A Museum Excursion

Fun fact: I am 98% sure that I am the model in this painting. In 2009 my hair was orange instead of blue, and it looks like the human earthling in this painting is wearing my favorite shirt. It is clearly a painting done at the Field Museum in Chicago, where the authentic skeleton of Sue the T. Rex is on display in the main atrium. That is, the entire authentic skeleton except for the skull, which was too heavy to mount with the rest of the specimen, and is therefore on display in a case upstairs. I remember being there and looking at the skull while an artist was set up with his easel and paints. How fun that one of my museum excursions was captured and memorialized in this way!

Many artists like to go to natural history museums to study, sketch, and paint, and I am one of them. Today, I spent a few hours at the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia – and what a lovely few hours it was! The Wagner is full to the brim with cases of bones, fossils, sea shells, mineral samples, and other goodies. It’s a haven for an artist like me that enjoys looking to the natural world for inspiration. Such cool shapes can be found in bones, corals, shells, and odd rocks! I had a lot of fun sketching at the museum today. When I play with the proportions, when I melt, warp, and distort the curves and lines, I never quite know where I’m going to end up. My sketches don’t look like that which inspired them, and that’s great! The abstract shapes that appear when divorcing my sketches from their inspirations open up brand new possibilities for my next design. I can’t wait to see what comes from the sketches that I did today!

Two Earthlings, John Brosio, 2009