Artful

Today, we went to a Frank Stella retrospective at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park. In part, because we wanted to spend a little time in the park, and also because we both enjoy Stella's work. He's associated with minimalism, and I had mostly been familiar with his earlier paintings, which tend to be simple geometric shapes in either bright colors or black and white. (I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff -- one of my very favorite artists is Sol LeWitt). But as his career continued, he started pushing the boundaries of what we might traditionally call a painting, first by departing from the standard rectangular canvas and then pushing into the third dimension more and more until his works basically become sculpture with a tenuous connection to the wall. Definitely worth the visit.

And then, after literally years of hemming and hawing about it, we applied our ticket purchase toward an annual membership, because there's a Monet exhibit coming up in February, and those tickets plus today's tickets are about the cost of a membership, and the truth is we get to this museum at least three or so times a year anyway. So it's long past time to step up on this one. I look forward to getting a lot of use out of it.