Visiting the MFA
Aug. 22nd, 2014 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elabyLast weekend, Rachel and I went to one of my favorite places in the world: the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Rachel’s library has a membership so we can reserve passes to go down there whenever they’re available. Rachel got up early to put the egg strata we’d made the day before in the oven, so it came out hot and smelling delicious when I woke up. She made it using a small loaf of bread we’d bought at the previous weekend’s farmers market and topped it with veggie sausage patties. I usually have to wait a few hours before I want to eat breakfast, but I snarfed this down right after getting up – it was that good <3
We drove down to Boston using a new route, because the last several times we’d gone, the GPS and Rachel’s phone had taken us different circuitous routes every time. This time, we used a freaking map XD And it worked out perfectly. I think it might’ve taken us a bit longer, but the route was simpler and didn’t require that we go all the way downtown first to get to the T station on the north edge of the city. We also went to a different T stop than usual, as recommended by one of Rachel’s coworkers :) It meant we didn’t have to change lines at all and we just had to walk a little ways to get to the museum. We left our house at 9:00 and were through admission by 11:30.
I’m always excited to go to the MFA, but this time I was really excited. There was no specific reason, no exhibition in particular that I wanted to see, but I had been vibrating with anticipation all week. It’s just such a miraculous place: there are echoing, high-ceilinged halls filled with light next to tiny, dimly lit chambers, passages with wooden screens carved with six-pointed stars, rooms designed to look like Victorian salons and Buddhist temples. The way they use light and space there makes it unique. The whole place has this very distinct smell, reminiscent of a newly printed book with glossy photographs – but to me it smells like paintings and history and calm and a love of beauty. And, of course, the museum filled to the brim with art and artifacts of all varieties, from Monet paintings to Egyptian sarcophagi to pots painted with the Mayan hero twins. There are numerous wings: Art of the Ancient World, Art of the Asias, Art of Africa and the South Pacific, Art of the Americas, Art of Europe, Art of the Middle East, Contemporary Art. Even if you ran through the whole thing, it would take you more than a day to see everything.
We made our first stop at the Nubian gold jewelry exhibit, one of the temporary special exhibits. It was incredible to see these stunning pieces that were 4,000 years old – some of them were very modern in style. Some were heavily influenced by Egyptian culture as well, and it was cool to see the mixture of Nubian style and religious symbols with the more familiar Egyptian style.
Next, we went to see the Magna Carta – the actual Magna Carta, not a copy. Yeah, the piece of parchment that’ll be celebrating its 800th birthday next year, the one that King John of Robin Hood fame agreed to under duress in a field in England and set the basis for the U.S. constitution. That Magna Carta. The Angevin/Plantagenet line include some of my favorites in English history, and so I was thrilled to see the actual document that John would have read and touched. I couldn’t see his signature anywhere on it, but the writing was faded and cracked in a lot of places and, as [Bad username or site: ”_melisande_” @ livejournal.com] tells me, medieval Latin is hard to read anyway. It was beautiful, in any event – the tiny penstrokes were so perfect. I wondered who actually drafted it. Probably a church-trained scribe of some sort?
Rachel told me that I was completely in charge of our day and she would follow wherever I wanted to go <3 So I took us to the European Art wing and then to the Art of the Americas wing, because I’ve been feeling drawn to oil paintings lately. I took classes for years when I was in elementary and middle school, but I haven’t done much oil painting since then, and lately it’s been calling me. I took copious notes while we were there, writing down the artists and paintings that particularly drew me. I always laugh to myself that I’ve finally found something I like about Europe in the 1700’s – I like the art. (It’s the literature I’m not as fond of.)
We stopped for lunch at the museum cafeteria, after looking at the restaurant menu and determining it to be too expensive for that day. The food in the cafeteria is pretty great, though; I had green chile corn chowder, a salad, and French fries. After that, we wandered around the Art of the Americas some more and saw the collection of Central American art, which I hadn’t seen much of before. I love Mayan art and its sinuous, flowing curves and lack of sharp corners.
