Birds of Winter

 

White-throated Sparrow

Dark Eyed junco

National Gallery of Art: Sargent in Spain

Today was a cool-musty, damp, gray day in the DMV.  The sort of day that is really easy to waste!  And the thought crossed my mind--but then so did "Sargent in Spain" at the National Gallery of Art.  The exhibit closes on Monday, and Monday being the last day of my winter seemed like a better day to just do nothing!

John Singer Sargent is, perhaps, my favorite artist of all--and certainly when I am in the midst of his art, the others take a back seat. What do you get from him?  Technique?  Unassailable!  It doesn't matter the medium.  Pencil/charcoals?  Check,  Oils?  Check.  Watercolor? Check!  Once he set to preserve an image to paper/canvas, the result was so imbued with life--that you cannot but stand in awe of it.  I have never seen the smallest of sketches that did not speak volumes of Sargent's craft, insight, and love.  I am convinced, that as easily as you or I breath the air, John Singer Sargent loved everything that he immortalized with his art.

The exhibition "Sargent in Spain" covers a handful of trips that he took there, a small representation of the images that he created there, and the influence of those trips and works on his final opus: The Public Library in Boston, Massachusetts.  Sargent toured Spain three times in the late 1800's and again in 1903, 1908/09, and finally in 1912.

The Exhibit opens with a room dedicated to his studies of masterworks he had encountered at the Prada Museum in Madrid during a visit there in 1879.  He would have been 23/24 at the time.  Studying paintings made over 200 years prior, he placed his own, decidedly modern take on the subjects.  The Painting of Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo (1638-1683) of the child Margarita became an amalgamation of that work and the more famous "Las Meninas" by Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), Martinez del Mazo's father-in-law.  Like all of the works in this introductory gallery, Sargent's budding genius is on display.

Sargent painted "The Infanta Margarita" after Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo in 1879.

The next room featured a range of works around his fascination with Flamenco dancing and the 19th-century master, Carmencita.  She is the inspiration for a handful of large scale paintings, including the iconic "El Jaleo"--a centerpiece of the collections of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston.  The original was not part of the exhibition; yet several sketches and "studies" for the work were.  And perhaps most interesting of all was the inclusion of a short film of Carmencita dancing from the Thomas Alva Edison early film collection in the Library of Congress.  She is actually performing in the same yellow dress that Sargent painted her in.

Study for "El Jaleo"; Seated Musicians' Heads and Hands, 1881

"La Carmencita Dancing", 1890

Video Clip: "Carmencita" 1895

William K. L. Dickson (1860 - 1935)

& William Heise (1847-1910)

Thomas Alva Edison Collection, Library of Congress

"La Carmencita", 1890

Albert de Belleroche, circa 1882

Portrait of a Welsh-born painter wearing costume items John Singer Sargent bought in Spain.

The next couple of Galleries take up the subject of Sargent's fascination with and acumen in depicting architectural subjects.  These morph into images of people and animals in common unguarded moments.  Most of the works are executed with watercolor, but a good number are also painted with oils.  The watercolors open up for me the heart of my love of Sargent.  His intuition and ability to use a medium infamous for it's difficulty demonstrates more than anything else his genius.  Many watercolorist, my humble self included, incorporate the independence of the pigment pretending to have meant it to be that way all along!  Sargent does play this game. He understands what every brush strokes implies and offers them up with a confidence and abandon that becomes perfection.  I study his paintings and I think: he saw it there, and then used the brush and paint to reveal it to the rest of us!

"Escutcheon of Charles V of Spain," 1912

"Spanish Fountain," 1912

Another aspect of Sargent's genius: Light.  He brings truth to light in a way that exceeds the two-dimensional limits of his subjects.  It effects me to the point of tears.

"Turkey in a Courtyard," circa 1879-1880

"Sierra Nevada," 1912

Up close this oil painting was little more than a sloshing about of colors as thick as icing, but just a few feet away and a moment in time, one hundred and ten years past, is as fresh and alive as it must have been on this sunny day in Spain.

"Spanish Soldiers," 1903

One of three works on this theme in the exhibition, depicting soldiers convalescing at the Royal Hospital in Santiago de Campestela.  Three paintings representing dozens that Sargent made as a result of this visit.  The watercolor highlights two aspects of Sargent's work.  1) his prolific output.  Sargent made paintings of his experiences like I take photographs!--well, at least, GOOD photographs.  And 2), his sensual side.  I mean, who are we kidding her, his recovering soldier is sexy!  As was La Carmencita, the flamenco dancer.  Sargent was in his heart as bi-sexual as any person could be without the label having been created.  He is famous, in his lifetime infamous, for two portraits.  Madame X--so scandalous that she wasn't named, and Dr. Pozzi--a man dressed a red robe looking like he's ready to remove it.  And I full-well love him for both.  

"Women at Work," 1912

3) his understanding of light.  Sargent knew the power of contract like few artists then or since.  He's a major inspiration to me.

"Driving in Spain," 1903

I would have taken a photograph.  Sargent paints a picture!

The next set of paintings focuses on his visit to the Spanish Island of Majorca.  Today, home to uber rich jet-setters, but in 1908, a backwater with orchards and fishermen.

"Majorcan Fisherman," 1908

"Pomegranates, Majorca," 1908

In the final gallery, we treated to images form Sargent's final and perhaps most intense, ouvre: the Public Library of Boston.  A shrine to humanism, the images connect the dots between what Sargent created for this iconic public space and his experiences in Spain.  It's an ambitious drawing, but also fascinating and well researched.

"Tarragone," 1908

"St. Teresa of Avila," circa 1909

Created from a post visit sketch, a watercolor sketch of its own right.  Would that I could have watched him conjure up this image from his notes and memory!

Christmas Tree @ the Canadian Embassy, Washington, DC

The Embassy of Canada is the only Embassy to be located on The National Mall in Washington, DC.  Britain may brag about our "special" relationship.  Mexico may share the most talked about land-boarder in the world.  But only Canada's Ambassador can look out of his office window and see the U.S. Capitol, or walk across the street and have lunch at the National Gallery of Art.

 

Baltimore Museum of Art: Derrel Ellis -- Regeneration

What a beautiful and poignant introduction to an artist whose life ended way too soon.  Ellis grew up in a home with a father who was an accomplished professional photographer.  He was well versed in the art of composition, contrast and emphasis.  Principles of design that no doubt informed his own personhood growing up gay in a home and a place when being homosexual meant being an outsider among outsiders.  In the exhibit, there's a place that speaks to the importance of his friends, of the family he created in place of the one he lost. Ellis died in 1992 of AIDS at the age of 33.  This is his first comprehensive exhibition.  

untitled (Couple Embracing)

c. 1980-1983

Watercolor and black roller ball pen on paper

untitled (Friends)

circa 1990

Brush and black ink, wash, and graphite on paper

untitled (Grandmother Lilian Ellis)

circa 1981-1985

Brush and black ink, wash, and graphite on paper

Self-Portrait after photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe

1989

Brush and black ink and wash on paper

Baltimore Museum of Art: Omar Ba -- Political Animals

 One of the greatest things about the Baltimore Museum of Art is how it embraces its mission of bringing a full range of international and national contemporary artists to the public's attention.  Currently the works of Omar Ba and Darrell Ellis are featured in focus exhibitions.  

Ba is a Senegalese painter whose works reflect a limited palate and an intricate, intimate and engaging compositional style.  Many works at first glance appear to have elements of tatted lace and embroidery work suggesting the idea of quilting, of assemblage of repurposed components, a constructed community, a redemption.  When you read about the author's life and inspirations, you recognize aspects within the works reflecting the contemporary realities and controversies of life in a modern west African city like Dakar--issues inextricably tied to the larger world of international greed, exploitation and political power.  A corrupt and unjust world.  And yet, I was drawn to the tenderness and universal humanity expressed in the figures Ba nearly always builds this paintings around.  It seemed to suggest the resilience of the people, their ability to retain their dignity and transcend these circumstances beyond their control.  Like the proverbial onion, the more you peel one of Ba's paintings, the more you discover to wonder at.  

This is Ba's first solo exhibition at a major American Art Museum, it is hard to imagine that it will be his last.  These 15 works will be on exhibit into April of 2023.  

Compartment-aller simple 3 (One-Way Trip #3), 2022

Oil, acrylic, colored pencil, gel pen and white correction fluid on canvas

Baltimore Museum of Art: Coming Attractions: The John Waters' Collection

Visited the Baltimore Museum of Art today with friends.  One of the impetuses was a recent visit they had made from which my friend spoke of this special exhibition.  "Coming Attractions: The John Waters' Collection" is not only a tongue in cheek nod to the Baltimore icon's work in cinema, but a reminder that the works have all been bequeathed to the BMA upon his death.  

Among the works presented, the motif of the phallus is rather ... present...dominant...evident, swelling, throbbing, LARGE! throughout the works.  Once you see it, and it does not take a genius to see it!  You see it everywhere!  From something as pedestrian and innocuous as a coat hook, to the facile column of a child's stuffed toy.  As one of my friends agreed during a discussion of this, "The man loves his penises."

But what I loved most of all was that, works by artists like Andy Warhol and Peter Hujar notwithstanding, the collection features artists of little note in the wider world.  This brilliant artist in his right, chose works that he found delightful regardless of what anyone else thought of them.  And in time, the entirety of the collection tells a story that became immensely valuable.  Interestingly enough, the Baltimore Museum of Art has a track record of this sort of thing.  Their entire modern art wing is predicated on the collection of the Cone Sisters, who amassed a group of over 3,000 post impressionists European works when no one thought artists like Matisse and Gauguin would actually amount to much.

From the exhibit, "Coming Attractions: The John Waters Collection," selected works.

"Outtake from Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood," 1990

Mike Kelley

"Pink Thing," 2010

Brett Reichman

[I missed the appellation of this work...]

It reminded me of Kukla, from the seminal Chicago children's puppet show, "Kulka, Fran and Ollie".  I can't help by imagine the Mr. Waters also saw that as a child.  Who knows?  Art--it just connects dots of meaning when it's any good.

Christmas Dinner: Poached Salmon, Green Beans and New Potatoes (Roasted)

 

Shakespeare Theatre Company: Jane Anger

Jane Anger was a real woman...or we think she was--a woman; there was a Jane Anger who published feminist pamphlets in London in 1589.  Scholars believe that Jane Anger was a pseudonym.  She was a contemporary of Shakespeare.  Further, some scholars point to the ideas in her pamphlets and there timing in the pantheon of Shakespeare's plays to suggest that old Will was not only familiar with her work, but influenced by it.  All great fun, since there's no way to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.  After all, she wasn't the only feminist speaking out and writing their ideas down in Elizabethan London at the time Shakespeare was actively composing plays.

Here's some more fun, Talene Monahon's play, "Jane Anger."  In it she brings Jane to life in the writing room of Shakespeare's London apartment, along with an aspiring actor named Francis and Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway.  It is 1606, and yet another plague is raging.  Shakespeare is a arrogant, cad with writer's block, Francis is a sycophantic, youth obsessed fan who becomes his servant, and Anne Hathaway is an overly earnest, chatterbox with suppressed violent tendencies.  To be honest, all of these characters are so multi-dimensional, another person could rightly have described any of them in other terms without contradicting my assessment--it is the nature of farce!   And this is a far-flung farce, full of fun and silliness and more than few pointed jabs at the state of misogyny in society both then and now.

