Warhol with a toddler?

Oh yes, that's right. We were THOSE people with our baby at the museum. We took our first family outing to the BMA and it was a treat!



Photo copyright by http://www.modernblog.org/ of Andy Warhol's Rorschachs. 

 It was the closing weekend for the Andy Warhol retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the museum was a madhouse. (Next time we'll go on a weekday...) I strapped E into our baby carrier and traded off with the hubby during our visit. Given the crowds of people and the amount of time we spent there, E did a great job! We both cracked up as he kept singing and humming to himself in the serious silence of all the art lovers. (I'm thinking it's a right-brained thing - his way of enjoying the art.) Little E was mesmerized by the colors and repetition of Warhol's work. He seemed especially taken with the Rorschach-inspired inkblot paintings, which are nearly 14 feet tall!

I am a huge fan of the abstract expressionist movement (Kandinsky, de Kooning, Pollock, Frankenthaler, Twombly, Hartigan, Kline) as well as the reinvented works of the "neo" abstract expressionists (Motherwell, Appel, Basquiat). Any art aficionado will tell you it can be difficult to separate artists in categories that are so black and white. Warhol is no exception. His work took on many forms throughout his productive, acclaimed career. If all you've seen from Warhol are his pop icon images of over-sized soup cans or Marilyn Monroe screen prints, then I highly suggest you check out this exhibition (rotating nationwide)!

The exhibition was thought-provoking and a treat for my eyes. Viewing art always makes me miss the days of painting for hours on end in my studio. I do still paint, but it's usually little owls or turtles or something along those lines for my students or for E. Maybe that should be my resolution this year - schedule blocks of time to paint for ME. Hmm. We'll see...