I’m very impressed with the way in which the National Portrait Gallery in London is engaging children and teenagers in the art of portraiture.

I was in the museum, one of my favorite London haunts, a couple of days ago and was struck by the volume and inventiveness of the kids’ outreach programs at the institution.

For example, the National’s high-profile BP Portrait Award features a “Next Generation” initiative which organizes a bunch of special programming for young people aged between 14 and 19. Kids enrolled in the program get private viewings of the works presented in the annual award exhibition,  portrait drawing and painting workshops with BP Portrait Award artists, the opportunity to attend a special summer school and drop-in art sessions.

Also connected with the BP Award is a lovely “kids guide” that youngsters can pick up when they enter the exhibition space. The guide, which takes the simple but effective form of  a colorful, high-quality paper handout produced by artist Anna Hymas, takes children on a special tour, asking playful questions about some of the works on display and providing space for kids to draw their responses to some of the paintings that catch their eye. There’s even a section for a prize draw. Kids are encouraged to draw thumbnail portraits on the entry form of their friends and family. Winning entries get goody bags with signed books by Hymas.

Then there’s the “Creative Connections” program, a four-year project which connects young people with contemporary artists to create artistic responses inspired by works in the gallery’s collection. The present incarnation of the project (which is in its first year) involves students from a London school working with artist Lucy Steggals to seek inspiration from eight portraits that have some kind of historical link to their neighborhood of Bow. The portraits include those of Gandhi and Sylvia Pankhurst. The initiative is accompanied by a slew of lectures, walking tours and family art workshops.

I saw lots of children and teens at the Gallery when I was there. Many of them were browsing independently. Some of them were drawing in front of canvases. The institution makes engagement look easy. But clearly a lot of time, creativity and effort has gone into engaging the young.

It’s official: I’m moving to Denver to launch and head up Colorado Public Radio’s brand new arts desk. First day on the job — July 17th. Exciting times. Here and below is the press release issued by the station, which came out today:

Colorado Public Radio Hires Award-Winning Arts Reporter to Lead New Arts Bureau

CENTENNIAL, Colo. – June 18, 2013 – Colorado Public Radio (CPR) announced that award-winning arts reporter Chloe Veltman will be the new editor for CPR’s forthcoming arts bureau and online arts hub.

Veltman brings more than a decade of experience to her new role, including working for The New York Times as the weekly Bay Area arts correspondent and for the SF Weekly as its chief theater critic. Veltman is also the creator, host and producer of VoiceBox, a weekly, syndicated public radio and podcast series about the human voice and the best of the vocal music scene, based out of KALW in San Francisco. Her work has also been published in The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times and American Theatre Magazine among others.

“Chloe’s wealth of knowledge and passion for the arts will be paramount as we build out the arts bureau and expand coverage,” said Kelley Griffin, CPR’s vice president of news.  “We’re thrilled to welcome her and can’t wait to harness her creativity and leadership as we chart the next chapter of CPR’s future by launching our first comprehensive multi-media news bureau.”

Veltman will be responsible for hiring and managing the new arts bureau’s two-full time reporters, supervising the bureau’s team of contributors and working with CPR Classical and OpenAir to ensure that arts-related coverage is distributed across all three of CPR’s services.

“I was drawn to Colorado Public Radio not only because of the organization’s existing commitment to supporting the arts, but also for its leadership and vision for how that commitment can expand to serve a larger and more diverse audience,” said Veltman. “Listeners depend on CPR to provide coverage that can’t be found anywhere else, and I’m looking forward to building on that mission by bringing Colorado’s cultural community to the forefront.”

In addition to writing about the arts, Veltman is also an active arts practitioner. She is a trained dramaturg, and has sung and played the oboe in many chamber ensembles and orchestras in the Bay Area including The International Orange Chorale of San Francisco, Convivium, Symphony Parnassus and The Mill Valley Philharmonic. She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature from King’s College, Cambridge and a Masters of Fine Arts Degree in Dramaturgy from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.

The arts bureau and online arts hub was made possible by a three-year, $900,000 grant from The Bonfils-Stanton Foundation, with the goal of significantly increasing arts coverage of the Denver/Boulder metro area and across the state.

For more information about Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Colorado Public Radio is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that provides 24-hour, in-depth news and music to about 429,000 listeners each week (Source: Arbitron, Fall 2011/Spring 2012). More than 90 percent of CPR’s funds come from the private support of listeners, businesses and foundations.

