Culture, Ahoy!

I got cultured™ this weekend. (so, now I'm yogurt, is that it?)

My folks came down to visit and we went to the San Diego Museum of Art. We had the good fortune to run into a Renoir [and related styles] exhibition, and each of us fell in love with several different paintings [oddly, often side-by-side] . My dad and I both fell for Renoir's The Letter, and we both loved a couple other portraits. Stupid me, not having a way to take notes at the time. One was Griselda, the other...Mrs. Clark-something.

There was a South Asian art display in one of the smaller upstairs galleries [Shiva, Destroyer of Time], and another much larger Asian art display that we did not see all of -- mostly statuary [Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, primarily] from Thailand, China [I think] and Cambodia, and some beautiful prints from Japan. One of the prints made Janis and myself share a laugh -- tamano-no-mae revealing herself and becoming a fox, which we looked at literally seconds after remarking on Yoshitaka Amano's illustrations in Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters.

Overall I had 2 or three favorites in every gallery we stepped into, which was over 15. I like portraiture and still lifes and my favorite artist is probably Jan Vermeer [Johannes Van der Meer], simply for the light [simply! she said, of course for the light!], but I adore Chinese and Japanese art.

One thing that was fascinating was a restored painting of David with the Head of Goliath. It's a very vibrant yet dark painting by Massimo Stanzione that appears to have been partially painted over at a later date to remove the head. The truly intriguing thing about the restored work was the photo series displaying the modified version, an x-ray where the head is visible, and other steps along the way to complete restoration. Very, very neat.