One of our favorite rooms in the entire museum is a recreated Victorian salon in the Art of Europe. It has dark wood floors, deep red walls, and paintings crammed in every possible space. It’s set up to look just like the museum looked in the 1800s, and the art in this room is my favorite (and Rachel’s too!). First of all, there’s some mind-blowing marble sculpture, including a statues of Medea clothed in the most realistically carved fabric I’ve ever seen. The paintings on the walls are my favorites, too: pastoral scenes of rolling fields and misty hills, ancient sun-soaked temples, dramatically lit valleys beneath thunderstorms, portraits of 19th-century rural folks with flowers in their hair.
We briefly visited the Contemporary Art wing, which is always fun. I have very old-fashioned tastes when it comes to art, but I’m learning more about contemporary art and I like thinking about the circumstances of its creation and the thought behind it. There’s a beaded curtain in one of the high doorways between sections of the exhibit, and visitors are encouraged to touch it and move through it. It’s very heavy and wave-like. There was also a really neat installment of blue and green threads going from one wall overhead to another, crisscrossing, creating a look like someone had drawn cross-hatched lines in the air. These were permanent exhibits; the special exhibits in the Contemporary Art wing were in the middle of being set up so we didn’t get to see any of them.
As it got later in the afternoon, we decided to make a stop at the Art of the Ancient World so I could visit the mummies. I’m fascinated by cultural death rituals but I’m also frightened of dead people, and I very much want to get over the fear so that I can enjoy learning and looking at artifacts. I’ve been practicing some perspective shifts that I hope will help with that fear, instead of my previous approach of “if I look at enough Victorian postmortem photographs I’ll somehow rid myself of the phobia”. I knew some of the mummies at the MFA had encaustic portraits (painted with wax-based paint on thin wood and secured in their wrappings) and I’ve been reading about those lately so I wanted to see them. They’re very beautiful and evocative.
We wandered exhausted through the halls a bit more after that, looking for the bookstore, and there we found a tiny doll-sized paint set and some doll-sized crayons :3 And a small puzzle of one of Monet’s water-lily paintings, which I love. The museum closes at 4:45 on the weekends (*sadface*) so we were hurried out by the staff. We managed to get on the T for free because the stop is just out in the open in the street with no kiosk to buy tickets, and there were so many people that they just let everyone on and told us to pay once we got to one of the underground stations. We got off before the station because we’d found a Wagamama in the area (yay, curry!) so we got a free ride :)
We were wiped out when we got home and we haven’t really recovered yet XD Mostly because we had other things that kept one or the other (or both) of us out late every night this week. I’m looking forward to the weekend!
We drove down to Boston using a new route, because the last several times we’d gone, the GPS and Rachel’s phone had taken us different circuitous routes every time. This time, we used a freaking map XD And it worked out perfectly. I think it might’ve taken us a bit longer, but the route was simpler and didn’t require that we go all the way downtown first to get to the T station on the north edge of the city. We also went to a different T stop than usual, as recommended by one of Rachel’s coworkers :) It meant we didn’t have to change lines at all and we just had to walk a little ways to get to the museum. We left our house at 9:00 and were through admission by 11:30.
I’m always excited to go to the MFA, but this time I was really excited. There was no specific reason, no exhibition in particular that I wanted to see, but I had been vibrating with anticipation all week. It’s just such a miraculous place: there are echoing, high-ceilinged halls filled with light next to tiny, dimly lit chambers, passages with wooden screens carved with six-pointed stars, rooms designed to look like Victorian salons and Buddhist temples. The way they use light and space there makes it unique. The whole place has this very distinct smell, reminiscent of a newly printed book with glossy photographs – but to me it smells like paintings and history and calm and a love of beauty. And, of course, the museum filled to the brim with art and artifacts of all varieties, from Monet paintings to Egyptian sarcophagi to pots painted with the Mayan hero twins. There are numerous wings: Art of the Ancient World, Art of the Asias, Art of Africa and the South Pacific, Art of the Americas, Art of Europe, Art of the Middle East, Contemporary Art. Even if you ran through the whole thing, it would take you more than a day to see everything.
We made our first stop at the Nubian gold jewelry exhibit, one of the temporary special exhibits. It was incredible to see these stunning pieces that were 4,000 years old – some of them were very modern in style. Some were heavily influenced by Egyptian culture as well, and it was cool to see the mixture of Nubian style and religious symbols with the more familiar Egyptian style.
