Rene Magritte, The Voice of Silence, 1928. Oil on canvas, 57 cm x 73 cm; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.

Rene Magritte, The Voice of Silence, 1928. Oil on canvas, 57 cm x 73 cm; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.

Usually, I really dislike surrealism. There is something about it that I find about it to be disingenuous, as though this glossy film is placed on top. It might be because surrealism did stem from Dadaism, which was an inherent rejection of the ideas of “art,” while still creating art. In that sense, I found surrealism to be somewhat mocking and not as inviting as other styles of art.

However, this past Friday, for my Roman Art: Hadrian to the Late Antiquity class, we took a small field trip to the Worcester Art Museum. I was expecting it to be a small, little town museum, with around three rooms, but it surprised me. It was pretty large and had a great collection of work. We went to mainly look at their floor mosaics that were on display in the main room. But after an hour or so with the curator, we had about an hour of free time.

In the very last room, I found this Magritte painting, The Voice of Silence. It’s the Worcester Art Museum’s first surrealist painting. What immediately caught my eye was the immense amount of black on the left side–and looking closely at it, it was completely black. Not just extremely dark grey, but completely black. And just looking into the black space made me, almost feel afraid–as though something was going to jump out.

I just feel this ominous sense from the painting, as though there is someone in the dark room, but we, as the viewer, just don’t know. And even though there aren’t any people on the right side of the painting, I get this sense of “never being alone”–people are always around and listening. You don’t know who is in the next room. And it is accentuated with the stark contrast of color, the symmetry of the space between the two sides of the painting, and the placing of a thick wall right in the middle.

J

Helvetica Forever

I completely stole this from an graphic design/typography blog I occasionally read, AisleOne.

Helvetica Forever is an exhbition that tells the origins of the font, Helvetica, and will be going to Bulgaria and Germany next. Too bad it isn’t coming to the United States.

Helvetica is such a clean and modern font, it is probably my favorite of the Sans Serif fonts. It may seem like it looks exactly like Arial, but I think it looks a little wider. It also has more of a curve to its letters, like the end of lowercase a’s. And each letter is cut very straight, there are no slants on the tops of the lowercase t’s.

J

Georges-Pierre Seurat. The Seine at Le Grande Jatte, 1888. Oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 32 1/4 in; Musee Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels.

Georges-Pierre Seurat. The Seine at Le Grande Jatte, 1888. Oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 32 1/4 in; Musee Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels.

Seurat brought science and art together. He used the technique, pointillism–painting with small dots of primary colors that create the impression of secondary and tertiary colors. The idea was based on breaking color so that, when looked from afar, it creates a mixture of colors.

With summer quickly approaching, I was drawn to the blues that create the ocean, even with the yellow and the red dots. It makes me excited for the bright sun and blue ocean, even though we don’t sail in California.

But really, I chose this painting because Seurat reminds me of my first encounter with art history. In elementary school, we had these lectures, Masters of Painting. I’m not sure if that is the correct name. But I remember all the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders filing into the “library,” sitting cross-legged, shoulder to shoulder, and we’d look at art slides, with each time being a different artist. I used to love them because they were like a mini-fieldtrip, but I sometimes got in trouble because I couldn’t stay silent for an hour and a half. And after every lecture, we’d return to our classrooms and attempt to emulate or imitate the artist’s technique. I remember after the lecture about Seurat, we were given Q-tips, paint, and paper. With the Q-tips we painted enormous dots, that were actually really ugly, but I guess the point was that we understood the technique of pointillism. I’m angry at myself for not appreciating these lectures and experiences at the time.

J