Gorgeous and sunny on Friday; windy and snowy on Saturday. Our plans to do outside sight seeing in Washington DC changed to indoor activities. We headed to the National Portrait Gallery in hopes of seeing Barack and Michelle Obama's portraits but they were not there. We spent a lot of time in the Gallery of presidents admiring the portraits and reading about the men who have led our country.
A portrait of Bill Clinton caught my eye...it would catch anyone's eye. Not the traditional pose of a man in a dark suit looking presidential. The artwork looked familiar...I had seen a similar style somewhere else but could not place it. I stared at President Clinton trying to figure out the artist and finally went to the sign to read about this piece of art.
The artist is Chuck Close, an American artist known for his large-scale Photorealist portraits. He constructed his paintings through a grid system, in where each square on the canvas corresponded with a squared off cell on a reference photograph. His works focused mainly on self-portraits or portraits of his family and friends. Similar to the Pointillist works of Georges Seurat, Close’s compositions come in to focus the further an observer stands from them. I had seen some of Chuck Close's large-scale art at the 2nd Ave/72nd Street subway in New York City.
After the Portrait Gallery, a quick walk over to Capital One Arena to watch the Dayton Flyers play the Richmond Spiders. Dayton lost...sigh. Not the ending we were hoping for as far as basketball goes but we sure enjoyed a weekend in our nation's capital.
Glad you enjoyed the city, I hope you return.
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