The place is packed with people. Many have inexplicably brought small children. I wonder how the museum is promoting itself if this is the demographic they attract. The kids are understandably bored out of their minds. The drone of voices in here is amazing, thousands of conversations unrelated to the museum or its collections. Most of these people should have gone to The Disney Store instead. It is difficult to read the descriptions of the art being hit by purses and strollers every few moments. Losing oneself in a study of the works is near impossible, [it's like being in a cafeteria line. Perhaps coming here during the holidays was a bad idea.]

I am surprised to learn that Ray and Charles Eames designed molded plywood products for the military during World War II, substituting the new material for metals, which were then in short supply.

Also of interest were many photos, like a solarized print of hands by Man Ray. I have a book of his work at home, but seeing an original print, even the same size as it would be in a coffee table book, is interesting. There is a retained freshness in the original print that does not come through in a copy. A print by Guy Bourdin, evidently of stained concrete or plaster, I have never seen it before. Finding it here felt like a vitamin booster shot recalling certain images in my Brera series. Third was an Avedon photo, recognizable as such from across the room, although the subject was uninteresting to me. The style of light and composition stood out.

Another area of interest was architectural drawings and models, most of which were concepts never executed. What struck me was how many brilliant ideas never make it off the drawing board or out of 1/100th scale. Like the Guy Bourdin photo, this energized me, to keep trying. So many plans, models, sketches, and eventually something gets built, or they lead to other kinds of projects, like Eames military glider noses leading to so much else. Hope?

Gauguin painted on burlap, Van Gogh painted with fury, piling pigments high, Munch is virtually doing watercolors with oils.

Cezanne though, the color, the effect at different distances, amazing. Another I didn’t understand from prints.

"Turnign Road At MontGeroult" by Paul Cezanne (1898)

"Pines and Rocks" by Paul Cezanne (1897)

"Still Life With Apples" by Paul Cezanne (1895-1898)

Starry Night is mobbed; every few minutes a flash goes off and a security guard yells. The [museum's] light on this canvas is intentionally dim. Are many of the gawkers? No one else is looking at the brush strokes.

Seurat was amazing. The pointalist thing doesn’t always work very well, but he knew how to do it. He really knew how to do it.

Despite the crowd and chaos, it was a good day. In fact, after recovering from vacation, I started painting again on Wednesday. Someone discarded an art projector in the hallway a few months ago and I am using it to paint from a photograph that didn’t quite work right. The idea of the image was right though, and that is what I hope to bring to life. My mind has been chaotic lately and painting melts it away. Seeing the Guy Bourdin print in the museum, combined with reading Gauguin and reading all this material on the other Impressionists, has restored some self-confidence. A friend has an art show coming up and I hope to show and maybe even sell a few new pieces. I need to get some lazy demons out of my head. Running modaCYCLE seems to run me into the ground a little too often. I love it, helping fashion designers tell their stories is amazing, but I need to also keep telling my own stories.

Even if I got some sort of digital Super IMAX 4D rig, I’m not sure I’d be happy.

Part of being an artist is being never really satisfied with your tools or your last piece. If we get happy we stop.

One thing I noticed in the stack of what I’ve kept, the models don’t look at the camera very often. I sometimes tell new models “don’t look at the camera unless you mean it.”

I look at all of these thousands of images in the magazines I’m tossing out, and I have a visceral reaction to compelling lighting, compositions, dances of color on the page. When I look at a photo in which the model is just standing there deer in headlights waiting for the shutter to click, supremely unconfident, no matter what is going on in the rest of the image, I have a strong dislike for the whole. If it is an interesting setting, I am even angry at the photographer for wasting it on an uncompelling subject.

To me, photography is only a rush when it feels challenging, and if the model just stands there looking at the lens, waiting to have their picture taken, it is uninteresting. I don’t like when they submit to the process, when they are having their picture taken rather than being interesting.

Unless you have the confidence to stare down the lens or tell a story, don’t go near it, the lens will know you are weak. The lens is predatory. To use it is always to be hunting for something. When the prey is immediately submissive, the hunt is dull.

It could be argued that science is an art. It could also be argued that art is a science. Whatever they are, they both involve testing ideas and looking for answers. They both involve curiosity.

Science is an art, in that creative leaps of faith are required to hypothesize. Science is nothing if not creative problem solving and a way of working to understand the universe.

Art is a science, in that when one is creating, one applies rules to carry out an experiment which might produce a result. In the process of the creation of a work, one tests these rules. Each choice is a rule. Are you going to use light blue for the sky? That’s a choice, a rule. You or someone else can later try another color and compare the results. Each work of art one starts is an experiment testing some hypothesis. The outcome is always uncertain. There are always unplanned results in complex rule systems. When the work is complete, both the final product and the memory of the process add to our knowledge of how things work.

Science and art are both linked at fundamental levels.