Reduction in Force - Increase in Office Supplies

In Which I Steer My Way Through a Sea of Glass

My poor blog. I've been neglecting it horribly and boy do the numbers reflect it. Well, we'll be football-less until Friday, since I didn't come close to winning the badge this week, I'm afraid. Congrats to Tom on his fantastic picks and great win!

So, where does that leave us? I suppose I'd better get on with the Chihuly pictures before too much time goes by and I forget what I'm talking about. When last we were at the exhibit we were in the Reeds, and now we move on, fittingly enough, to...

Boats







The first of the two old, wooden rowboats was filled with pieces known as Floats, like large marbles of every color and size. Not surprisingly, they resemble the glass marbles Chihuly was enamored of as a child. Having a boat filled with Floats has a bit of a double-meaning, since the pieces are actually based on Japanese fishing floats and they have been literally floated in other displays. I think I'd really like to see them in water sometime, as it would have a more organic feel.





The two boats were placed stern to stern, adrift in a big, black, endless shiny sea. The next boat was filled to bursting with pieces of Ikebana, also of every color and description, which made up for the lack of pictures back in the second room.







It was hard to get a bad shot, but equally hard to get a great one. The official shots of the exhibit had better lighting, if you want to check them out. It was a very static part of the exhibit in a way I can't really explain. Oh, and the room was packed with people, so it wasn't quite as enjoyable a part of the experience, though I loved the explosion of color.

In Which I Admit that I'm a Color Whore

Thanks to all of you who commented on the first set of photos. As was pointed out, you really do need to see these first-hand to get the full effect, mostly because of their scope. But if I can offer a taste that makes you hungry for more in person, I've done my job. Let's move on to the next room, shall we?

This is the room where I had the most trouble getting good shots. I just couldn't hold still long enough to avoid blur on the Ikebana pieces in such low light. I'm going to look into the monopod that was mentioned, because that would have been ideal!

Venetians + Ikebana

This is the only Ikebana picture I took that didn't blur.



It's not from a color palette I particularly like, but it's very evocative of nature (it has a mushroom-like feel to me) and appropriate for the style.

It got easier after that, once I moved on to the Venetians.









The colors! The detail! The cherubim! I was in love. One part of the text on the wall really summed it up:

The Venetians are defined by a baroque aesthetic of exuberance - even excess - that is deeply rooted in the Venetian tradition. This is especially true of the colors, which owe as much to the extraordinary color combination in the Renaissance paintings of Titian, Veronese, and other Venetian masters as they do to the glass produced in the factories of Murano. Chihuly's expressionist use of form and color for their own sake, so foreign to American sensibilities, is one of the liberating characteristics of the Venetians.

Yeah, I'm a color whore (Did you know there's a Flickr group just for people like me?), so these were right up my alley. I should point out that if you click on any of these photos, you can see them larger. I scaled these so they're not huge, which I neglected to do yesterday.

Tomorrow we move on to the Persians, which are truly spectacular.