Monday, October 05, 2009

Fourth and Final Vacation Report

I am finally finishing my report of vacation doings. It has taken a long time. I wonder why that is ... oh, well, time flies when you're having fun!

Our 4th big adventure happened at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. We were lucky enough to have our return stay in OKC coincide with the museum's late night. After we checked into our hotel, we took short naps, then headed out to find the Art. Actually, we were quite close, although I was glad to have my GPS along. OKC has a lot of twisty and one-way streets that would have been difficult to navigate from a map.

The museum itself is nestled between downtown buildings. It looks more incorporated with the business community than our art museums in Houston. They are in a separate Museum District. The glass-fronted building immediately revealed an unexpected treasure: A three-story, 2,100-object glass sculpture by a famous glass artist named Dale Chihuly. This lovely piece of art is titled the Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower. (Click on the name to see a photo of it.)

We first learned about Chihuly at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, a wonderful public art gallery and artists-in-residence workplace, when they sponsored an glass art exhibit last year. Along with glass from many artists, there was a film about Chihuly, his vast glass art facility, and techniques of blowing/making art glass. It fascinated me, partly because son Nick made beautiful glass art in college.

That exhibit had primed me for anything Chihuly. It turned out that the OKC Museum of Art has the largest collection of Dale Chihuly's work in the country. (His wife came from there, so he has roots in Oklahoma.) Once I heard that, I got excited. My excitement doubled when the guard told me that photography - even flash photography - was permitted in the Chihuly galleries. I immediately left to get my camera out of the car.

If you clicked on Chihuly's name in the paragraph above, you saw photographs of his exhibit. (If you didn't, do it now!) I cannot begin to describe them to you in words because they are so lush, so exotic, so mindblowingly beautiful that I would be writing for the rest of the day.

I took 234 photographs of the glass pieces. And I got a little revenge on Michael. I cannot tell you how many times I have stood around waiting for him to finish taking pictures. This time it was him waiting around instead of me! LOL

My plan is to use 15 of those photographs for my Houston Photographic Society portfolio review next week. In a portfolio review, several professional photographers evaluate your work and give you feedback in a kind of round robin manner. With this information, the photographer being reviewed can learn what needs to be done to improve the images and/or market them.

Turning pictures of glass art into good photographs is actually very difficult and I have struggled with it despite having taken so many pictures. I want my portfolio to be top-notch, with no amateur mistakes. Wish me luck on that.

Take a trip to Oklahoma City sometime and see the glass art galleries for yourself. They are gorgeous and you will be glad you did.

And that, along with the previous three blogs I posted, is what I did on my summer vacation. It was truly a good time.

Ciao