The Delaware Museum of Art is located in Wilmington, DE, just up the road from us. This is a fine small museum with several really interesting collections. There is a large selection of American illustrative art, as optimized from the painting shown here. The galleries include a contemporary collection more often found in a larger gallery in a bigger city. It is worth a visit.

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In December we were able to visit NYC again, so I got my first chance to visit the MET. It is a very large museum, and I made no attempt to see it all. Instead I took a good long look at sculpture and artifacts from antiquity, specifically: Etruscan, Greek, and Roman. After that survey I did a spin through several of the 19th C European painting galleries, and finished by a quick spin through modern American Art. I was thrilled to see several of my favorite sculptures, particularly by Noguchi, Maillol, Calder, Lachaise, and Boccioni. I look forward to seeing much more of the wonderful museum in the future.

I have seen these Assyrian carvings, and similar ones from Egypt and other ancient sites, in the art history books for many years. I found these in the Brooklyn Art Museum, in fact a whole room of these, and nothing can really prepare you for the impact they have in person. The scale is enormous, and the carving truly spectacular. Very memorable.

So, way back when, a Philadelphia philanthropist had a crazy passion for Auguste Rodin, the famous French sculptor. He created this museum to feature original castings and carvings, as well as excellent copies of some of Rodin’s best known works. Many of the bronze castings were made after Rodin’s death from molds of the originals. No photograph can do justice to the huge “Gates of Hell” sculpture, which includes some 200 figures in every conceivable pose. It is about 20 feet high, and outstanding in every way. This is a nice first stop on the East Coast Art Tour.

Starr has had little recognition outside of Colorado Springs, and it is really too bad, because the guy is a fantastic artist and visionary. All of these sculptures are located at the Kempf residence near Cheyenne Canyon, and date back to 1977. Starr was keenly interested in creating an environment where each of these sculptures relate to one another even as they stand alone. The material is painted steel, and there are many moving parts. The sculptures slowly swing back and fourth in the wind, several rotate, and the round parts with fins spin, like a roof vent. He did all of this from a tiny little workshop set along the street, below the house a little bit – eventually each sculpture is too large, and he is out in his driveway for the final assembly. Starr committed suicide in 1995, and some of the sculptures shown here may have been removed due to ongoing legal issues with the city and neighborhood. The house gives some scale, but take my word when I say these are BIG sculptures.

We had the opportunity to attend a McDowall Family Reunion at St. Pauley’s Island in South Carolina in June, 2011. The garden was started in the early 20th century on the foundations of a rice plantation from the 19th century, by a husband and wife artist couple – the Hungtingon’s. These photos concentrate on a handful of sculpture, but the estate is filled with stately oak trees, hydrangeas, intimate garden spaces, and several indoor galleries. If in the Myrtle Beach area or further south, this is a must see.