brunch with jacob
7:32: brunch today was with jacob van ruisdale, arguably the greatest 17th c. golden age dutch landscape painter. his landscapes have a quality, a combination of light, composition, unique introduction of figures, magical skies and crazy accurate depiction of plant life, still admired by botanists, that put him in a class by himself. under appreciated during his lifetime, his works can be found inmost of the world's major museums.
but it is his way of depicting figures in the landscape i most love. significant in their seeming insignificance, dwarfed by the magnificent landscape, they always seem, as does this lone figure on the cover painting below, magnificently humble.
1:44 pm: the drawing is now complete and i'm about to stretch the 56x68" canvas.
as you can make out from the details of the drawing below, there are a number of figures, visitors to the acropolis museum, moving about the space. beneath them is a transparent floor beneath which can be seen the ancient greek ruins that were discovered when excavation for this new museum took place, not so long ago. in a brilliant move by the architect, these ruins were allowed to be exposed to the museum goers, giving them a double dose of antiquity: above and below ground.
11:18 am: i'm about 1/4 of the way through making the drawing for parade 48, which i should be able to start painting tomorrow morning. i'll post pics of the completed drawing as soon as it's done, plus some cool robot-making and video class pics from our SLV Summer Camp that i shot yesterday.