From Saxby Wiles:
Sunday morning, we got up at 8 a.m. to get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of my most favorite museums. It is huge and beautiful, and houses some of my favorite works of art, such as those by Vermeer and David. I love European Art, and also going to the museum sparked a new interest for me in the field of drawings and etchings. My favorite piece I saw was by a French man named Charles Augrad. The piece at first seemed too simple to me, but as I started to look at it more deeply, it was anything but simple. Made by crayon and canvas in 1892, the drawing depicted a man in a top hat, presumed to be Augrad, himself. It is ironic because he seems high class and bourgeois in the drawing, but in reality he is not. The drawing is dark, and the more you look at it the more it just seems like a blur of black and white. Without the subtle difference of light between the blacks and the white, it would only be a black canvas, with no picture at all.
However the blending between shades of black onto the sections of white created a shadowy drawing of a man, and I found that technique to be genius. It reminded me of an artist, whose name I can’t remember, who painted around the time of Jackson Pollock. He simply painted entire canvasses with shades of black, so subtle you can hardly see the differences, especially when close up – similarly to the Met drawing by Augrad. I was very glad we got to go to the Met, and it was one of the best things we have done in New York so far!
After the museum we went to see the Importance of Being Earnest, which was hilarious, and after that we went to explore Chinatown and Little Italy, and then we ended our night with my friends at a Thai restaurant called, Spice in Greenwich Village near NYU.
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