Week 2 - Class/In-class Field Trips

I attended the UNH art show for "War and Remembrance and Acts of Memory" show at UNH's art gallery. The downstairs was filled with Langdon Quin's pastel colored landscape paintings. I found his color choices to be somewhat abrasive. Everything was candy colored and pale. He did however, do a triptych of the art studios in the pcac that was very interesting. I think the colors in the triptych were a little darker in comparison to the landscapes he had done; so it wasn't as pastel-like as the others.

Upstairs, the show had paintings having to do with war, and some Picasso reproductions. There was a piece that I really liked that looked like a print. It showed helicopters flying over hunched figures. I noticed something bizarre while looking at the piece... A person wouldn't actually see individual helicopter blades on a flying helicopter, they would see a blur of spinning blades. The helicopters in the piece had only two blades each, and they were visibly still.

I also went to the "Sacred and Profane" show in Portsmouth, NH. It was a really neat experience, I had never been to an art opening before. I walked through and tried to look at everything at least once. The pieces that I really liked I tried to go back to look at a second or third time. There were two really large paintings that I particularly liked.

One was a long painting called "Titans" (I think...) It showed four muscular men huddled in a circle in what looked like a cavern. The piece was monochromatic, in a really interesting pale teal color. I thought the figure studies were amazing, and also found the way in which they were bent disproportionately was awesome.

Another piece I came back to look at again was by Katherine Doyle. It showed a mother crouched over a child. The canvas was not entirely covered in paint, so there was interesting negative space around the bottom. Certain areas of the piece had been splashed with turpentine so that the paint would run. The faces of the figures were completely hidden which made the piece seem mysterious.

I very much enjoyed going.