Appreciating Art and Friends on Friday

I met my friend Lois at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena on Friday and we enjoyed our company and lunch overlooking the lily pad blooming pond surrounded by sculptures.  We then strolled into the museum and I found two paintings that spoke to me today.  The first was the El Greco titled "Portrait of an Old Man with Fur by Domenikos Theotokopoulos, Greece, 1541-1614.  With a name like that you can understand why the Spanish in Toledo where her lived called him "The Greek"...El Greco.  He adopted the Baroque style with "audacious use of color...bold distorions of the physical world."  I have seen his paintings in the church and his museum in Toledo and was struck by his colors....eerie and elongated noses and bodies.  The painting below was completed in 1590 to 1600.

The next painting I liked was a landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael, Dutch 1628/9-1682.  "Jacob van Ruisdael is considered to be the greatest and most versatile Dutch landscape painter of the seventeenth century.  The figures were painted

by his friend Nicolaes Berchem.  The emphasis of the painting is on the natural elements in the landscape...the human and animal figures are less significant...but I very much like them.  They are hard to see in the bottom photo of the whole painting so I took close up pictures of the figures which are located in the bottom center.