Lyric Modern Museum Report

On November 12, 2015 I visited the gallery Lyric Modern created by an exceptional artist named Hal Marcus at El Paso Museum of Art. My first thoughts of visiting a museum were “boring”, “unexcited” and I just imagined myself going one work of art to another and describing it as if it was the textbook. As soon as I stepped into the museum my whole perspective changed, and at the end of the visit I had a different mindset. Lyric Modern was an outstanding exhibition, I did not only describe each composition individually, but I also compared them to each other. The focus of visiting the art exhibition is to know the overall descriptions of Hal Marcus art works, art works I admired the most and why, and the compositions I could not relate and seemed
unclear. Hal Marcus is a remarkable person and artist because he only used visual material to express his feelings and convey its messages. The color is the first thing you notice in almost in all his works. For example, Under the Rainbow was the first composition that I saw and the first thing I noticed is the magnificent color, but even though the colors were very bright the sensation you received was calmness. I felt calm because the structure of the work was linear perspective which also gave a sense of control. Also the colors were balanced because he included dull colors that seemed as the contrast colors; therefore, we had asymmetrical balance. Most of the art works had unity and variety; for example, Perfect Balanced is a composition that has a representational figure of a women holding flowers and there is a watermelon in the center, an apple at the left, and a pear at the right. This work of art has both unity and variety; by variety I mean that the fruits, the flowers, and the way her head is positioned is unusual, but it is normal because if everything was the same it would have been uninteresting. And then we have unity because the background are squares of different colors and the other shapes are geometric shapes.
As I continued viewing the gallery I start to notice that the artist adds texture to the works of art even though the composition is two dimensional.
The material Marcus uses to draw or paint, seems as a thick outline and you could almost touch it (well you know that you are able to touch it, but you are not allowed to touch it because of the museum rules). Also, Marcus created two sculptures and they were impressive. One of them was titled Lolly made from serpentine and it was the like the outline of a head of a women and it could be viewed only from two sides, if you saw her from the front it was a deformed. Moreover, I also notice that many of his art works include fish, rainbows, either the sun or moon, and birds, and each painting the objects were used differently or had a different meaning. Marcus had a wild imagination that took me time to put myself in his shoes and figure out the purpose of the
paintings.
Throughout the exhibition many of the compositions that Marcus developed caught my attention not because of the color, but the structure of it. My favorite work of art was Partly Cloudy and it was acrylic on canvas, this work of art demonstrated a woman lying in a sofa and there was a window in the back. This design seems so simple, smooth, and monochromatic, and the best part was that the sofa was made out of curly lines which really caught my attention. The design was asymmetrical because if you divided the painting in half you could see the same elements such the color and the geometric and organic shapes in each side, but they would weight differently. Furthermore, this painting had more unity than variety, but it was still interesting because the background with the geometric shapes balances the foreground which were more organic shapes. In the gallery, the museum also displayed many of his cartoons, but they were more like sketches and ideas. I was fascinated with them because they were very simple and next to the cartoons were the final draft which was more complex and you could see how much work the artist implies to the composition.
In my opinion, I chose the correct gallery because I could relate most of the paintings which made me feel part of something.
The Sunset Heights composition made me feel special because I kind of know where the painting took place and I also noticed the “La X”, Juarez monument, on it too. In the other hand, there was works of art that I could not relate to and they were harder to understand. For example, Magic Bus was a complex painting and it had more variety than any other work of art in his exhibition. There is a colorful bus in the middle of the painting with people inside including a king and a queen, then outside the bus we had like circus people preforming, and there were musicians on top of the bus. Also the background was strange as well, we had the sun in one corner and the moon in the other side and there was a rainbow in between them, there was fish at the bottom and stars at the top. I took the longest in this painting, even at the end I was still confused and did not understand the purpose of this painting.
By visiting Hal Marcus’s exhibition, I know the overall description of his art work, I was able to relate to some of the paintings, and some left in me in doubt. It was a great experience going into the El Paso Museum of Art, and not only did I learned art, but a life lesson about experiencing new things is terrific. I'm amazed by this museum, I never thought that it would be this remarkable. In conclusion, Hal Marcus showed me that art is beautiful and that
I can gain knowledge from it