Miro in the Rain

Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited family in in the Pacific Northwest. Here is my postcard.

One of the lucky natural features of the Seattle area is the incredible amount of shoreline afforded by Puget Sound, Elliot Bay, and an extensive network of lakes and waterways. The landscape gives the impression that you are never far from the water, and you are almost always not far from a view of the water. I love this aspect of the area - it reminds me of the cities, towns and villages along the coastline of my native Rhodes Island.

Aerial view of Winslow on Bainbridge Island, looking east over Puget Sound back towards downtown Seattle, WA. 

It was a mostly gray weekend that included some pockets of sun and plenty of full-on rain. Prior to the rain, we took a day trip to Bainbridge Island, just a 30 minute ferry ride from the downtown Seattle waterfront but a world away.  The ferry ride was great - a big ferry for carrying cars - with unmatched panoramic views of the city skyline. 

 

On Bainbridge Island, we visited two tiny towns with short, bustling high streets - Winslow and Poulsbo. Winslow was a craft utopia, and we followed shopping with a pub lunch overlooking the harbor. My craft-brewed local hard apple cider was made with New York State apples, rather than Washington's local crop. This was crisp and bitter anomaly in the food production chain that I was willing to overlook! The Poulsbo high street was left crafty and more Norse, with architecture and shops themed on the Scandinavian heritage of the island.

When in Seattle, we took shelter from the rain at the SAM - the Seattle Art Museum. I've been visiting Seattle for 15 years but this was my first visit there. The museum reopened a few years ago after an expansion redesign by Portland's Allied Works. The SAM occupies the bottom 4 floors of a 20 story glass tower in downtown Seattle. 

 

We went to see an exhibit that wax about to close: "Miro: The Experience Of Seeing". This exhibition was focused on his last 2 decades of work, a balance of paintings and sculptures mostly from the Queen's National Museum in Madrid.  Juan Miro (1893-1983) started as a realist painter then moved to Paris in 1921, and developed his more abstract style into the 1930s. Since then, he has ceased to innovate (which is perfectly fine). Miro's work is on the edge of conceptualism, but like Picasso he never abandoned the subject components of genre painting: the human figure, objects, animals, landscapes. Unfortunately I think he seemed to have gotten trapped into being Miro, into producing "Miro's". For five decades he produced abstracted pieces that confirm the artist's value is primarily in the formal idea and much less in a work requiring skill, diligence, or a significant investment of time. Nevertheless Miro claims a place among modern artists between Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder - and that's very good company indeed!

 

 

A high point of the SAM was seeing a painting by Kehinde Wiley (b.1977), a new acquisition interestingly hung in the European Renaissance / Mannerism / Baroque galleries, called "Anthony of Padua".