Color and white

I saw a pair of interesting exhibits at the Met recently--the first called simply enough Vincent van Goh: The Drawings.

Unless you're truly a Van Gogh fanatic, the exhibit could be a bit of a tough slog since it's (crowded) room after room of dimly lit drawings, many simply prepatory sketches that weren't meant to be 'shown'.

What pulls you through is watching the iconic artist evolve--Van Gogh was apparently no Mozart, he had to painstakingly learn how to draw, and he tried different techniques before settling on his built-up style.

It's interesting how psychologically fragile he was; he'd send multiple copies of a drawing to different friends, and in particular his brother, seemingly holding his breath for their feedback. I wonder whether he altered his style based on what they said?

And as you near the end of the exhibit you're jarred as you come across some of his paintings. Suddenly you see beneath the familiar vibrant colors and thick paint that he painted the way he learned how to draw, piling line after line together to create a sense of dynamism.

And you realize how much you miss the colors; there is beauty in his drawings and you can appreciate them, but they're just not the same, there's too much peering and examining somehow, versus the 'wow' of his paintings.

It's the same way I feel everytime I go to the Guggenheim and finish one of their interesting modern art exhibits and duck into the familiar gallery of Old World masters.

That's not to say 'long time ago good, now no good'--the other exhibit at the Met I saw was Santiago Calatrava: Sculpture into Architecture.

Caltrava is one of my favorite architects (along with the incomparable Maya Lin), purely because I like the way his buildings look.

They're usually functional structures like train stations or bridges, but he makes them more beautiful than you would think they need to be. Without it looking tacked on or showy.

It makes sense, then, that he started out as a sculptor--his buildings have a good sense of flow, and although not basic could be described as minimalist, the same sleek way a swan is minimalist.

Just looking through some of the online photos now, it strikes me that both Van Gogh and Caltrava can be reduced down to curved lines.

Vincent van Gogh's Street in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center Transportation Hub rendering, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.