This production with the same cast was first staged Off-Broadway at the New Ohio Theater last February and March to great critical acclaim.  It is clear from the get-go that the quartet have a wonderful chemistry together formed over time, and rekindled here.  Amelie Workman's Jane Anger sets the stage from the moment she first appears, addressing the audience directly and then never fully calling up that magical wall.  The other characters play it straight, until one moment over halfway through the performance when in a peek of frustration, Jane calls up the house lights and announces, "Behold!  The Audience!"  Shakespeare responds with, "Have you been watching us this whole time?"  The zaniness continues to spiral until in scene reminiscent of Monty Python, Anne Hathaway slices off one of her husband's arms.  Torrents of blood spray forth, only to have the act repeated to his other arm by Jane Anger.  Workman is commanding and compelling--the voice of modern reason trapped in an era when women had neither a voice or where thought to be reasonable.  

The author herself, Talene Monahon, plays Anne Hathaway to great comic delight.  Ryan Spahn's wit-challenged hanger-on-er is likewise funny, and endearing, and ready to grab the melodrama with abandon.  Michael Urie's partner in real life, some of his sexual physicality with Urie's Shakespeare--who swings on whatever swing is at hand--somehow felt less bawdy, but that's no doubt the linger prude in me!  And Michael Urie.  Just WOW.  I had seen him play Hamlet here back in 2018.  Not up to the challenge.  Not horrible, just lacking that compelling spark that you cannot fake with Shakespeare's leading characters.  I wanted to give him a second chance--and I was honestly blown away.  Comedy is clearly his forte.  Laugh out loud funny, fearless, easy on the eyes and easy in the skin of the character.  His every moment on the stage was just a joy.

I don't know what I expected from this play, but what I got was something else.  Something with wit, intelligence, surprises even.  Something better than I could have imaged.  On stage until January 8th.  I rate this one a go to.

William Shakespeare (Michael Urie) in one of his more frivolous moments

[This picture is actually from the NY run, I wish the DC press photos had one like it--it embodies so much of Urie's performance.]

Francis (Ryan Spahn), Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway (Talene Monahon) looking over a transcript of his newly completed "King Lear"--a total plagiarizing of Thomas Kidds "King Leir" written ten years ealier.  True or not, I don't know, I do know that most of his plays--97% were based on earlier works and ideas.

Francis, Jane Anger (Amelia Workman), Shakespeare and Anne at a moment when Anne's hold of reality may be loosing it's edge...

Anne confront Will with his monumental portrait looking on.  A lovely metaphor in the form of stage design.

Jane and Anne having a heart to heart in the wake of the death of Will and Francis.

Chesapeake Shakespeare Company: A Christmas Carol

 What a delightful production!  Just perfect for the Holidays.  

I've only been to Chesapeake Shakespeare Company in Baltimore one time before to see "Measure for Measure."  This was in the winter of 2020, pre-pandemic.  I remembered it as an intimate space, but forgot just how intimate and magical it is.  Built to fill up three stories of the cavernous lobby of one of Baltimore's leading 19th century Mercantile Banks, it embodies the spirit of Shakespeare's own Globe Theatre with three levels of 3/4 wrap around seating.  On the stage level there are only four rows of seats straight on and stage left, and 3 rows stage right.  Second tier mezzanine has two rows, and the third level mezzanine only one.  The seats deserve a nod.  They are two person wide (and amply measured) drop down upholstered benches without arm rests.  They are hands down the most comfortable seats anywhere in the region!  And a cash bar with soft drinks and snacks is open throughout every production with patrons encouraged to get up at any time to help themselves...in the absolute spirit of the Globe. In the two productions I've attended, everyone has politely waited until intermission.  There is also always a lottery to give away a bottle of wine to one lucky patron.

