Sarasota and St. Petersburg, Florida
April 16, 2010
If you were going to test my brain and how it thinks, you would learn that my mode of thinking is definitely on the left side: logical, sequential, rational, analytical, objective, looks at parts rather than the whole. No surprise there, given that my top role models when I was a child were Spock (of Star Trek fame) and Sherlock Holmes. I soon came to realize the right side of my brain needed to be expanded, and I have exercised it as much as I could by the choices I make. Those choices include visiting art museums every once in a while.
The Tampa Bay area offered me several opportunities to exercise the right side of my brain. I first went to Sarasota for a day trip to the Ringling museums. The Ringling compound hosts the historic Asolo Theater, the Ringling Circus Museum, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art housed in the Ca' d'Zan Mansion. The Asolo Theater took me to 18th century Italy to a classic opera theater, and the Ringling Circus Museum took me to the 19th century when my ancestor Martin Van Buren Bates and his future wife Anna Swann were attractions in the circus. I saw a photograph of Anna but not my great-great-great uncle.
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| Rockwell's Freedom of Speech |
I spent most of my time though at the Ringling Museum of Art. The museum has a large collection of art gathered by John and Mabel Ringling. Most of the paintings are from Europe of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries and I soon tired of the sameness of this style. However, there is a collection of works from Peter Paul Reubens with some paintings from van Dyck and El Greco, artists that even I knew about. My favorite part of the museum was a temporary exhibit of works by Norman Rockwell. Although Rockwell considered himself an illustrator and many of his works are described as illustrations, his works have become art as time goes on. His art captures moments of America past that we have left behind, much like Baroque artists capturing the moments of Europe in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. By viewing these moments, each of us can ponder in our own way of life in America from the 1920's to the 1960's as captured by Rockwell.
I ended my day in Sarasota with a visit to the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens. The gardens had interesting collections of orchids and carnivorous plants that piqued my not-so-in-depth curiosity of green things.
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| The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus |
The next day was for the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, which has the second largest collection of paintings and other pieces of art by Salvador Dali. Dali was a surrealist and highly imaginative, and his works stretched the right side of my brain. Even after hearing a docent describe several of his paintings, I still had a difficult time understanding the transference of an idea from his mind onto the canvas. But who said that exercise was supposed to be easy :) My favorite painting of Dali in the museum is The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. It is over 14 feet tall and nine feet wide and is an allegory of man's conquest of space. For some reason, Dali decided to spill turpentine and let it run on a small part of the painting. Huh? A great painting to this workout of the right side of my brain.
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