Artist Date (part deux)

We to the Tacoma Art Museum for a brief visit this morning. Tim was really a trooper to have back to back weekend museum experiences, but I wanted to see the photo exhibit by Chuck Close with poems by Bob Holman.

It is sort of surprising that the TAM is so small. One of the galleries held a handful of recipients from the 2008 Neddy Artist Fellowship. There were some odd pieces on view -- the strangest being a statue of a naked man. To me it was strange because he had a creepy look on his face and the artist used real hair on the head of the statue. He also had really small hands that looked out of proportion to the rest of the body.

There was also an exhibit of Renoir (as printmaker). There were two of his paintings, which was really a neat experience to see them up close and personal. The rest of the exhibit was a collection of prints. He used several different methods of printmaking, so it was really interesting to see the differences between the prints and the methods.

The Close/Holman exhibit was interesting, but not as interesting as I thought it was going to be. I expected different pictures, but they were portraits of faces. He uses a special form of photography which focuses differently. There was an interesting technique he used with his digital images. He had a software created that would take the digital image and translate it to a loom -- weaving his photos into a tapestry. They were huge, and when you were up close, you could see the individual spots of color that made up the woven black and white image. It was pretty amazing. I was not impressed with Holman's poetry, although I was intrigued with the format he used for some of them.

All in all, we were able to get through the entire museum in less than an hour. I'm glad we got in free because I would have been disappointed to pay full price and not feel like I really had much of an experience.