Linnette Gomez
Professor Lisa Rockford
16 November 2011
Boca Art Museum An artist’s perspective gives a curious audience a world of creativity displaying emotion, talent, and intelligence. The Boca Art Museum contains extraordinary galleries with many interesting pieces of art that come together to create an entire work of art in unity, and different portraits and framework with a variety of mediums. Viewers can see abstract sculptors placed in the outside garden giving the audience self-thought of understanding strange pieces that could mean anything; the meaning is individualized. The first gallery in the museum exhibits many different portraits of people, made up of different mediums such as pen and ink on paper, graphite on paper, and acrylic on canvas. A portrait created by the artist, “Pavel Tchelitchew,” named Mere Parizot a portrait of his mother, made it out of pen and ink on paper. The paper looks dyed or if it was once white or if it just colored through age. The detail of the portrait looks complicated with many lines to emphasize the features of the profile; the shading seems to be used by bleeding ink through the quill. Lighter areas have less bleeding. Another portrait created by the artist Jeri Metz, made a portrait of a woman named Selma out of graphite on paper. There is not any explanation of relation to this woman but the detail looks well shaded. Darker areas are smeared closely to create the darker areas when lighter areas the graphite is smeared farther out to make lighter shading. The background has cross hatching and the facial features are lightly touched by the graphite since the material is permanent when placed on a surface and can be easily ruined when not placed properly. Another interesting portrait is made by the artist Fritz Scholder, an Egyptian style piece of art. The figures are displayed with frontal sideways view; the details show no exact areas of lighting and shading. The medium use in this piece is made of acrylic material and gives it a rough texture in certain areas when other areas are smoothed out. The main gallery in the museum is one of the most interesting creative galleries made by Federico Uribe. Federico Uribe created an entire African setting that contain various lifelike pieces of animals and trees made up of different materials such as soles of shoes, shoe laces, crutches, corks, cut up books, and wood shavings. It is so strange to see how the work is made up of strange materials and so uncommon to see these types of materials used in an art gallery but is put together very well it makes an extraordinary creation. Viewers are able to walk through the gallery to examine each piece of work closely noticing the trees made up of cut up books to create the trunk and shoelaces to simulate the palm leaves draping down. Other trees had different materials as in flip flops to create the entire tree folded and held by wires to simulate the leaves. Some trees were also made entirely of corks and others of cut up crutches put together. Some of the life size animals are made up of the soles of shoes, folded or cut together when others are made of wood shavings, corks, or golf balls. The animals are easy to identify which they would represent such as the life size horse is made up of long cut wood shavings bended and held together by nails, the bull in the gallery is made up of wood and shoes, neatly put together to create a perfect bull representation. There are a variety of monkeys some made up of shoes and some made up of draping shoe laces that look more like chimpanzees. One of the bigger pieces in this gallery is the sun, made up the soles of shoes stacked on one another to create half a sphere hanging on the upper wall and spray painted yellow, the rays are the shoe laces stretched out to give more the sunny look. As viewers are able to walk through the gallery, a portrait of a herd of zebras is placed on the walls. The most interesting part of this piece is what the stripes of the zebra is made of, long cut pieces of bicycle tires resemble the stripes. This piece is so well put together the viewer cannot be able to tell the material used in this piece right away until looked closely. Another piece just like this one is one of a flock of sheep. The faces of the sheep are actually drawn into to the wall but puffy bodies that unite all of them together is the material of cables bended and curled together to give it the puffy texture of the sheep. There is also use of kinetic art in the gallery with birds made up of shoes or cut up books with the pages mimicking the motion of flight, all tied together with wires and change motion through the air. A very interested and intelligent use of everyday materials put together to create a natural setting and lifelike sculptors the audience can enjoy inspecting and staring at. Federico Uribe developed this gallery to create a world in which man and animal come together into one in nature. Putting together and transforming these everyday materials that people throw away every day and recycle to put together a beautiful natural display of animals and wildlife. A strong message to the audience of endangered wildlife through his creativity and put out a need for harmony, and mindful consumption. On the outside of the museum there is a garden decorated of different sculptors some obvious of what they are when others are very abstracted of any true form. One of the first sculptors on display is one made from the artist Bill Barrett. A creation named after Picasso’s made up of fabricated bronze, the figure is abstract containing several pieces curved and welded together without any focal point or any place for the viewer’s eyes to rest. This piece is life sized. Another sculptor placed in the garden is one resembling a human head only showing the lower jaw, neck and shoulders, the rest of the head is a cube. The piece could represent a blockhead, a message towards people representing a stubborn mankind. This sculptor is made up of marble, neatly smoothed around the edges to show soft complexion and is about five feet high. A more than life sized sculptor placed on an outside fountain is about seven feet high and 10 feet long made up of stone, of a man lying on its side covered in carvings resembling a maze. The message of this piece could be different to viewers; some would say it is a representation of a puzzled man. Another gallery of this museum is upstairs displaying a variety of pieces of interesting materials. A piece by Larry Rivers created a piece made up of oil on canvas mounted to sculpted foam board. It is American pop art of a mix of political, social and historical references that is 80 to 98 inches. A piece created by Jules Olitski made up of acrylic on canvas. It is 35 to 128 inches, he is one of the first to use thinned paints in a staining technique to create color compositions of a delicate, ethereal quality according to his biography. His creation is named “Gods Pleasure” it shows his reintroduction of gestural and textural surfaces. Judy Rika is an artist that created a piece called Pyramid of Nudes, it is 58 by 73 by 15 inches and is made of oil on shaped linen. It is an interesting piece that literally sticks because the shaped linen is formed to be that way and gives it a rough like texture. The oil painting is of nude woman stacked on each other creating the outline of a pyramid. Many different artworks that are displayed in the Boca Art Museum that display different art cultures and materials that give viewers a strange yet meaningful perspective of each piece of artwork. The galleries are perfectly placed and give an accent of unity, some maybe too abstract for a viewer’s explanation but there are biographies of the different artist to give the purpose of the artist work ( Boca Raton Museum of Art November 3, 2011)