the sea x love

art

blaschkas glass sea creatures

A few months ago, I went to Wien to visit some art museums (mostly to see Wes Anderson’s exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum) and practice my German! This was my second trip to Austria but my first-time visiting Vienna. While I saw many amazing works of art and fragments of history, I want to focus on two sets of works that really blew me away—the Blaschka glass flowers and sea creatures. The Blaschkas were a father-son glass artist duo native to Czech-German borderland. They sold thousands of these glass invertebrates as models for scientific and academic study.

I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself a glass artist but my foray into glassblowing has deepened my appreciation of glass art and the skill required to produce such realistic and proportionally accurate replicas. Harvard also has a collection of their sea creatures and commissioned the infamous glass flowers, but I hadn’t seen the glass flowers before visiting Vienna. Both of these collections are breathtaking and so realistic, I am absolutely awestruck. These models are both art and scientific models, and quite honestly, these photos don’t do them justice.

Oliver Lee Jackson Recent Works (National Gallery of Art//DC)

I stumbled upon this exhibition. If you follow me on Instagram, you would think I’m this super artsy person and while I have developed an appreciation for art and what it reveals. I wasn’t always into art. I just didn’t think about it much growing up because I was more focused on science and literature but then I noticed the beauty and history in art and design. I also think my love of fashion and food helped further develop my interests in other arts. When I first visited DC in 8th grade I immediately fell in love. DC will always be one of my favorite places, I love the people, food, and the museums. I absolutely adore museums, they’re some of my favorite places to visit and just be. So, the fact that DC has tons of museums and exhibitions that are constantly changing is overwhelming in the best possible way. This feeling is the main reason why I decided to visit DC for a weekend earlier this summer (and every hotel in Maine was booked). I planned to visit three museums: Women in the Arts, Museum of the Palestinian People, and the Hirshhorn, but I ended up visiting a fourth museum the National Gallery of Art. I had never visited the National Gallery of Art before but after seeing some adverts for the Oliver Lee Jackson exhibition on the metro I had to see the paintings in person.

A little background on Oliver Lee Jackson, who’s also one of my top painters of all time, is a multifaceted artist (he’s a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and draftsman). He’s 84 and was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Although currently based in Oakland, CA he started his career through artistic community engagement such as creating an arts program at Pruitt & Igoe (a housing complex in St. Louis) in the 1960s. He also became involved with BAG (the Black Artists Group) as a consultant and collaborator on multimedia presentations for the African American community. He’s been an Artist in Residence and Visiting Artist at numerous institutions like Wake Forest, UC Santa Barbara, Aix-en-Provence, Harvard, and Flint Hill School, to name a few; and his works are in the permanent collections of The National Gallery of Art, MoMA, The Met, LACMA, and the Detroit Institute of the Arts in addition to numerous other public and private collection. You can read more about him here on his website, and you can check out some of my favorite works from his current exhibition which is on view at the National Gallery of Art in DC until Sept 15, 2019, below.

Roberto Burle Max @ NYBG

I grew up in and around gardens. My grandmother’s entire backyard seemed like the Garden of Eden to me. There was an endless supply of fruit (various types of citrus fruits and grapes) and a myriad of flowers that overwhelmed the air and my nose with the loveliest of smells. I had my own small garden at my home and gardened at the botanical garden in my town. After spending the past year researching gardens and seed banks (working from a more scientific perspective of urban agriculture) my love and appreciation of roaming landscaped environments was need of some renewal. (I was also desperately missing the gorgeous tropical plants of Colombia)

I heard about the Roberto Burle Max exhibition at the New York Botanical Gardens a few months ago. I wanted to see an international landscape architecture exhibition, as I had never seen one before and I was intrigued by how one would execute such a feat. It was absolutely breathtaking. Over the past 3 years, I’ve spent a majority of time focused on arid and desert environments; except for two trips to Costa Rica and Colombia. I absolutely love the tropics, just as much as deserts and more temperate biomes, but this exhibition provided me with a new appreciation for these ultrarich biomes. I highly recommend making the trek out to experience it. Check out my highlights below.

begonia
Etlingera elatior (I’m now a huge fan of these flowers because they have a hyper futurist vibe)