offcntr | Entries tagged with museums

Somewhere in the middle of an exceptionally busy week--meeting Tuesday (abruptly cancelled), sale set-up Friday, sale on Saturday, studio open house Sunday--we managed to eke out a day off for both of us, and drove down to Newport for a holiday.

Drove up to Corvallis and across on 36, hit town just in time for an early lunch at Nana's Irish Pub. Good Scotch Eggs, and Denise enjoyed her oyster roll; my cod and chips really needed salt. I'm always hopefully ordering it on the coast, and always disappointed. You'd think I'd learn...

Afterwards, we went over to the Oregon Coast Aquarium for the afternoon. We hadn't been in several years so it was good to be back. Denise knees have been giving her grief, so we borrowed a rolling walker, with seat, from our former choir director, a brilliant decision, as it turned out. Having a place to sit down whenever necessary, and even roll forward a little without standing, made the day much more manageable for her.

It was lovely sunny, though still pretty chilly outdoors, but we still caught both the otters and pinnipeds at feeding time, and I dropped in on the aviary. Puffins were in winter plumage, so no dramatic white cheek patches, though they'd gotten in some horned puffins since the last time I was there.

Spent a lot of time poking around the tidepool exhibit, gazing at the brightly colored fish in the coral reef tank, watched a three-foot long spotted moray circling its enclosure, blissed out with the jellyfish, and even managed a pretty nice watercolor of the copper rockfish.

The big walk-through tank originally built for Keiko the orca has been divided into three habitats, shallows, mid- and deep water pelagic. Five-foot sturgeons and gliding bat rays fascinated, but nothing compares to having a shark swim right over your head. Didn't see the octopus, sadly. Really wanted to try an paint one from life.

Decided to take the long way home, down the coast highway to Florence, watching the waves roll in from China. And then home for supper. All in all, a lovely day.

My friend lydamorehouse has a gift for finding the perfect place to take visitors to show off her city. When we said we'd be in town for the weekend, and had Sunday free, after tossing around some ideas, she said, How about the Russian Art Museum? Oh, hell yeah!

The Museum of Russian Art is in a little converted church in south Minneapolis. I don't know if it has a permanent collection, or just assembles guest and touring shows, but the two shows they have currently are fabulous.

On the ground floor and upstairs was a painting show called The Body in Soviet Art. The paintings in question are post-Stalinist, mostly from a period called the Kruschev Thaw, when the old-guard, Social Realists got the boot and both style and subject matter diversified. The subjects, while still including hard-working proletariat--tractor drivers, women plasterers and loggers--also include some lovely portraits, people at rest and play (and bicycling!). The style is where things really open up. There's a lot of impressionist influence on composition, light, brushwork. A couple of portraits, back to back on the same display panel, could have been early and late Rembrandts. And a big panel of winter life in the courtyard of a housing block harkens way back to Pieter Breughel the Elder in the way he fills the scene.

There's also a little gallery of nude studies, very student-life-drawing-class-ish, and a bunch of more recent political allegories upstairs, surreal and creepy monsters dissecting the body politic (as represented by nude female figures). Surreal, check. Creepy, double check.

Less creepy, but still very surreal (and, okay, a little creepy) was the show in the basement: Surreal Promenade - Sergei Isupov. He's a sculptor in porcelain, born in Russia, but now living in Massachusetts; the show was apparently organized in conjunction with the NCECA conference last winter. The subjects and juxtapositions can be a little unsettling, but the craftsmanship is amazing.

weaseling out