Denver Art Museum - January 2020

We visited the Denver Art Museum to see the Monet exhibit (The Truth of Nature) and while there explored the other exhibits in the Museum.

One dealt with the concept of light and how that influences various works of art.  The Light Show at the Denver Art Museum explored physical and symbolic representations of light in art. The exhibition features about 250 objects drawn from the DAM’s nine curatorial departments.

The exhibition helps visitors reflect on a variety of light-related themes through a broad range of materials and artworks, including ancient sculptures, paintings, photography, textiles, and contemporary installations.

Another dealt with English history of paintings.

The Museum is in the process of expanding and there are nice examples of the new buildings being planned.

One exhibit consisted of reflective two way mirrors which gave one a sense of infinity.

This is a Sand Mandala 

I was not sure why this gown was in a display about light, but it relates to Transparency

This is the shadow side of puppets projected on a transparent screen

The following few images give an overview of the new building at the Denver Art Museum

Treasures of British Art: The Berger Collection showcases about 60 paintings gifted to the museum by the Berger Collection Educational Trust (BCET) in 2018. The exhibition presents a chronological selection of works ranging from the 1400s through the late 1800s, telling the story of Britain’s rich cultural history. The exhibition invites visitors to immerse themselves in the places, personalities, and events that shaped a nation over the course of five centuries.

Treasures of British Art presents 500 years of British cultural history through the stories of its people, captured by the enduring brilliance of artists of the time. The exhibition features devotional images, portraits, landscapes and sporting scenes by the greatest artists of the British School—including Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence and John Constable—as well as non-British artists who spent significant time in Britain—such as the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck, and American artists Benjamin West and John Singer Sargent.

All in all a great place to spend time!

Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature Exhibit at the Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum was home to the most comprehensive U.S. exhibition of Monet paintings in more than two decades. This exhibition featured more than 120 paintings spanning Monet's entire career and focused on the celebrated French Impressionist artist's enduring relationship with nature and his response to the varied and distinct places in which he worked. The paintings were on display from October, 2019 thru February 2, 2020.

Monet traveled more extensively than any other Impressionist artist in search of new motifs. His journeys to varied places including the rugged Normandy coast, the sunny Mediterranean, London, the Netherlands, and Norway inspired artworks that were featured in the presentation. This exhibition uncovered Monet’s continuous dialogue with nature and its places through a thematic and chronological arrangement, from the first examples of artworks still indebted to the landscape tradition to the revolutionary compositions and series of his late years.

Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature explores Monet’s continuous interest in capturing the quickly changing atmospheres, the reflective qualities of water, and the effects of light, aspects that increasingly led him to work on multiple canvases at once. Additionally, the exhibition examined the critical shift in Monet’s painting when he began to focus on series of the same subject, including artworks from his series of Haystacks, Poplars, Waterloo Bridge, and Waterlilies.

I hope the following images give a bit of an overview of the presentation. We purchased tickets weeks in advance and hoped the weather would cooperate and allow us to attend.

The exhibit included these audio devices which gave an overview of each portion of Monet's life and details about the artwork

The exhibits had a fair number of people but the flow was quite orderly.

We were quite taken by his work. I've since visited our libraries  to obtain books to learn more of his life and work. 

Buying a Blade for the Grader

Our Colorado neighborhood has its roads maintained by a John Deere road grader. This grader has the typical center mount blade as well as a wing blade to push snow back from the road edge and allow more snow to be plowed by the center blade.

The grader can also support a front mounted blade, but the one we currently have is better suited to plowing snow on paved surfaces rather than our unpaved roads. It was time to find another front mount blade that could be adapted to work with our grader.

To that end we searched the surplus plows stored at our local county yard and found one that will work.

Checking dimensions

We showed up with a flatbed trailer to take delivery  of the plow blade

It takes a pretty good sized piece of equipment to move a big blade

The County workers affixed chains to the blade

Heavy equipment operator did a good job moving that out of a tightly confined space

Loaded and ready to take to be fit to our grader

The welders did a good job of installing the blade

We'll get to see this winter how it does