Painting color drenched artworks of places and things I love
Finally, I took a real Artist’s Date. Between holidays I found myself with a free day and I had been waiting to visit the Tiffany exhibition of oil and watercolor paintings at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn, New York.
Not many people are aware that Louis Comfort Tiffany painted besides designing stained glass windows and lamps. It seems he traveled to the Middle East and Egypt and painted during his visits. His watercolors were my favorites.
The museum allowed photographs without flash so I took a few of the works I liked best.
I was especially struck by the way he painted highlights, paying special attention to the play of sunlight on objects. Some darker works popped with the dappled highlights, really giving his paintings life.
This watercolor painting was special to me for the beautiful color of the endless sky against the sandy foreground with the small figures as an afterthought. How evenly he applied the color to the sky area. I was impressed.
This is one of the pieces of glass work in the exhibit. The colors and design are reminiscent of Tiffany’s travels from his paintings. The museum had large glass panels and paintings Tiffany did with the Hudson school of artists, which were nice, but I liked his paintings of the Orient much better.
It was inspirational, to say the least.
Last month I visited The Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn, New York. It’s a lovely old mansion on the north shore of Long Island in and around the areas known as the Gold Coast. That nickname was made popular by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel The Great Gatsby. Many of these homes were built and owned by millionaires all living the good life here.
This particular estate was owned by Henry Clay Frick, co-founder of U.S. Steel Corporation, in 1919. The Georgian mansion was a wedding gift for his son, Childs. The mansion home was built on land owned by William Cullen Bryant, and named Clayton. In 1969, the estate was purchased by Nassau County to be converted to the Museum of Art.
It was my first time at this museum and I wanted to see the current exhibit of original paintings by Norman Rockwell, the noted illustrator of the Saturday Evening Post and other periodicals. He liked to represent the everyday basic human experience in his art. “I paint life as I would like it to be,” he once said.
Spanning the decades of his career through several wars and painting styles. His realistic, painterly approach finally met up with the more modernistic styles of other artists in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The paintings were larger than I expected and utterly beautiful.
As I walked I was thinking that my heeled shoes were all wrong for a hike, but I kept going. The trees grew taller, the underbrush denser, and the sky was hidden the further I walked. It was beautiful and quiet. The sun sent it’s rays down through the trees to settle on fallen branches in the path. Serene and wonderful. Did I bring my sketchbook with me? Of course not!
