Using My New Camera

Here's a photo I took in another part of Balboa Park. I was driving around experimenting with my new camera, and I shot this one over by the International Houses. That's a group of small buildings sometimes confused with Spanish Village. Unlike Spanish Village, the International Houses are each occupied by representatives of other nations. There's a House of Sweden, House of Ireland, House of Mexico, etc. Usually the members of the organizations are immigrants from those countries. They serve food and have dancing on Sundays I think. They're only open on the weekends.

It's interesting that they only open on weekends. Spanish Village use to be that way as well, but at some point the artists must have decided that we needed to be open everyday. So we've become so preoccupied with making sure all the studios are open everyday, except the ones like mine with individual occupants. And that's kind of funny, because when you think about it, it occurs to me that a number of the buildings in Balboa Park do stand empty and closed for days at a time. Of course, ones like the San Diego Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum, and the Museum of Man are open everyday, except maybe Mondays. I'm not sure actually.

When I first started at Spanish Village, I thought it would be so nice to work in the Park and walk all around, going to the various museums and just enjoying the ambience. However, I admit I've done almost none of that. There are several exhibits at the San Diego Art Museum and the Mingei Museum that are worth going to see, and I haven't been. There are two on printmaking and one on jewelry. Surely as an artist of those mediums I owe it to myself to go over.

I went several years ago to an exhibit of Rembrandt's etchings and I've never been the same since. A group of us went from our printmaking class, and I'm grateful to this day. Rembrandt's paintings are wonderful, beautiful, amazing, but his etchings are so special I hardly know how to describe them. The one thing I can say about them is that they were in an exhibit in which there were etching by several of his contemporaries as well. There was no comparison. I could see his genius, but when his work was compared to others' the difference was striking enough to take your breath away. The others' work was stiff and unimaginative by comparison, amateurish to even the most unsophisticated eye. In the past, I may have missed the chance to see his etchings in museums in other parts of the world, but I would never pass up the opportunity to see them now.

One of the charateristics of his work is it's size. He was capable of drawing a crowd of people in a space no larger than a business card. He created portraits the size of postage stamps. And even in the tiny spaces the details are so perfectly drawn that they seem more than alive. He had the ability to create a realism that went beyond a copy of what he saw around him. I suppose nowadays it might be called something like super-reality, something beyond everyday life. And I am not referring to the costumes that he frequently dressed his subjects in. Certain they added to the atmosphere, but were not what makes his work so unusual.

I find it interesting that some works of art, like anything else, are photogenic and some are not. I have been to museums and seen monuments in Europe, India, China, Siberia, Senegal, Egypt. Some are so memorable that you understand why they are so famous, Michelangelo's David, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids, Rembrandt's Night Watch, Monet's Water Lilies, the Duomo and Bapistry Doors in Florence, the Winged Victory in Paris. I could go on forever. And in most of those cases, the photographs don't come close to doing the work justice. What is my point? We need to all get going and check out the permanent and visiting exhibits in our local museums.