PENTAX Image This past summer, I spent a week cleaning my bedroom in preparation for graduation (and therefore, moving out), and I was dismayed to find that many of my old graphite sketches had faded and smudged over the years. In retrospect, I should have used a fixative spray or stored them in a safer place. Luckily, there are art conservationists [...]
If you’ve visited an art museum, you are probably familiar with the feeling of silent awe and inspiration provoked by pieces that move you. If such remarkable emotions are elicited by viewing something, imagine the sensations attached to an interactive art installation that immerses you in its full experience. And imagine if this interactive work of art was placed in an exotic setting, [...]
Imagine standing in a meadow. Grass shoots up from the ground around you, tickling your ankles. In every direction, flowers of brilliant reds, purples, blues, yellows and whites are sprinkled over a blanket of green. The flowers bow with grace as a light breeze passes you. You hear chirping birds, rustling leaves and a low buzz. This buzz is the sound of one [...]
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is always quiet. Even mid-afternoon on a Saturday the crowd was hushed. I stood and looked through the glass at a six-hundred-year-old book. Lines and lines of meticulously hand-painted text covered the pages. I was struck by the sheer amount of work that went into what was before me—and I was only looking [...]
Where I come from in Millbrook, Alabama, people don’t recycle. The nearest recycling center is a 30-minute drive down the highway to Montgomery. But in Tacony, Philadelphia, the opposite is happening—recycling is being taken to an entirely new level. There, artists are showing what happens when trash is treasured at a recycling center called Revolution Recovery, one of the few recycling plants to allow [...]
It’s easy for a work of art to be lost to the ages and, unfortunately, all too common. But what about art that’s been hidden behind other art? Though not as common as a piece simply being destroyed, there is a surprising number of paintings underneath other paintings. Discovering these hidden works has been almost impossible until recently, when X-ray technology has given [...]
If you were to begin talking about pop art, most people will immediately think of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962). If they’re more familiar with the movement, they may consider other works such as Wayne Thiebaud’s Three Machines (1963) or Jasper Johns’s Flag (1954). The subjects of these pieces might seem mundane and everyday, but the pieces are anything but drab and monotonous. A spark of [...]
I’ve got a question for those of you not involved in the art world: When was the last time you painted something? Maybe when you took that last mandatory art class about halfway through high school? Even though it’s been a while for many adults, those creative juices are still there just waiting to be tapped into—and now there is a booming industry [...]
Traveling is a hassle no matter how you do it, but trust me, it could be so much worse. You could be traveling with an instrument. Throughout middle school, I played a cello nearly my size that I lugged back and forth to school, often by school bus. It was unwieldy and obtrusive and could never decide if it wanted to fit in [...]
We plebeians have known for years about the happiness that specific things can give us. There’s the comfort of a home-cooked meal just like mother made after a long, tiring day; the contentment of rereading a favorite novel while wrapped in a blanket on a cold day; the pumped-up adrenaline that hits after listening to a favorite song on repeat. We figured all [...]