Today I went to see Claude Monet's triptych: Waterlilies. This is a HUGE painting (rather, three panels of painting. Hence, the word triptych.) The three panels are owned by three museums in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Kansas City. This spring/summer, all three panels are exhibited in Kansas City. The Waterlilies painting was nice. It better be - it took M. Monet 11 years to finish it. I need to research his life. If it took him ELEVEN years to complete this work, there might be some obsessive/compulsive thing going on there.
This is one of the three panels of Monet's triptych, Water Lilies
The fun part of this museum jaunt was going with Grad Student Gillian. She is, after all, in museum studies. What a great companion for museum-ing! She has been behind the scenes in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and she has a wealth of knowledge about the part of a museum that we don't get to see. She told me about scientific practices used to identify materials...how an instrument they use identified what was thought to be glass beads on an antique Indian (as in India) necklace actually were rubies. Whoa. What a purchase! Like Let's Make a Deal: Museum Edition.
We lunched at the museum, which is always a treat. We also zipped around some other parts of the museum, including a photography exhibit. I will say, it sure beat the Warhol one I went to see a couple of months ago at the Beach Museum in Manhattan. My favorite photograph was a contemporary one taken of some US soldiers in Iraq just after the downfall of the Sadam Hussein regime. I am not sure why it called my name so, but I went back to it three times. I think I was intrigued by the soldiers, who very likely were Ft. Riley soldiers, from just down the road here.
And so with this post, perhaps now I have gotten back on artistic track, and will continue on through out the remainder of the year, doing the art thing I had planned to do all year long!
