Portland Art Museum, Powell's, Crystal Ballroom

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 23:59:59 -800

Despite leaving the party at Dave's house pretty late in the night (~2:30), I
kicked myself out of bed midday Sunday and went downtown to a tour of the
Portland Art Museum that was being put on by a friend of mine. There were two
main exhibits at the museum that I saw on the tour--one of Childe Hassam, an
American impressionist painter who painted dozens of landscapes of the wild
west, including Oregon. His style differs from the French impressionists
mainly because he tended to paint scenes of nature that were totally lacking
in people, and his style was distinctly masculine (he painted while hunting,
fishing or shooting his gun in the Oregon desert) because of his sneaking in
the occasional moderately-hard line into what should otherwise be a fairly
soft-looking painting. Many of the canvasses that the museum had on display
were evocative recreations of rolling plains of flowers with high clouds in
the sky and mountains in the far distance--the plains in the picture reminded
me of the fields I walked through as a boy, and the distant blue mountains
dredged up memories of roaring through the Central Valley on Interstate 5,
gazing at the Sierras which were a good 70 miles away. Ah, to be in
(some parts of) California (with the people I love) again!