News: Denver 90.1 FM, Boulder 1490 AM, Pueblo 1230 AM, Vail 89.9 FM, Grand Junction 89.5 FM, Montrose / Craig / Parachute 88.3 FM, Gunnison 88.5 FM, Ouray 91.5 FM, Meeker / Rangely 91.1 FM, and online at www.cpr.org.

Classical: Denver 88.1 FM, Boulder 99.9 FM, Pueblo 91.9 FM, Colorado Springs 94.7 FM, Glenwood Springs 90.5 FM, Aspen 101.5 FM, Western Slope 103.3 FM, Dove Creek 88.7 FM, Gunnison 89.1 FM, Cortez 102.5 FM, Crystal River Valley / Old Snowmass 93.9 FM, Thomasville 93.7 FM, and online at www.cpr.org.

OpenAir: Denver 1340 AM. Online at www.openaircpr.org.

I am in England, having a bit of family time before life, as I know it, does a total summersault in July. This morning, I found myself sitting with around 50 people, most of them retired and female, in Canterbury’s Salvation Army headquarters, singing old-fashioned pop hits and folk songs.

My mum sings with this “Monday Music” group. She invited me to join her for this morning’s session. The choir is led by an amazing and dynamic conductor, Grenville Hancox (pictured). Grenville, whom I have known since I was a kid, is a retired music professor at Canterbury Christ Church University, a fine clarinetist and a passionate believer in music-making for all. He leads several vocal ensembles around town.  The Monday Music group, which meets every Monday at 11am, is mostly aimed at older people who love to sing for fun but may not have any musical background at all.

Singing as part of this group was such a pleasure this morning. We started off with warm up exercises which ranged from clapping games and singing the letters of the alphabet, to doing rounds in as many as six parts. Then we made a joyful noise in four parts, accompanied by Grenville on guitar, in oldies like The Crystals’ “Da Do Ron Ron” and George Harrison’s “By Bye Love.”

The singers clearly love Grenville. He has a light touch and makes it fun, while at the same time conveying enough about the importance of good diaphragm support and clear diction to make people pay close attention and sit up straight.

One of the unexpected delights of the morning was ending the session by walking en masse over to a nearby health food store where we sang a few songs, flash-mob style, before unsuspecting shoppers. Everyone was smiling among the shelves of gluten-free granola and vegan cheese. The group’s energy was high. I think we could have stood there singing for hours.

I left feeling very happy to have been part of the ensemble for the morning. For my mum’s sake, I wish Monday music could also happen on the other six days of the week.

 

PS July 14: Someone posted a 2.5 minute video of our escapade in the health food store. Check it out here.

It was surreal going from fawning over a lock of Beethoven’s hair yesterday afternoon to running through a park scattered with thousands of artificial bones this morning.

The lock of hair (given the stamp of authenticity by virtue of a document, written in now-faded ink, by Beethoven himself) is one of the many curiosities stashed away in the Library of Congress‘s music archives. Yesterday, I hosted and produced in collaboration with music specialists at the Library, a podcast about some of the whacky stuff that the institution holds that once belonged to famous composers. Beethoven’s hair, a bunch of fabric swatches owned by Wagner, who had a weakness for pink, silk waistcoat linings, and Copland’s rolodex were among the ephemera under discussion.

Yesterday’s fun was sharply thrown into relief this morning as I was on my run through the National Mall. A team of volunteers was hard at work, picking up what looked like trash but upon closer inspection turned out to be thousands of plaster- and paper-cast human bones.

Over the weekend, the Mall had been the site of a huge “graveyard” – a large-scale social arts installation entitled “One Million Bones” masterminded by artist-activist Naomi Natale. The project took three years to come together for display from June 8-10 on the Mall. Natale and her team collected one million handcrafted bones from members of the public. The installation, coupled with workshops, music and talks, was aimed at raising awareness of ongoing atrocities in places like Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Burma. The project was inspired by Philip Gourevitch’s book about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.

I didn’t get to see the installation over the weekend. But it must have made a powerful statement. Even the dregs of it that I saw this morning — most of the remaining body parts reduced to a mushy pulp owing to the heavy rains we’ve had here over the past few days — were still completely disconcerting.

Isn’t is strange how a lock of a dead composer’s hair can be treated like a holy relic, while the fabricated bones of millions of massacred people get swept into the trash?

