Madrid Museums

If you visit Madrid be sure to check out some of the world's most important art museums. I went to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. Here there is not only Picasso's amazing Guernica but beside it there area rooms filled with sketches and studies showing how the work evolved. Other artists on exhibit are Dali, Miro and more Picasso. Unfortunately I did not make it to the Museo Thyssen-Bonemisza or to the local galleries (next time!) but I couldn't miss the Museo Nacional del Prado.

What an incredible collection of work. The Velazquez room, Bosch, the Durer self portrait and the upstairs Goya court paintings and the downstairs black period were some of the highlights for me. Other artists are exhibition include Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Titian and lots of El Greco.
If you won't be visiting Madrid anytime soon, download Google Earth, mix yourself a mojito and see the Prado masterpieces in amazing detail.

In Google Earth go to the 'Fly to' search field and enter Museo Prado Masterpieces. On the map a white square marker is shown. Click that to get art zooming. Written on the link is the following:

We present a virtual tour of fourteen masterpieces from the Museo Nacional del Prado, displayed in ultra high resolution, enabling you to see details of the paintings that have never been seen before. Thanks to the high resolution of the digital images, you can view the whole painting or zoom in on a small fragment. Given the plethora of masterpieces housed at the Museum, choosing which works to include was no easy task but this selection represents the best of the collection.

Exhibition Zaragoza

Back from Spain and the group exhibition. Also recovering from 4 days in Madrid...had a great time and really enjoyed the mojitos and museums!

Geek tee

www.thinkgeek.com
I can't believe that I actually saw a guy on the bus wearing this tee today. Sadly I am 1 of the 10 different kinds of people that understood this...sigh. If you want to take a refresher course or need more info on understanding geek tees visit the binary wiki.

'Laisser tomber' diptych, left panel complete.

I have finally finished the left panel of my new diptych titled 'Laisser tomber' and I am now working on completing the right panel. Hopefully it won't take me as long to finish it off. My goal is to have it done before going off to Spain.

Make your own Hockney or interactive street map.

First let me say, this was developed by some cool people in a not very cool place, Microsoft labs. So that means you can't make a synth if you have a mac, and you can't view a synth using Google Chrome. You also need some pretty good processing speed and some patience. This is a new thing, so its still a bit buggy, but I can hardly wait to see how it develops. I shot the photos for this synth very quickly, and actually I had photographed the dvd label details on the shelf. You can't see it all in one shot though because I didn't do enough medium shots before doing the close-ups. Taking loads of overlapping photos is the key, because it gets compiled with texture recognition...some trial and error is going to be necessary. Expect to see some more synths from me in the future!

I love maps!

llustration intended for use in The Selected Work of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen. www.tsspivet.com

I really dislike going to a city without having a map to study, even while reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy I was constantly flipping back to the maps to see where the heck I was in Middle Earth. Certainly Tolkien and his son Christopher, who did almost all the map illustrations, loved their maps too. Who doesn't love google maps, and if you check out my post from Dec. 2008 you'll see how great the terrestrial globe in Florence is. On the topic of loving maps there is a new book out called The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, and it looks like something I would really enjoy. Following the life of a 12 year old genius cartographer who tries to map out everything in his life. There is an article on amazon written by the author discussing the illustrations used, and removed from the book. In this quote the author describes his use of illustrations:

"I found that I had to be very selective about what I wanted to show. What is not shown is as important as what is shown. In addition, many of the images in this book are not direct illustrations like might you see in other books—as in, 'let me tell you about x and now here is a picture of x.' Instead of a direct one-to-one correspondence, there's a satellite-like relationship between the text and the image, a kind of graphical parallelism."

Hmmm I actually like a lot of the drawings that were taken out, but I guess I better read the book so I can have a more informed opinion.

Fashion, Film and Art

I know that its advertising, but how great are these?! Sad news though for Karl Lagerfeld and the Chanel mobile art museum designed by Zaha Handid. The tour was cut short after visiting only 3 of the 6 scheduled cities.
www.chanel-mobileart.com

Samuel Benchetrit for YSL


Sofia Coppola for Miss Dior Cherie


Superflat First Love by Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton