Literary London: the Artist and the Muse
For Christmas this year, my boyfriend got me a mini, portable water color set, and sketchbook. And thus, I have this goal of going outside and doing art. Although I have not yet ventured into the many parks around me to do a watercolor still, it seems a bit too cold for that still, I made it a more general goal to do more art here. This is also in part inspired by something Prof. Henderson said in our introductory meeting at MIT: to enjoy our month being immersed by the HASSes (i.e. humanities, arts, and social sciences).
With all of our after class outings to the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Guildhall museum, the British Museum, and even churches like Westminster Abbey and all its sculptures, I am drinking my fill in all things art, artists, muses, and patronage. Here are some of my favorite things I've seen.
Left: Westminster Abbey's sublime hallway (1269), lined on every surface with magnificent marble sculptures and inscriptions
Middle: Exquisite Pain (2006) by Damien Hurst, a terrifying anatomically correct looking sculpture of a man who was damned by Apollo to skin himself, located in the Church of St Bartholomew (1123)
Right: The Coronation Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (1600), in the National Portrait Gallery
Some things I drew during these visits or during class.
Left: Petrarch
Right: Sketched in class in 3 minutes, because he labeled himself as the Poet Laureate, which is the energy I'm trying to bring to 2025.
Left: Cast of Matteo Civitalli's Angel (1496) in the V&A
Right: Sketched in person in about 20 minutes Procreate
Left: Venus, Marble from Rome, AD 1-200, in the British Museum
Right: Sketched in pencil in about 30 minutes from the photo image.
The sketch of Venus is an improvement from the previous two, because I realized shadows make art so much more interesting. Additionally, I wanted to draw Aphrodite/Venus, because "ideal beauty" is so interesting to me, as a Korean.
However, Venus is also the goddess of sex, and in the Hellenistic period exhibit in the British museum, I noted that the display talked about how erotic art was central to the time period. Adowyn was with me, so I wondered out loud if it was because everyone was walking around half naked. Post Garden of Eve. Recently, I walked into the Foyles bookstore, and was randomly flipping through books in the fiction section looking for contemporary books based in London, and I swear every book I picked up I landed on an erotic scene! Which led me to think that perhaps, the UK more so than the US, had normalized and found artistic inspiration in sex within realistic fiction literature!
As I wrote in my discussion post, I am curious about the driving force of artists, which led me to do my case study on Tyler the Creator. I'll finish this blog post with a screenshot of one of our very first readings this month: In an Artist's Studio by Christina Rossetti, which depicts a male artist who creates multiple art works, but it is just one ideal female muse in many forms that fuels his art. The eroticism of ancient roman sculptures and modern English literature reminded me of this poem, and makes me wonder if art might be so much easier if I stay close to primal human instincts.
Above: In an Artist's Studio (1856) screenshotted from my GoodNotes file
