Visiting Utica's Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute
The first panel titled Childhood from MWPAI's series The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole from 1839-40. I just love this painting! While I was in Western New York two weeks ago to give a talk on my exhibition at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, I drove east to Utica to visit one of my favorite museums. It has a powerhouse of a permanent collection. And I secretly just love saying its tongue-twisting name, the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute (MWPAI). Way back in 1967, just after I'd made a serious decision to become an artist I made a visit to see its collection. That visit planted an important seed in my mind about becoming a landscape painter.. It was there I saw my first paintings by Thomas Cole, the great grandfather of American landscape painting. MWPAI has the magnificent series The Voyage of Life by Cole, a four canvas series depicting the stages of a person's life symbolized by a figure in a diminu...