Leogulus-Champ's (Taweewat Somboonpanyakul) blog: The First Post about Museum of Fine Art

The first topic that came to my mind during my visit of MFA this time is about "the perspective".

The perspective from where you see the painting actually change how I feel about the painting, especially couple landscape paintings from Monet. I found this is a unique way to experience the art like I never did before. You can't really do it from the photograph of the painting online or elsewhere. This makes me appreciate my time going to different art museums more.

The two photos below show the same painting but at a different angle. Looking at the painting at the 45 degree angle gives me a sense of three dimensions from the painting which is gone as soon as I stepped right outside the painting.

Valley of the Petite Creuse, Claude Monet, 1889

Another topic that came to mind is the historical context of each painting. Especially pairs of paintings that are done in the same period/era.

For example, the two paintings below were done around the same period by Frech artists living in Europe. They were astronishingly different from the subject matter (historical figure, stories vs landscape of everyday life), the technique they used to paint each painting, to the location where the paintings were painted (indoor vs outdoor). Back in 1860s, most Frech academic prefers painting about the Hercules fighting with its horse and absolutely dislike quick paintings of the mountains and views. One benefit of love/hate relationship between different kinds of paintings in Europe is that many of these now-so-called classics impressionism like Monet were not very popular in Europe at that time. This allowed the Americans, who came to appreciate many things that Europeans hates, gathered much of the early impressionist works from the very beginning. In fact, MFA has the largest collection of Monet outside of France because of this reason.

Just image a guy, grabbing his color tubes and going outside to draw all the 'impression' that he got from experiencing the view while his friend is sitting in the dark corner inside the studio trying to finish this masterpiece. They both are artists but their world could not be more different.

By visitng art museums, it made me realized that even though the art has progressed so much in the past several centuries, we can still experience art from the past as if they were just finished recently. That is the beauty of museums.

What about other parts of our life? Have they progressed as much as the art did? Can we experience and appreciate those moments in the past like we could with art?

PS: shout out for Museum Day by Smithsonian which make me go outside and enjoy the outdoors for a while.