By CATHERINE ELLERTON
Moapa Valley Progress
Members of the MV Art Guild ventured to Las Vegas on Wednesday, to explore the current exhibit at the Bellagio’s Gallery of Fine Art. This exhibit of the Master Artists of the last 150 years is on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.
It is said that “art is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface.” However, after wandering through those ‘surfaces’ of Boudin, Monet, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Daumier, this reporter and Guild member was more inclined to agree with a quote of Edgar Degas: “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
The stories of the people, the cities and the country as seen 150 years ago was captured in various styles of painting from Cubism to Lithograph to Drypoint – after steel facing to photography and included modernism to realism. The viewer was drawn into the story as they studied the expressions and ‘Body English’ of the people and found themselves intrigued by the cities and countryside as captured by the artist.
As I left the Fine Art Gallery, I was drawn ‘back’ to the present in the Jeff Mitchum Photography Gallery. Huge, colorful photographs surrounded the viewer immersing them back into the world of today.
The Art Guild members headed for home vowing to attend the next day’s weekly Gab ‘N’ Dab Session to learn the “Alcohol Ink” style of painting which would be taught by Marie Williams.
