Posts Tagged ‘museum’

Ray Grathwol’s “Busy Corner, Akron”

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Last year I added this painting by Ray Grathwol (1900-1992) to my collection of urban snow scenes.  Grathwol was a self-taught painter who depicted primarily landscapes and other Ohio scenes.

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This week’s mail brought an unexpected letter asking me to donate the painting to an Ohio museum.  The letter, signed by the museum’s Director of Curatorial Affairs and forwarded to me by the auction house where I bought the work, provides interesting details on the painting.  It reads in part:

“Dear owner of Ray Grathwol’s fabulous painting of downtown Akron: 

*  *  *  The work you own, Busy Corner, Akron, shows […] the city’s prosperous commercial side: a downtown corner with a drugstore (it was a Walgreen’s).  It makes an amazing pairing with another painting owned by the museum, Raphael Gleitsmann’s Winter Evening, produced around 1932.  Both men show the same stretch of Main Street during a snowstorm, but from opposite sides of the street (the Grathwol was made one or two decades later).  Both artists contrast nature’s fury with the built environment.  The two paintings are like bookends.”

Some cell phone photos

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

My prior cell phone, an LG, could store 20 photos.  My iPhone can store, what, tens of thousands?  Here are four from 2008. 

1.  First up, a photo that could be titled “Museum Dog.”  A couple of years ago, while visiting the Getty Museum in LA, I saw a woman on a Segway roaming through the galleries.  From time to time she would pivot and halt in front of a painting that caught her eye.  I said to myself, “Now this is a museum with an enlightened admission policy; they’d never allow that back East.”  Well, here’s evidence that when it comes to disabled visitors, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in DC does “enlightened admissions policies” just as well.

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2.  Although probably not as museum-worthy as a Klee or Miro, the bold, primitive rendering below has, I believe, an equal claim to be trimmed with an explanatory label, like this:

Figure with Small Companion, created 2008, anonymous child artist, colored chalks on concrete, approx. 36 by 36 in. (destroyed 2008, by rain).”

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3.  Moving on to sculpture, in October I myself took a stab at carving Dick Cheney as a Halloween pumpkin.

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The day after his first night on the porch, Cheney suffered a cruel fate: extraordinary rendition into the paws of  ravenous squirrels.  Nibbled beyond repair, he had to be put down.

4.  Lastly, a photo of a parking garage at night.  In the corner rests a seductive red sports car, as if awaiting the start of her starring role in a film noir.

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