Art Visit

On Wednesday, June 4 I went to the Crocker Art Museum for my art visit. During my time there I visited several exhibitions, but my two favorite by far were California Art and European Art. Viewing art in person is very different from viewing it in a book or on a computer. It seems much more alive and vivid in person than it does in a two-dimensional setting. When you look at art in places such as books, you can't really get the sense of the artwork because of many certain factors. These factors could be that it wasn't printed to original size, it maybe would not show the texture of the artwork, or, in the case of types of art that are three-dimensional in person, you cannot view the entire piece. The only part you can view is the part the photographer captured.
Viewing it in person gives you the advantage of seeing the artwork through your own point of view and really being able to enjoy it.

My favorite work of art was in the California Art exhibition and the E.B. Crocker Collection. The name of the painting is Sunday Morning in the Mines, painted by Charles Christian Nahl in 1872. The original size is 274.3cm x 182.9cm. To give you some background about the artist, he is an emigrant from Germany who painted many scenes from the gold-rush time during his career. I really enjoyed this painting because of the controversy that it established. If you look closely, you will notice that this painting has two very different meanings. On the right-hand side are the diligent church goers, reading the bible on a Sunday morning and washing their clothes, perhaps as a Sunday ritual. On the left side of the painting are the more rambunctious gold miners. There are depictions of people fighting, beating their horses with whips, and even perhaps some intoxicated people on this fine Sunday morning. Even in the far back and to the left are some people fighting. This side must contain the sinners, for all their actions are proving them to be morally corrupt. There is also a man smoking, standing almost dead center in the painting. What I also found interesting about this painting was that there is a large redwood tree that divides the painting into equal halves, almost separating one lifestyle from another.

To the left is a picture of me next to my favorite painting! Seeing this work of art in picture form just does not give it justice. You can see from the size of me compared to the size of the painting that it was magnificent in size, really a beautiful work of art. I had walked around the museum and only had two more rooms to go and was disappointed because nothing I saw really caught my eye enough the way this artwork did. When I saw this piece I immediately knew that this would be it. Oh, by the way, I don't know what's wrong with the date and time on my camera, but I definitely wasn't there at 10:30 at night :-).

There actually was one more painting, in the last room that was left for me to look at, that really caught my eye. This is an oil on canvas painting called In the Artist's Studio, by Edouard Marsal. It was painted in 1889 and is located in the European Art section of the Crocker Art Museum, with the measurements being 81.3 x 65.5 cm. As soon as I saw this painting, I was sucked into it. It looks completely three-dimensional in person. It really looks like if you put your hand on the painting, it would just move into the room instead of touching a flat, two-dimensional painting. Marsal was born in France in 1845 and loved to paint scenes with history and genre in them. At some point in his life he was also a professor, teaching from an academic point of view the love for making works of art just as beautiful and great as the one to the left.






Overall, I am really glad that this visit was a requirement for the course. I do not believe that I would have gone to an art museum on my own, especially because I'm so busy between school and work. I realized that throughout these last two months, I really am able to appreciate and love art, something that I somewhat struggled with before. I'm able to look at a painting and really feel connected to it because I have been taught to appreciate it, and not take it for granted. I have been to Crocker Art Museum many times, especially in grade school. It was a required field trip every year for the art program at my school. Although, my experience and the things I took out of this trip have changed drastically from when I was a child. When I used to visit Crocker, I just thought of it as a free day from school and an excuse to get out of the classroom. I would walk around with my little friends and talk and laugh and have a good time. The most recent time I did walk around with the same best friend I had in grade school, but this visit was different in the sense that I was really able to enjoy the journey and appreciate the works of art in front of me. Overall, this trip exceeded my expectations.