My first ever visit, yesterday evening, to see a production at The Folger Theatre in Washington DC – Twelfth Night – happened to coincide with the very final performance of the present season. Outside the venerable building in Capitol Hill, I overheard members of the company discussing post-performance party plans.

In retrospect, the whole situation was fitting, because perhaps more than any other play by Shakespeare, Twelfth Night represents a last hurrah of sorts – it was the dramatist’s last truly fun-loving play. After Twelfth Night, his comic sensibility would become more complex and troubled as is evidenced by works like Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. “What you Will” morphed into “what you must.”

Robert Richmond’s wonderfully madcap production also represents a last hurrah. The director’s take is set in 1915 aboard  an opulent, sinking cruise ship (modeled on the famed Lusitania) with a massive, round stained glass window, keeling precipitously over the stage having lost some of its delicate panes.

Aboard their Illyrian pleasure boat, the brilliant ensemble cast pushes the party atmosphere to its limits. Everyone on stage is a lord or lady of misrule, seemingly governed by groin, spleen and/or heart.  Like the ship’s mast breaking in the storm that precedes the action, these characters all lost their heads long ago.

The songs, performed live on stage accompanied by a gorgeous grand piano with a transparent, curlicue body that would make Liberace happy, as well as assorted ukuleles, cellos, clarinets and accordions, are jubilant-lyrical odes to love. Balanced against this euphoria, though, is malice.

This nasty edge is most visible in the treatment of Malvolio (the superbly pompous yet lovable Richard Sheridan Willis, who steals the show.) When Sir Toby Belch and Feste goad the steward and accuse him of lunacy as he lies helpless inside the filigree body of that gorgeous piano, the prevailing atmosphere is sinister and sadistic. I only wished that the colorful lighting palette could have been muted in that scene to fit the ominous mood. Music, as symbolized by the piano-prison, at that moment becomes a source of torture. In this reality, Malvolio’s puritan way of life perversely starts to make sense.

The early 20th century seems to be looming large right now in the popular imagination, from Baz Luhmann’s Gatsby to Downton Abbey. The idea of a loss of innocence, of western society drunkenly staggering towards the chaos of World War I and the stock market crash, seems to echo an unease that people feel right now about our own culture, where the carefree excesses of the 1990s and early 2000s are perceived to be pushing us over a precipice.

This production of Twelfth Night bristles and dances with the same, intoxicating energy. Just as Viola (Emily Trask) — standing under the stained glass window on stage that also looks like a massive, looming clock — understands that only time can untangle the chaos of people’s affections, so the distance of a century provides us with a way of making sense of our present whirligig.

When Nicholas Alexander Brown was walking down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC yesterday afternoon following a lunchtime concert he had just conducted at The Library of Congress’s genteel Coolidge Theatre, two young women called out to him from outside a café to congratulate him on his success.

I wasn’t surprised: Brown is the sort of person who quite regularly gets accosted in public places around Capitol Hill. The twenty-something Library of Congress musicologist and administrator cuts an atypical figure at the Library. He’s about 40 years younger than the average employee, several inches taller and much better dressed. Yesterday he was sporting a charcoal-colored Hugo Boss suit that looked like it had been painted on him.

One of the things that Brown, a singer, French horn player and conductor, took on when he started working at the Library just over a year ago was the unglamorous job of conducting the Library of Congress Chorale.

Composed entirely of volunteer singers from the ranks of the Library’s many departments, the SATB Chorale is a marvelous relic. It’s probably one of very few genuine workers’ choruses left in this country. The group rehearses once a week for an hour or so at lunchtime. The majority of its members are, at a guess, well over 50 and many of them don’t read music.

Despite the minimal time available to Brown to rehearse with his singers, the Chorale managed to pull off — with aplomb — an ambitious program of classic opera choruses yesterday that consisted of music in several different languages including English, German, French, Italian, Russian.

The ensemble’s intonation and articulation were fantastic throughout. I could make out almost every word that was sung. There were great dynamic contrasts and best of all was the variety of mood throughout the hour-long program. The group was suitably furious when they performed the “Chorus of the Furies” from Act II of Gluck’s Orphee et Eurydice, lyrical when it came to Verdi’s rousing “Va, pensiero” from Nabucco, full of pomp for “Gloire a Didon” from Les Troyens by Berlioz, rambunctious during Tchaikovsky’s “Chorus and Dance of the Peasants” from Act I of Eugene Onegin, and hushed for the “Humming Chorus” from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.