This production began with a carol sing-a-long of traditional songs like "The First Noel" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" led by three of the ensemble members of the cast.  The Play was infused with lots of music.  Scenes from the original story that are left out of every modern version I've every seen become an excuse to add in a Christmas sea shanty sung by sailors battling a storm on the open seas and a Black Gospel Christmas song sung by forgotten factory workers.  Both are additional stops on Scrooge's even with the Ghost of Christmas Present.  All the principles were ready and able to deliver bold and also, at times, nuanced performances.  The only character that seemed at all stiff was a understudy for an actress who's run was cut short by Covid, and who performed a lesser role.  Tiny Tim was also, ironically, stricken with the latest variant and had a sweet, if stilted young stand in.  While the bio of the original actor described him as a 4th grader, this swing was, at best in second grade, a little lamb lost in the sauce, but ready to deliver the two zingers that are essential to the whole show.  

The set was versatile and easy to spin from one scene to the next, transformed by the cast in due course with the story telling.  The costumes were lush and luscious.  Laura Rocklyn's adaptation was replete with the author's words in both dialogue and narrative delivered by members of the ensemble randomly yet woven together like a comfortable blanket.  Stand out performances include the party led by Mr. (Michael Salconi) and Mrs. (Molly Moores) Fezziwig in the company of the Ghost of Christmas Past.  Troy Haines-Hopper as the Ghost of Christmas Present delivered a joyous, ebullient and ultimate poignant performance.  Although a brief role in the first act, J. Bradley Bowers portrayal of poor departed Jacob Marley with intense and really set the bar for everyone else.  But the glue that holds the show together is Scrooge himself and Gregory Burgess as glues go was Gorilla Glue 100%.  He was both every inch the embittered miser, and then inch by inch he melted into a new man, a better man, a repentant man.  In moments of remorse and self-awareness, can I say, I wiped away tears?  This is the power of the stage in hands of a seasoned actor with the skill and talent to bring to life the character they are embracing.  

My seat was one in from the aisle on an angled bench, Row B, stage right.  I was joined by a nice young Black man named Justin.  We shared some casual banter before the show and at intermission.  While the cast was interracial, the audience was over 90% white.  The CSC offers a HUGE discount for attendees under age 25; it was Justin's first time at this theatre.  I suppose he's exactly the demographic that they are hoping to snag.  I tried to do my part to encourage him to come back.  And except that today's performances are this production's last, I would have also tried to get everyone I know to buy a ticket and see it, too.

Some of the Press Photos from the show.  Unfortunately, the bio pics in the program for a good third of the actors are older than the dust on King Tut's Tomb!  Well, okay, not THAT old--but old enough to make me have to really think hard to connect the dots between the picture and the person I just watched perform on stage.  This is a pet peeve on mine, it really is.  If I ran a theatre company, and someone wanted to act in a production that was being staged there, they would have to have a certified head shot taken within 18 months of the show.  Period.  Not negotiable.  No one attending should look at a picture in the program and thing, who the hell was that?  Just sayin'...

Scrooge (Gregory Burgess) spurning the entreaties of the Mendacity Charitable Society's request for a donation. 

Jacob Marley (J. Bradley Bowers) visiting Scrooge to warn him of his pending adventures.

Scrooge negotiating with God.

The Ghost of Christmas Past (Lauren Jackson).

From the Christmas celebration at the home of Mr. (Michael Salconi) and Mrs. (Molly Moores) Fezziwig revealed again by the Ghost of Christmas Past.

A propitious moment when Scrooge witnesses his encounter with Belle (Morganne Chu) and his younger self (Shaquan Pearson) and realized just what a fool he was then.

The appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Present (Troy Haines-Hopper).  A moment the ended the first act, and reprised began the second.

The Ghost of Christmas Present eaves-dropping on a Christmas Eve dinner at the home of Bob & Martha Cratchit.

Bob Cratchit (Samuel Richie) cajoling his wife, Martha (Emily Zinski) to have compassion on his stingy boss, Ebeneezer Scrooge.

Scrooge post-epiphany, after catching Bob Cratchit arriving to work late, suddenly announcing that he is giving his long suffering employee a raise!

The moment of that fateful line from Tiny Tim "God Bless Us One and ALL!"