At the Art Museum

This past Sunday I went with my family to the Miyazaki Prefectural Art Museum. There was a big exhibition of young, local artists from all over the city. It must have been quite a thrill for these young artists to have their work displayed on the same walls where frequently hang the works of Monet, van Gogh, Picasso, and the like.

As (I believe) with most museums, the taking of photographs is generally frowned upon. I had to surreptitiously snap the ones below with my cell phone, so I apologize for the poor quality. You can click any of the photos to get a larger view.

As the images below make clear, young Japanese artists have many artistic influences, and follow many of the great artistic "schools." It's quite common for most of these young artists to work together in one large room while honing their craft. Not being especially artistically inclined myself, and having no formal training in the fine arts or art history, it's beyond me to pinpoint the specific influences of each of the artistic groupings you see below. Perhaps you, gentle readers, can help me?








Here's one of the young artists hamming it up for the camera:


And here's a sampling of her work:

Eating Sweet Potatoes after Digging Them Up
and Roasting Them over an Open Fire
Apparently one of the young artists (I think his name was Escher...) was so highly regarded that they put a number of his works in their own room just down the hall.


Maybe next week we'll go check out this Escher fellow...

My Face Will Blot Out the Sky...

A couple of months back I read the following in a New York Times article (East and West Part Ways in Test of Facial Expressions):

Researchers studying paintings from the 16th through 20th centuries, for example, have found that in Western portraits, the subject took up a larger portion of the picture and was painted in a way to make the subject stand out, the study said. In Eastern portraits, the subjects tended to be smaller and to blend into the background.

Even now, the differences often remain. When [...] researchers handed students cameras in an earlier study and asked them to take portraits, the subjects filled more space in the frame of the photographs taken by the Americans.

I've noticed this type of thing myself when I compare family pics I've taken with ones taken by my (Japanese) wife. In fact, I frequently (and perhaps naggingly) have to remind my wife that there is indeed a zoom control on the camera; the people in her pics look tiny to me.

Anyway, I was reminded of the above quote from the Times article again this past weekend when I saw some "portraits" of me and my wife that our 5-year-old daughter had drawn. Here's the one she made of me:



And here's the one she made of her mother:



Now, if you're finished laughing about my "big head" (my wife isn't yet), it's possible that you've noticed the different approaches my daughter took in drawing these pictures. Not particularly scientific, I confess, but (I thought) kinda interesting...