Brown needs to encourage his forces to sing with a fuller, rounder tone. The overall sound was a little thin most of the time. But all in all, the Chorale gave the audience a fantastic lunchtime concert. The experience made me wish that workers’ chorales would come back in vogue.

I hesitate to draw conclusions about the sensibilities of entire nations from seeing three plays over the course of a weekend, but it strikes me that the trio of productions I just experienced — a desperately dark Irish play, an English comedy with a hard-hitting underbelly, and a resolutely optimistic American musical — kind of sum up traditional views of these three contrasting yet related cultures. Here are a few further thoughts about each show:

Abigail’s Party at SF Playhouse: The English dramatist / filmmaker Mike Leigh’s dark 1977 satire revolving around an adult cocktail party as one of the guest’s teenage children (the titular Abigail) holds her own social gathering next door is subtly yet insistently infused with the inter-marital, class-conscious struggles of everyday life. The play is nearly 40 years old at this point and is set in a time and place — 1970s south-eastern England — which probably feels quite alien to most contemporary American audiences. At one point, the chatty, glamorous hostess Beverly (a sashaying, goading and irrepressible Susi Damilano) and her younger dowdier neighbor Angela (a frumpy yet endearing Allison Jean White) gaze at a shelf ornament that changes color and remark, excitedly, that the object reminds them of New York. Ah, these were innocent times. Yet despite the distance separating us from Leigh’s world, the core issues at stake are as prescient as ever. As Amy Glazer’s hilarious yet hard-hitting production careens on and the characters become more and more drunk and more and more disaffected with their lives, we are left with the feeling of dread not so much about the characters themselves, but about the sort of world that the obliviously partying teenagers next door will inherit from their unhappy forbears.

Terminus at the Magic Theatre: The last time I saw a play by the Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe was also at The Magic Theatre. That was about 12 years ago and Howie The Rookie has stayed with me ever since. I came away from that experience dumbfounded by the power of monologue and giddy from the beautiful violence of the dramatist’s lyrical use of language. This play, a three-hander instead of a duo, delvers similarly in terms of pith, poetry and punch. The tightly structured play takes place in a sort of holocaust-like nowhere land, realized by Robert Brill as a desolate sandbox packed with flinty dark grey shale upon which the three characters, uniformly dubbed A, B and C, stand, sit and lie down. A sepulchral light glimmers throughout Jon Tracy’s menacing-taut production and the characters are trapped in this space for the duration of the action. The drama weaves together narratives that balance extremes of kindness, destruction, love and hate and inhabits a liminal space throughout that perches on the precipice between life and deaf. In one story, for example, a young woman finds herself falling off a crane following a nasty surprise involving a boy she fancies; in another a woman describes being hit in the head repeatedly with a chair following an altercation with a psychopath about a violent abortion. Through nine monologues (alternating equally between each of the three characters) the tumbling locutions of the three characters’ monologues bring the cadences of Beckett, Shakespeare and rap music to mind. Stacy Ross, Marissa Keltie and Carl Lumbly make for a formidable cast. Their performances are focused, balancing mania with pathos. I staggered out of the theatre after close to two intermissionless hours feeling profoundly frightened and moved.

The Sound of Music at Mountain Play: It’s hard to imagine a more fitting production to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Mountain Play summer play producti0ns in a capacious amphitheatre near the summit of Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais than Rogers and Hammerstein’s classic musical ode to fresh mountain air and the healing power of song. I hiked up Mount Tam from Mill Valley for three steep, sunbaked  hours, schlepping a picnic with a friend, Christophe, in order to see the show. (See above for a picture of another friend, Mirit, making fondue on the mountaintop for our lunch. Never let it be said that my people do things by halves.) I’ve seen productions of this musical all over the gaff. But this time, uniquely, felt like I could join in with Mother Abbess Hope Briggs’ rich rendition of “Climb Every Mountain” and actually mean it. Mountain Play has assembled a lively and talented cast for the production helmed by an energetic and lovely Heather Buck in the central role of Maria. I was highly entertained, and, surprisingly for a boozy, sunny afternoon on top of a mountain among several thousand picnicking playgoers, also felt deeply moved by the drama’s serious political undercurrent.

Wednesday evening saw the latest incarnation of Drinking Songs: A Night Of Beer And The Music That Goes With It, an interactive live event that pairs beer tastings with specific songs as a means to tell the story of the close relationship between beer culture and singing culture through the ages.

