At the Met on Saturday

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this Saturday. This is a Egyptian temple in the museum. It's not the museum itself.

I'd like to show you some of the pieces that stood out to me. The first piece is a little medieval painting of the Last Judgment:

I didn't note the artist who painted this. What really caught my attention were the figures in hell:

If you can get past the subject matter, it's quite beautiful. (I'm particularly fond of the poor guy in the lower left being torn in half.) I'm interested in the way the figures are all floating in space. This is something I try to achieve in my art: an absence of gravity. I noticed that I would rather not be in either of the scenarios depicted in this piece. Heaven looks boring, and hell looks rather, well, hellish.

Another painting that jumped out at me was a El Greco. Here's a detail.

I adore the wavy lines that form the figures. The figures also have a floating quality that I am drawn to. The color is insane, of course. Look at the pink shawl. I've been drawing more men lately. I want to start building a new male model so I can create renderings of a man. I love the attitude of the man on the right.

This Velasquez killed me:

From a distance it almost looked like a photograph. But as I got closer the paint became more and more abstract. It looks like it was painted extremely quickly, with a pretty heavily loaded brush. There's something here; the fact that our eyes and consciousness can make out a portrait made up of such loose paint is interesting. Up close the reality falls apart. There's a interplay between abstraction and physical concrete subject matter that I find exhilarating. It's a beautiful balancing act that Velasquez has attained. This balancing act is what I'm interested in with my own art. I like finding the abstraction in our physical reality.

Speaking of a balancing act between representation and abstraction, here's Ingres:

The more I looked at these the more I fell in love with them. They look so real on first sight, but the more I sit with them the more the abstraction of the forms is apparent. I traced the forms of the above paintings:

The lines remind me some of de Kooning's earlier work. Here's Pink Angels, painted in 1945:

I've been looking at Rodin. I've never been a big fan of his. His famous pieces have struck me as sentimental. The Thinker is as ubiquitous as Dali's melting watches. But recently I've begun to get an appreciation of his work. It started with seeing some old photographs taken of his work that are in a Phaidon book I have. I'm getting past the subject matter, and the jaw-dropping strength and beauty of his work is becoming apparent. Here are some of his sculptures at the Met I looked at this weekend:

I love the fluidity and solidity of his figures. I've been drawing his sculptures. I don't quite get them intellectually yet. But I like them more and more. This may be sacrilege, but I like looking at photographs of his work more than seeing the work in person. I'm not completely sure why this is. I think it may be because the line of his work is more apparent to me in a photograph.

I'd like to end with a cave painting I've been looking at, the Altamira Bison. It was painted sixteen thousand years ago.

De Kooning said that there is no progress in art. The sophisticated abstraction of form of the bison speaks to this. Progress is something many of us are obsessed with. I believe it is part of our human makeup. I find it comforting to be working in a form that I believe can't progress.