Luke 2:1-20

1 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register.

4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
    and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

The Truth of Nature

Now that I'm retired, I've made a pact with myself that if I see something that looks interesting that's going to happen somewhere, I'm going to explore and check it out. I don't have specific examples, but when I was working, more than once I was disappointed because there was something that looked interesting to me that I was unable to attend because I was working. I cannot even tell you when I heard about the Denver Art Museum (DAM) "Monet - The Truth of Nature" exhibit, but I knew that it looked interesting enough that I wanted to see it. 

Had I been working, it would have been tough to attend, because the exhibit runs from October of this year until February of next year. With that time frame, the only way I would have been able to attend would have been during Christmas vacation and there's enough other stuff going on at that time. But, because I have extra free time now, I decided to make a road trip out of it and come in the middle of October figuring that the weather would probably be the best of the time frame. Well, that's another story altogether.

As a disclaimer, I wouldn't call myself a Monet devotee.  I enjoy artwork for art's sake. I just found this exhibit interesting because it would be a very large collection of paintings by a particular artist that was supposed to show a well rounded collection of his work. I would have been just as excited about attending this exhibit had it been Picasso, or Van Gogh. I was looking forward to seeing the art, not necessarily the artist.

The artwork was arranged over two floors of the DAM museum annex with scheduled entries every 15 minutes. When it came close to my time, I queued up and waited for them to let us in to the exhibit. As we entered, we were given headset devices that we could listen to at our leisure that gave much more in detail information about different paintings as we walked around the two floors of the gallery. The nice thing about this was it kept people fairly quiet and it was also set up on two levels, one for adults and one for kids. I listened to one of the kids level portions and that was enough for me, but I could see where it would keep younger audience members engaged in the exhibit.

Most of the artwork was arranged chronologically, so I got to see how his art progressed throughout the years. The three paintings that I have posted here I found the most interesting mainly because of the information I had been given by my headset during the time I was looking at the particular paintings.

The first painting was taken on many of his excursions down to the southern coast of France. He loved painting the people and the beach scenes. What I found the most interesting of this particular paintings, was that they were able to discern that most of his work during this particular period, was actually painted right down at the beach and not in his art studio. He did not sketch the scene, then go back and paint the scene from memory, opting rather to paint right there. They know this because of careful analysis of the painting reveals small grains of sand in the paint that had been blown about with the breeze along the beach.

The second photo shows a waterfront scene painted in Amsterdam. Analysis of this basically proves that he painted this while sitting in a boat because it's the only spot where one could get that perspective of the scene. That's some serious dedication to sit there for hours, possibly days in a boat to get the scene the way he wanted it portrayed.

Quite possibly the most interesting painting to me was the third shot here, showing the Seine River in Paris almost frozen over during the winter of 1879. Because Monet was actively painting during this entire period, he captured the weather of the era as well. This is a time of a mini ice age in Europe and meteorologists actually use his paintings to get a sense of what the weather and climate were like in this area during this period because of his attention to details.

All in all, I enjoyed my time at the DAM and was very glad that I was able to view this collection of Monet paintings. I hope you enjoyed some of these samples of his work. If you'd like to see one other painting, there's another example of his work in this blog entry about halfway down.

The Light Show

Besides the Monet exhibit at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), there was also a large collection of British portraits and an entire exhibit dedicated to light and how light plays out in certain genres. Several of the pieces caught my attention, including this sculpture using a series of monitors and an old pay phone. On the wall behind this piece was a set of sentences that read, "You watch to much TV. You read too much TV. You are too much TV."

I'm not sure if that's totally correct. While I fully admit that I used to watch a lot of TV when I was younger, I don't as much now. However, while I'm not watching as much TV, there's a certain amount of screen time with other technologies that aren't TV that have taken up the slack and I'm sure if everyone really looked at their own life, they'd probably see similar things going one with themselves as well. Most of us use a screen in our work and in our leisure, be it a smart phone, or a computer, or a tablet. Video games, YouTube videos and the like are constantly screaming for our attention, so this particular piece did hit a note.

While wandering around this floor of the museum, I actually walked right past an Ansel Adams print they had on the wall. How I missed it the first time around is beyond me since I'm a big fan of Adams and have admired his work from an early age. I even have a poster of this exact print that my wife gave to me for Christmas one year before we were even married. Suffice to say, she knew my tastes pretty well, even back then.

The funny thing about artists is we tend to revere what we like and usually, not always, but usually assume that because they are good in one field of art, they should be good in all fields. That's not the case and it's true with Adams. At one point in my life, there was an Ansel Adams show at one of the Claremont Colleges of his portraitures, which I attended because, as I said before, I was a fan of his. This exhibit was 100 portraits by Ansel Adams.

I'm sure others went away satisfied with this particular exhibit. I did not. I have come to the conclusion that Adams was not a good portrait person. I felt that most of the portraits lacked any kind of depth and they were sorely lacking when compared with his landscapes. But, as I've said in the past, art is subjective and others, I'm sure came away with a new found respect for him.

This particular print of Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is one of his most famous images. He encountered the scene while driving down a highway from another photo shoot and had only minutes to set up his equipment and take an exposure. In fact, he only took this one exposure. Later, when asked, he couldn't remember the date the photo was taken, but an astronomer in Boulder, Colorado was able to use basic knowledge of when Adams was in the area, surveying tools, astronomical information, and moon cycles to later determine that the photo was taken on October 31, 1941 at 4:03 PM. This time has since been correct to November 1, 1941 at 4:49 PM. Apparently, the error was due to a number of things, including incorrect geographic coordinates and the curvature of a computer monitor. You can read the account here in a 1991 Los Angeles Times article. 

Perhaps why I didn't see this particular Adams print on my first go around was I was distracted by the hall of mirrors. Or at least that's what it looked like at first when I approached it. What looked like a fun house type of mirror exhibit turned out to be very interesting once I entered it.

First, I had to don booties to keep smudges off the mirrors. Yep, not only did this hallway have mirrors on the walls, but it also had them on the floors and ceilings, making for a very surrealistic tunnel that seemingly stretched forever in all directions. Because of the vantage point of all of the mirrors, you can actually see the booties I'm wearing in the third photo. Later in the morning, I had to walk through this again, even though it was only a 20 foot hallway. I really liked the illusion of floating on air.

I think I noted in my last blog entry that the DAM is undergoing some major renovation, so there's not as many pieces on exhibit at this time. Couple that with the two floors that were solely dedicated to the Monet paintings and there wasn't a lot to see there. However, what was available, was fascinating, in my opinion and it made me want to come back in a couple of years to take in the full museum once the renovations are totally complete.

My next blog entry will be devoted to the Monet exhibit.