Vice President Joe Biden at the Delaware Children's Museum Gala

The Delaware Children's Museum had a grand opening Gala and fund raiser this evening. We had a great time and got to finally meet Congressman Castle and also Vice President Joe Biden.

Here we are with the Vice President. I gave my camera to a woman and asked her to take our picture when we got a chance to say hello to the vice president.

She took more picture than that. There were other folks in line ahead of us, most noticeably a marine in dress uniform.

The very nice woman took pictures of us as we got to say hello and finally the great shot when we were posing. I never even got to thank her for the extra pictures. I told him he was doing a great job, I did not say it was a big f***ing deal, though I was tempted.

He gave a touching speech about how important it was to support the DCM. Being a parent and grandparent you could tell he was touched and of course as parents, Lynn and I were touched by his speech. Beau was the announced host of the Gala, so I was wondering if his dad would show up. When we had to go through metal detectors to get in, I knew something was up.

Body Plastination sensation

We visited the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the Maryland Science Center when we were in Baltimore on Saturday. The exhibit is made up of many bodies and body parts that have been subjected to plastination, a process that leaves the bodies looking very realistic but preserved. This one focused on the brain as an underlying theme, but explored all parts of the body and plastinated corpses in various poses.


I snuck a picture even though there were signs saying no photography permitted. The had scared people so much in the exhibit that even the other patrons were warning me I could lose my camera. I must have missed a more full speech about camera confiscation at the entrance.

I should have taken a picture of the look of horror combined with fascination that was on our faces during the tour of the entire exhibit. It was very interesting to see the body parts and the exploded anatomical displays. Many of the veins, arteries and nerves were colored differently for easier understanding, some bodies had the skin left on in strips to be artistic, but you couldn't forget that these used to be people, and I am not a big autopsy, dissection or corpse fan myself.

The room showing the stages of human development in the womb was especially interesting even as it was vaguely unsettling. Even though I had seen pictures in books it is amazing when you see the real thing and how tiny a fetus is in the early stages, yet it has all of the features of a baby at the small size. Some of these displays were soft tissue in formalin some were pregnant woman who had died while pregnant (apparently) and were plastinated.

Wikipedia lists the steps of plastination. First the body is embalmed with formaldehyde as a regular burial might be, then the body is dehydrated by soaking all of the tissues in acetone, the acetone is boiled out by reducing the pressure which sucks the polymer in during the impregnation step, then comes hardening or curing step and finally posing. The bodies in the display were posed in all types of ways, the one seated as above was the mildest. There were upside down skateboarders and yoga practitioners, an ice skating couple and a baseball player in mid-swing.

I recommend the exhibit.

Botero at the Delaware Art Museum

Last weekend we visited the exhibit, "The Baroque World of Fernando Botero" at the Delaware Art Museum. You will recall that Botero is famous for his voluptuous, corpulent, or even bulbous figures in sculpture and in paintings. He seems to use the style to poke fun at important figures, though he claims that is not his intent. These twin pictures of the "President" and "First Lady" certainly suggest that.


The figures are sitting on his classic bulbous puffy horses that he loves to paint and sculpt.

One of my favorites was the Nuncio (2004), which I found humorous because the Nuncio dwarfs his servant, maybe this is Botero's opinion of the Nuncio's self importance. It was pointed out to me that both are dwarfed by the jungle.

There were several very large sculptures outside in the museum's sculpture garden just for the show.

The cartoony Rape of Europa (1999)


The stocky Hand (1985)

No image is sacred enough to escape the corpulent transformations of his paint brush. This painting of the Crucifixion for instance.


I realized that we have also seen Botero's works in Chile on our honeymoon and this sculpture, Reclining Figure (1984) at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama.

MoMA has the Van Gogh

One of the more popular paintings that the Museum of Modern Art in new York has is the painting The Starry Night by Van Gogh. This was at least eveident by the constant crowd of art appreciators gathered around the painting. I was excited to see the Van Gogh with my own eyes (if necessarily through the glass on the painting). Van Gogh did cut off his ear lobe, but there is a lively debate as to why and what medical condition caused him to do so.

here is the list from Wikipedia, all of these have advocates and naysayers:

• Epilepsy
• Bipolar disorder
• Sunstroke
• Ménière's disease
• Lead poisoning
• Acute Intermittent Porphyria
• Syphilis
• Absinthe Intoxication
  

I myself am a big fan of Acute Intermittent Porphyria because it sounds so cool.

How do you pronounce that name anyway? van go? van gawff? The dutch pronunciation is not "f" but more of a guttural h. It sounds pretentious when you pronounce it differently from everyone else in the English Speaking world (especially if you speak English). Or perhaps we should pronounce all names the way they are pronounced in the language of their origin. God help the Welsh!

Meet the Artist in Santiago

When we were at the Museo de Bellas Artes we were captivated by the work of the artist Sergio Roggerone set off in a gallery off the main hall. He has a modern style, with an almost cartoony flair yet is evocative of baroque and byzantine religious art.

While we were there (11/17/2006) we wanted to get a program of his exhibit and we copied all of the web addresses down in the seemingly impossible hope of acquiring one of these pieces some day. As we hunted down a program, the woman in the gift shop was monopolized by a group. Lynn found the program and starts frantically pointing at the leader of the group in the gift shop. It was Sergio Roggerone himself! That day was the opening of the exhibit so he was there to see it. We got his autograph and information that purchasing the art was possible (www.roggerone.net seems to be defunct, don't bother with that one). I do love the chance to meet an artist or author of works which I admire.

Here is my favorite, a triptych called Madona Intergalactica. It is very three dimensional and Byzantine. Unfortunately it is sold.

La Reina Azul - The Blue Queen.

A mermaid.

There were many other interesting works there which can be seen at his website. Please do pardon the quality of my pictures, I had to sneak them with my crappy Treo camera instead of a good one.