I produced and hosted the event, a collaboration between VoiceBox, my weekly public radio and podcast series about the human voice, and Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, an artisanal beer maker based in Delaware. Our singers are an awesome bunch of mostly ex-Chanticleer members who call themselves The Fill-A-Steins for our purposes. And we have a fascinating beer cicerone on hand to talk about the ale end of things — Sayre Piotrkowski of The St Vincent Tavern in San Francisco.

Drinking songs lend themselves particularly well to audience participation. Usually we have opportunities for audience members to join in with the singing (they also get to taste a variety of Dogfish Head Beers.) This time around, we had a new partner, Smule, that helped make the event even more interactive.

Smule is a Silicon Valley-based company that develops music-making apps like Magic Piano, I Am T-Pain and Ocarina. On Wednesday during intermission, we used a whizzbang app called MadPad to crowdsource a drinking song with anyone who wanted to participate in the packed bar of around 200 people. Smule’s Turner Kirk (aka the Mule) went around the room asking for members of the crowd to contribute snippets of song and other sound effects which he captured using the MadPad app on his iPad. MadPad saves nuggets of audio and video which can then be rearranged at the touch of a button into an instant “music video.”

The product of our tipsy collective imaginations can be seen here.

The track includes foot stomping, jangling keys, clinking steins and comely sung phrases like “raise your glass and drink it down” and “beer, beer, beer, beer.” At the start of the second half of our program, we showed off our crowdsourced drinking song on a big screen on stage. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to create from start to finish and it made me (and I think quite a lot of other people who were at 50 Mason Social House on Wednesday night for our event) very, very happy.

Finally, here is a 5-minute video capturing the spirit of the entire event. With thanks to Rachel Hamburg, Rebecca Hsu and  Jake Wachtel.

The San Francisco MusicTech Summit is the place to go if you want to find out things like how to make sense of the murky licensing laws surrounding music distribution in our digital age, how to engage the community of fans around a band or artist and where to find the best open source audio technologies to support your newly developed app.

In the Hotel Kabuki yesterday afternoon, hundreds of people, most of them in their 20s to 30s wearing tight jeans and/or bangs and hailing from companies with snappy, two-word-mashup names such as TuneCore, BandCamp and VentureBeat sat in on panel discussions where they asked questions like, “What are best practices for crowdsourcing the ideation of the Xhiph app?”

There was relatively little on the program to do with the art of making music using the latest technological advances, though there were demos of music software and sets performed by DJs and electronic musicians (e.g. the guy pictured above was making pleasant synthesizer sounds on his instrument in the lounge area for a while.)

Most of the attendees seemed preoccupied with questions of how to make more money from listeners. Judging by the discussions I heard, the act of creating and fostering community around an artist or band using social media ultimately seemed geared towards finding out how to monetize those relationships, e.g. through incentivizing the fans who drive other fans to buy tickets to a band’s concerts.

There’s nothing wrong with making money. That’s what a business is meant to do. But I think I would have liked to have seen panelists and attendees make a stronger connection between the commercial interests of this burgeoning field and the artistic ones.

Private homes have long been the locus of some of the most interesting arts experiences, from providing a backdrop for the debut of Schubert song cycles to honoring the work of the New York-based experimental theatre company Banana Bag and Bodice.

The reasons for this are diverse: Private homes allow for art to be seen without necessarily being judged in an atmosphere that’s supportive. The work presented doesn’t have to be full or complete — it is commonly “in progress”. The emphasis is as much on the social experience as it is on the arts experience, creating an atmosphere that is relaxed and less intimidating for most artists than a public space. The setup allows for easy conversations about the work which often helps artists with their developmental process. Lastly, the costs of mounting an arts event in a private home are relatively modest compared to a full no production in a concert hall, museum or theatre.

In the Bay Area, home-based arts events have been going on all over the place for years. One of the most lively, eclectic and inventive of these happenings I’ve experienced is the Franconia Performance Salon, which I attended for the first time on Saturday night.

The salons happen every few weeks at the home of the theatre director and Stanford faculty member Michael Hunter. Hunter lives in a quirky-expansive hilltop home in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. With its high ceilings, big walls, and natural staging and viewing areas (e.g. a sweeping staircase and gorgeous outdoor patio), the house makes for the ideal space to interact with art.

About 50 people, aged, at a guess, between 20 and 60, attended the salon on Saturday. The room was alive with conversation about a wide variety of topics, ranging from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (inspired by the viewing of a blurry short film by Kiki Valentine on the subject) to the use of chest voice in American musical forms like shape note singing (inspired by a robust performance of a Bulgarian close harmony song by a trio of fresh-faced twenty-somethings hailing from Denmark, Poland and the US.)

