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Friday 11 December 2009

Finding my heart (and Tim Burton's) at the MoMA

Thursday I'd lost that loving feeling for NYC. The wind was so cold it felt like it was driving icicles into my flesh. So I headed into town to the Museum of Modern Art where I knew I would be out of the cold. The special exhibition was Tim Burton. His sketches right back to when he was at school were on display. one looked amazingly like Helena Bonham Carter. I think he found a wife that looked like his drawings - all heart shaped faces and crazy hair. Tim Burton seems to have always been gothic in his imaginings. He imagines monsters and macarbre characters like blue babies with nails in their eyes, draculas and corpses and dragons and characatures of bankers with hugely swollen bellies and ridiculously skinny legs. His way of drawing is gorgeous characterful - always the long spindly bits and the shadows under eyes and plenty of mournful looking faces. In the exhibition you could also see models from films like the Corps Bride and Nightmare Before Christmas. There was the cloak of the headless horseman from Sleepy Hollow, Edward Sissorhand's outfit, Sweeney Todd's barber blades and more.Tim Burton says that he was lucky enough to have a teacher who didn't tell him how to draw but more let him explore his own style and his own strength. This certainly shows in his work which is highly original in style and subject. his is an imagination that has never been checked. I wish my teachers had been this visionary. When I was small I drew small, never taking up the whole page. That was drummed out of me. Should it have been?

Other parts of the MoMA were just as inspirational. Art as free, modern, experimental. I even saw collages like the one that I did when I was 15 and hung in the guest room until one day I decided it was probably rubbish and took it down. How lovely that the MoMa makes you feel like you could make art, that there is room for your imagination there too. Everyone's art is worth something. That's what I came out thinking. If you want to see some of Tim Burton's work follow the link below.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/timburton/

In the evening I met up with the Finance boys and my NY BF (who I have missed) and we went to a ridiculously expensive steak restaurant called Wolfgang's Steak Place http://wolfgangssteakhouse.com/ . When the Steak came it was as if they had put a whole cow on the table and it was beautifully cooked too. The evening was lovely apart from when Fiance's boss decided to call me a chav and said he could imagine me wearing a pink tracksuit with a sparkly thong. I decided to get my own back by telling his wife (NY BF) that her husband was imagining me in a thong. HA! Don't mess with me Boss boy or I'll mess with your marriage.

Afterwards we went to a bar in a garage called Smith and Mills. It really was! It was very cute and the toilet had a fold up sink! Never seen that before. In honour of a real NYC night I ordered a Manhattan. It was very strong.

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