Still Life with Dial / Still Life, Red / Still Life, Brown
Stuart Davis, 1922
Oil on canvas
In the gallery... | Philbrook organized a wonderful Modernist Exhibit from the Vilcek Foundation Collection from New York City . According to Vilcek's policy certain artworks in the exhibition were not allowed to be photographed, including the three Stuart Davis paintings we looked at during this months session. That is why the paintings are blurred out in the photographs in this post. |
Laughter is what I took away from today.I will admit, at first everyone seemed a little apprehensive to trying to describe the large abstract imagery before them. Some people said...
Judging the room I asked a broader question. "Can someone describe one of the paintings to me as a whole?" Everyone looked around in silence. Then |
The laughter seemed to inspire some while for others laughter broke a barrier wall blocking their confidence to say what they were really thinking. For the next ten minutes, we laughed. "It looks like the artist was off his meds!" / "I see a nun bending over backwards because she fell down the stairs" / "She was probably trying to sneak a sip of that wine!" Laughter.
In response to that question I asked for a volunteer to sit in a chair upfront facing the group. I then passed out a pen and a sheet of tracing paper attached to a board to three participants sitting on different sides of the room. I asked these participants to draw the woman sitting in the front of the room. When the drawers finished I placed all three drawings of the woman on top of each other so each drawing could be seen. This process created an image of one woman drawn from three different perspectives. I passed this image around to the participants and asked if anyone was familiar with the term Cubism. In the studio... |