Today is the start of my museum weekend extravaganza! Today I started off the festival by meeting up with Julie and Paige, and then Patrick took us up to Musée de Grenoble (the Grenoble Museum of Art) and served as our personal tour guide for the day. This museum was really gorgeous, and the artwork inside was even more wonderful. It was so amazing looking up at these paintings that were larger than life, framed in gold-leaf frames that would cost more than my house! And these paintings are just so interesting and amazing, to think that way back then these painters made these works of art, probably unaware that these paintings would be on display for years and years to come. And up close and in person, the detail in these paintings is absolutely remarkable! They look real! The people in the paintings, the animals, the fruits and silverware, whatever the subject was, it felt like I could step into the painting and become part of it. Kind of like Mario did in Super Mario 64...
Anyway...it was interesting to see the subject matter in each of the paintings, especially with Patrick there to explain everything to us. For example, we saw one painting that was a balcony full of all types of animals (dogs, birds, rabbits), wooden furniture, marble furniture, a person, and basically anything else you could imagine. At first glance, the painting looks like a haphazard swirl of random, but Patrick explained to us that artists would make paintings like this to show off their skill in painting multiple textures, such as wood, marble, humans, fur, feathers, plants, and all other sorts of textures, in hopes of advertising themselves to nobles that needed professional painters to paint for their castles and whatnot.
After the paintings we stepped into the sculpture area and they were absolutely stunning. To think that these amazing statues were carved from a single block of stone or marble, and now stands a man or a woman chiseled to every last detail, as if they were really there in front of me, frozen in time! One of the statues we saw titled Champoilion was made by an artist named Bartholdi, the same person who created the Statue of Liberty - too cool! These statues really inspired me to start chiseling statues of my own! Granted, whatever I ended up with would have to be considered "abstract" or "horrible", but whatever...
And then we walked into the Reductionist chamber...this art was...well, definitely reduced. One of the paintings was literally a white canvas. A small, square, white canvas. I hardly had enough time to recover from my amazement before we found a small, square, black canvas. I suppose it's considered art, and I'll appreciate that, but this is the first art I've seen where I thought "Well I wish I bought a blank canvas from Michael's and became famous..."
After going through a few more rooms of empty potato sacks stacked up and blocks of wood stacked up neatly, we went downstairs to the new Egyptology exhibition they're opening. Now this stuff was really amazing, to think that all of the pots, vases, and sculptures behind the glass cases were made by Egyptians and now here they are in a museum in France, looking so pristine as if they were made just yesterday! And to see the sarcophagus was even more amazing, to think that ancient pharaohs were mummified and buried inside of them ages and ages and ages ago. It almost makes you wonder if any of them back then realized that they were going to be eternal history...
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