notable to look at took one hour.  We waited on line to get in the building, then we waited to get little booties to put on our feet to protect the parquet floors,

then we waited on line in a stairwell for a while

to get into a big room where we staged up and waited for fifteen minutes

before heading on through the endless series of rooms along a corridor.

Each room was very similar to the next one: many of them had big tables set with fancy dinnerware.

Every room had a big porcelain stove (you're seeing only one-quarter of the stove: it served four different rooms).

Our guide was big on pointing out the details of the fabulous furniture, which frankly didn't do much for me.

Then we strolled through the gardens

past Catherine's hermitage, which literally means a little place where you can go and be alone, like a hermit.  You might say it was the start of the tiny house craze.

Art report / Russia 1

In almost three weeks of northern Europe, I was able to find surprisingly little art to report on.  We visited four elite museums but had what I would describe as a satisfying art experience in only two of them.  I'll tackle these in ascending order of satisfaction.

I've been disappointed in museums before (read about our bad day in Berlin here and my bad day in Paris here) but at least I always got to see some art.  That was not to be at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.  According to the National Geographic, the fourth greatest museum in the world, with the largest collection of paintings in the world, but according to Kathy, a dud. 

The Hermitage started off as a variety of state buildings, including the royal residence and a large administrative headquarters, so you can imagine that the decor was over the top.  Many, many, many fabulous parquet floors and grand reception rooms:

A life-size gold-and-jeweled peacock clock -- on the hour, he spreads his tail:

In a huge room crowded with tourists, two tiny Da Vinci paintings, which I could not get close to:

Da Vinci, Litta Madonna

Da Vinci, The Benois Madonna

Here, I finally got up close enough to look at some art without 27 people in front of me:

Michelangelo, The Crouching Boy

El Greco, The Apostles Peter and Paul

The greatest disappointment was the Rembrandt collection, the largest of any museum in the world with 15 paintings.  We got to briefly pause in front of two of them before being hustled along by the guide.

Rembrandt, Danaë

Rembrandt, Return of the Prodigal Son (detail below)

There are three million pieces of art in the Hermitage Collection.  I am not exaggerating:  those six paintings are the only ones I got to stand in front of long enough to take a photo.  What a thrill.

Found poetry 23

Surprise of the week

I went to the eye doctor on Monday, because I'm having trouble seeing the little numbers in the crossword puzzle boxes and low-contrast text on the computer (everybody who thinks small gray letters on white is a nifty style for your website or blog, YOU'RE WRONG!!). 

I thought maybe he would change my glasses prescription, or maybe even have a conversation about cataracts.  Yes, he talked about cataracts: the one in my left eye had gotten much worse in the six months since the last exam.  Probably could be taken out any time now. 

Fine, I said, what happens next?  You have to see the surgeon for a reality check.  Fine, I said, when can that happen?  He's working this afternoon, maybe he can see you right now!

And he could.  He sent me for more tests, laser mapping of the topography of my eye and that sort of thing.  He looked at the results, peered into my eye again, called in the first doctor for a second opinion.  The verdict: "I can fix your eye so you can see good, or I can fix your eye so you can see real good."

I ignored the grammar and said if it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon see real good.

Seems I had an area of blobby, bulgy, wrinkly stuff smack dab in the middle of my cornea, which he could "smooth down" in advance of the cataract operation.  Fine, I said, when can that happen?  If you have somebody to drive you home, I can do it right now!

So I called my husband, and by the time he arranged for somebody to pick him up and bring him to the doctor's office, I was all "smoothed" and ready to go home.  I guess the surgeon used a little dremel tool with a sanding disk and just ground away till the bumps and bulges were gone.  Slapped a "bandage contact lens" over the eyeball to keep the nerve ends wet and protected, and sent me away.  Two days of discomfort and blurry vision, which I have been medicating mainly with red wine, and now I feel almost as good as new.

This is the way to have surgery: no waiting, no apprehension, no second thoughts.  I don't notice any improvement in vision, but I expect a huge boost in six to eight weeks when the cataract comes out.

Life imitates art 9

For many years Ken and I have had the tradition of a "beer shot," a photo when we're sitting in a foreign place about to improve our day with a cold beverage.  We align the glasses or cans so the labels are visible, along with a bit of the background scenery, such as this picturesque little cafe in Copenhagen three weeks ago.

We've done so many of these on various continents that I was able to make a book for Ken's birthday a couple of years ago, called "A Shot of a Beer."  (I was almost as proud of the title as of the photos.)

So when I found this painting in the Hamburg Kunsthalle museum it was clearly a case of life imitating art.  Even though it took three and a half centuries.

Johann Georg Hinz, Still Life with Beer Glass and Bread Rolls, 1665

Found poetry 22