The weekend afloat

This past weekend took on very much of an aquatic theme. On Friday, I visited the Met to see the Turner exhibit (and an exhibit of Pre Colombian feather work). Both exhibits were worth seeing, both populated by traditional, in the first case and antiquarian in the second that exhibited strong contemporary affiliations.

Peace—Burial at Sea, exhibited 1842

I had only just seen isolated paintings of Turner prior to this retrospective. I think most of what I have been exposed to have been the watercolors. I was struck by the brutality of the later paintings. The handling of the paint was far more aggressive than I'd anticipated. Interesting to me was that the gallery layout was exactly as it was for the previous Courbet exhibit, and there was an analogous arc of development in the work of the two artists from the academic to the iconoclastic. It's pretty amazing how Turner presaged both impressionism and expressionism, and much of the later, and unfinished work exhibited the scrawling graffito of Twombly.

One of the Swimming Cities vessels.

The next day marked the arrival in Beacon of the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, the Hudson River flotilla instigated by the artist SWOON. I've got a bunch of links, images, etc. of that project at maykr. The crew had been on the water for a week already, and spent two nights in Beacon, taking up residence in and around Spire Studios. It was cool to see the tents nestled around the Habitats.

Live/work at the habitats..

The rectilinear forms of the sails in Turner's pieces, particularly those in silhouette in the Burial at Sea, above infiltrated the drawings I was doing over the weekend.


The light filtering into my habitat.