Other artistic offerings included several strangely compelling performance art pieces with their roots firmly in the 1960s.

Perhaps the most throwback-y offering involved a naked young woman lying on her back on an animal pelt. She was touching crowns with a young man dressed in dirty long-johns, who had his right forefinger stuck in his exposed belly button, his left grasping an ax and his feet covered in mud. Oh, and there were flower petals scattered over his chest. The couple lay motionless for the best part of an hour as people stood over them chatting with their hands full of wine and snacks. (Hunter provides delicious food and drink for his events and attendees each make a suggested donation of $10 to cover the costs.)

Another performance involved a young woman standing still while another performer cut up long pieces of wood and used them to “pin” her partner in a wooden frame that was part of the architecture of the main room in the house. After each piece of wood had been added, making the stationary performer resemble a Medieval Madonna surrounded by rays of heavenly light, she burst out of her confines and the wood clattered to the floor. It was a beautiful theatrical moment of disruption.

And in yet another short piece, one performer used a flashlight to project shadows of dollhouse furniture on to a large piece of white paper pinned to a wall while another performer used a black pen to trace the outlines of the furniture to eventually create a drawing in black and white of a room. Then the draughts-woman sat down in front of the canvas and started eating a bunch of flowers that had been sitting in a vase on the floor throughout the drawing process. Finally, the two artists beckoned audience members to come up to the front, kneel down and eat flowers. They tasted quite bitter, but I was rather hypnotized by the whole thing.

The new song by the Chinese artist Ai Weiei, “Dumbass,” seemingly has little in common with “Craftsmanship,” a talk given in 1937 by Virginia Woolf, a newly released recording of which is being touted as the only known imprint of the British author’s voice.

It’s fascinating, however, to listen to both recordings side by side.

Despite the fact that thousands of miles and nearly 80 years separate Woolf’s erudite and queenly-toned meditation on the power of words from Weiei’s gruff, a-melodious crie de coeur about incarceration, the two share one important thing in common — they are both essentially about freedom.

Woolf’s essay is a heartfelt plea for people to give themselves the license to use words with a sense of playfulness and abandon and to get away from the burden of British history and the tyranny of the English dictionary. There’s as much gravity and yearning in Woolf’s voice as there is old worldly poise in her desire to break away from the past.

Weiwei’s song (as published on YouTube with an accompanying article in The Guardian) is a hard-hitting diatribe against the constraints of the Chinese system. The single’s video, created by the renowned cinematographer Christopher Doyle, reconstructs with literal deliberateness scenes of the artist’s 81-day incarceration by Chinese authorities in 2011. Weiwei’s approach to singing is a snarl. It’s tuneless but powerful in its directness.

In a sense, the enemy in both artists’ eyes is the British and Chinese patrimony. Both feel imprisoned and frustrated but have a different way of voicing their resentment. I think Woolf and Weiwei would have a lot to talk about if they could get together in a room today.

The final part of my trip to Denver included a visit to The Clyfford Still Museum. This jewel-box of an art institution, which opened in November 2011 right in the middle of an otherwise rather barren section of downtown Denver overlooking several parking lots, is one of the most compelling museums I’ve experienced dedicated to a single artist.

The grey, concrete building, designed by Brad Cloepfil and his colleagues from the Allied Works Architecture firm, provides vast amounts of natural light and interesting views at every turn.

Seeing so many of Still’s art under one roof makes me understand why he felt so strongly about an artist’s works being seen en masse rather than as an isolated element in the context of a large group show.

The museum does a wonderful job of demonstrating Still’s development over time. The importance of the human figure runs as a theme throughout his long career as is evidenced from the juxtaposition of early works showing farmhands toiling in the fields with more abstract paintings in which the human form is depicted by a few jagged vertical columns.

The way in which Still used color over the years is especially vivid. An entire room is devoted to paintings whose dominant hue is bright yellow. Another is occupied mostly by black paintings. Red and blue rooms are also on display.

I found myself sitting for long stretches of time in the color-themed rooms, simply letting the canvases work their magic on me. Where initially I saw only sunshiney yellow in one painting, after a few minutes, I began to see yellow as a vast assortment of different shades and moods. The same thing happened in the other rooms.

I didn’t consider painting to be a time-based art until I sat down in front of these works.