Next, we went to see the Magna Carta – the actual Magna Carta, not a copy. Yeah, the piece of parchment that’ll be celebrating its 800th birthday next year, the one that King John of Robin Hood fame agreed to under duress in a field in England and set the basis for the U.S. constitution. That Magna Carta. The Angevin/Plantagenet line include some of my favorites in English history, and so I was thrilled to see the actual document that John would have read and touched. I couldn’t see his signature anywhere on it, but the writing was faded and cracked in a lot of places and, as [Bad username or site: ”_melisande_” @ livejournal.com] tells me, medieval Latin is hard to read anyway. It was beautiful, in any event – the tiny penstrokes were so perfect. I wondered who actually drafted it. Probably a church-trained scribe of some sort?
Rachel told me that I was completely in charge of our day and she would follow wherever I wanted to go <3 So I took us to the European Art wing and then to the Art of the Americas wing, because I’ve been feeling drawn to oil paintings lately. I took classes for years when I was in elementary and middle school, but I haven’t done much oil painting since then, and lately it’s been calling me. I took copious notes while we were there, writing down the artists and paintings that particularly drew me. I always laugh to myself that I’ve finally found something I like about Europe in the 1700’s – I like the art. (It’s the literature I’m not as fond of.)
We stopped for lunch at the museum cafeteria, after looking at the restaurant menu and determining it to be too expensive for that day. The food in the cafeteria is pretty great, though; I had green chile corn chowder, a salad, and French fries. After that, we wandered around the Art of the Americas some more and saw the collection of Central American art, which I hadn’t seen much of before. I love Mayan art and its sinuous, flowing curves and lack of sharp corners.
One of our favorite rooms in the entire museum is a recreated Victorian salon in the Art of Europe. It has dark wood floors, deep red walls, and paintings crammed in every possible space. It’s set up to look just like the museum looked in the 1800s, and the art in this room is my favorite (and Rachel’s too!). First of all, there’s some mind-blowing marble sculpture, including a statues of Medea clothed in the most realistically carved fabric I’ve ever seen. The paintings on the walls are my favorites, too: pastoral scenes of rolling fields and misty hills, ancient sun-soaked temples, dramatically lit valleys beneath thunderstorms, portraits of 19th-century rural folks with flowers in their hair.
We briefly visited the Contemporary Art wing, which is always fun. I have very old-fashioned tastes when it comes to art, but I’m learning more about contemporary art and I like thinking about the circumstances of its creation and the thought behind it. There’s a beaded curtain in one of the high doorways between sections of the exhibit, and visitors are encouraged to touch it and move through it. It’s very heavy and wave-like. There was also a really neat installment of blue and green threads going from one wall overhead to another, crisscrossing, creating a look like someone had drawn cross-hatched lines in the air. These were permanent exhibits; the special exhibits in the Contemporary Art wing were in the middle of being set up so we didn’t get to see any of them.
As it got later in the afternoon, we decided to make a stop at the Art of the Ancient World so I could visit the mummies. I’m fascinated by cultural death rituals but I’m also frightened of dead people, and I very much want to get over the fear so that I can enjoy learning and looking at artifacts. I’ve been practicing some perspective shifts that I hope will help with that fear, instead of my previous approach of “if I look at enough Victorian postmortem photographs I’ll somehow rid myself of the phobia”. I knew some of the mummies at the MFA had encaustic portraits (painted with wax-based paint on thin wood and secured in their wrappings) and I’ve been reading about those lately so I wanted to see them. They’re very beautiful and evocative.
We wandered exhausted through the halls a bit more after that, looking for the bookstore, and there we found a tiny doll-sized paint set and some doll-sized crayons :3 And a small puzzle of one of Monet’s water-lily paintings, which I love. The museum closes at 4:45 on the weekends (*sadface*) so we were hurried out by the staff. We managed to get on the T for free because the stop is just out in the open in the street with no kiosk to buy tickets, and there were so many people that they just let everyone on and told us to pay once we got to one of the underground stations. We got off before the station because we’d found a Wagamama in the area (yay, curry!) so we got a free ride :)
We were wiped out when we got home and we haven’t really recovered yet XD Mostly because we had other things that kept one or the other (or both) of us out late every night this week. I’m looking forward to the weekend!
