Designer's Life - Finishing and Reading the omens

There's a tendency for a theater set to Never Be Done!

I'm off to Fort Worth again today to - I hope - finish finishing the Fantasticks set that I thought I finished Monday.  This time it's to age and tweak the big "Fantasticks" banner.  Sigh.  This is pretty normal.  Like most art projects, a theater show is never so much "finished" as "you open anyway."

The Fantasticks opens Saturday!  (Come see the New! Improved! Banner...  and the show too.)

Image borrowed from Circle Theatre

Besides, any day when the staid NPR station wakes you with Kurt Cobain in your left ear is not a day for peaceful rest-itude, or so the omens suggest.  (I liked the song, it just startled me is all.)  Speaking of public radio: here's another couple art critiques from Our Reporter in the Midwest.

Introducing a New Art Critic

The National Public Radio station in Wichita, Kansas - KMUW - has a new art critic.  (Am I the only one who reads "art critic" but hears Monty Python saying, "Aaaaaaaut Critik"?)

Here's a thoughtful piece by Lindsey Herkommer on two Midwestern American Gothics: the first, the iconic painting by Grant Wood, the second, an important photo by Gordon Parks.

American Gothic by Grant Wood - image borrowed from KMUW radio

There's something really compelling about Wood's image of this farmer and his daughter.  I love many paintings from the 1930s - Hopper's slanting sunlight on hillsides, WPA murals of noble factory workers, Texas dust-bowl paintings of bony cattle, wire fences, cotton boles... but this double portrait has presence that seems out of its period.  

It feels a little like a Renaissance portrait, reminding me of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage.  I think it's the formal, self-conscious poses of the subjects: the men's severity and vertical gestures and the way the women incline their heads, deferential to the men, but staring off into a private distance.

The Arnolfini Marriage by Jan van Eyck

Hard to imagine two painted couples with more different lives or times.