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Published: February 4th 2012
The full glow
The moment everyone waits for, the full balloon glowKentucky Derby Festival
Today I’m back in Louisville.
As almost everyone knows, this date is roughly a week before Louisville’s most famous event, the
Kentucky Derby.
At first blush, I figured I wanted to be nowhere near here this time of year.
The Derby is popular, so anywhere in town is crowded and parking is a nightmare.
Even worse, the event attracts a wealthy crowd, so any decent accommodation will
raise rates by a factor of ten (and require booking the room for half a week!)
Finally, I’m not a big fan of horses in the first place.
(In 1970
Hunter S Thompson wrote a unique look at the scene which has become famous: The Kentucky Derby is
Decadent and Depraved).
As I did research, however, my opinion changed.
The Kentucky Derby is merely the final event of a
huge sports festival.
This festival contains dozens of competitions, ranging from straightforward contests to events that are downright insane.
Many of these looked interesting.
Even better, most of them attract primarily local crowds, so accommodations are manageable and restaurant reservations are easy to get.
I eventually came up with a plan of showing up
Speed parking garage
The parking garage at the Speed Art Museum is a work of art! for a week, and leaving just before things got truly overloaded.
I would miss the actual horse races, but they aren’t the reason I’m going.
Speed Art Museum
The big event today was at night, so I had a day to fill.
I went to the
Speed Art Museum.
The name is not a joke; it
memorializes one James Breckinridge Speed.
The museum is
encyclopedic, but it is also small.
I really dislike this combination by this point, because it means a visit shows a little bit of lots of different things with no depth.
My visit did have some highlights.
The Speed’s most significant strength is
art from Kentucky.
This region is far from the major art centers, so people imagine it as a backwater.
As the displays make clear, the state did produce significant artists, and most had formal training.
They had to head to the East Coast or Europe to get it, but they came back afterward.
Most of the early paintings are portraits and landscapes, in tune with what was popular among the wealthy planters and merchants who could buy art.
Balloons inflating
Balloons inflating as the sun sets before the glow The museum also has a remarkable piece of early folk art, a quilt with intricate starburst patterns by Sarah Means.
The artist herself donated the quilt just before her death.
The museum had a significant show of
Impressionist landscapes.
The show is promoted in billboards all over the area.
I suspect the promotion is based more on Impressionism’s popularity than artistic merit; the tagline is “Show me the Monet!”
The show itself has more depth than the ads imply, although it was different that what I expected.
I expected a show showing how impressionist ideas were applied to traditional landscape painting; instead it was about the evolution of landscape painting in general during the Impressionist era.
The first part of the show is Impressionist precursors.
Impressionism did not appear full blown one morning.
It evolved from previous ideas that artists had been exploring for decades.
One of the most important of these influences was the
Barbizon School.
Centered on the town of the same name in the French countryside, this was the first group to advocate painting outside in nature rather than the confines of a
Balloons in daylight
Louisville balloons in fading daylight studio.
It arose partly from improved paints that could be used outdoors and partly from the demands of a French public that favored bucolic rural scenes as an antidote to rapid industrialization.
The second part is Impressionist landscapes.
All the big names are represented, along with a few that nobody has heard of anymore.
The paintings are grouped by subject, to show how different artists explored the same motif.
Some included the effects of industrialization, while others did not.
Some concentrated primarily on light, while others went for atmospheric effects.
For a show called “Impressionist Landscapes”, this section was surprisingly small (roughly a quarter of the total show).
The third part was the part I liked the least, Impressionist landscapes from American artists working in the US.
These were very popular in the early 1900s, and the show has a large number of them (the largest grouping in the whole show, in fact).
What
art historians know (and the show does NOT point out) is that these paintings are essentially derivative; they were only painted after Impressionism was shown to sell in the US and French
Balloon burner
How balloonists create hot air painters had moved on to other things.
Most of these paintings are the art history equivalent of a coffee table book.
The artists are talented, and there are some genuine innovators mixed in, but it took effort to find inspiring work.
I can’t help but compare these rooms with the equivalent presentation in museums like
The New Britain Museum of American Art, which have a much superior, carefully edited, selection of this type of painting.
The last part was called The Legacy of Impressionism.
To put it politely, it was a mixed bag.
It had a set of
Fauvist,
American Realist, and
Cubist landscapes.
Only a few of the artists were ones most people have heard of.
The write-ups try to show how the techniques in these paintings relate to the techniques used by the Impressionists, with very uneven results.
Overall, the show left me wanting more.
The first part was quite good, and then it ran out of steam.
I would have liked it better had it focused more on the innovators in France, and less on what came after them.
I suspect the work the museum was able
Burner fire in a balloon
The classic balloon picture, upward as the burner goes off. Timing this one is incredibly difficult. to borrow for the show had a significant effect on the show design and content; a problem that affects regional museums much more than big city ones.
The other temporary show at the Speed was worth the entire visit.
Impressionism is mostly seen as a painting movement.
In reality, these artists worked in a variety of mediums including sculpture and graphic arts.
The fame of the paintings mean this other work is rarely exhibited.
This show had a collection of Impressionist prints.
For a movement famous for its colors, these prints show it’s possible to create Impressionist pictures with no color at all!
The prints were created entirely though use of lines of different widths.
The placement of the lines relative to each other and their lengths create the same light and shadow effects as paint strokes.
Renoir made several of the prints in the show, and the drawing pattern exactly matches the long flowing strokes he used for his paintings.
James McNeil Whistler also has several prints on view.
His investigations of using lines to create a particular mood broke ground the Impressionists later investigated.
Energizer bunny ears
The most sought after giveaway of the night, bunny ears from Energizer Degas also makes an appearance, with pictures of nightclub scenes that presage his dancer paintings.
This show is a window into a rarely seen part of the movement, and I really enjoyed it.
Balloon Glow
The major festival event for the night is called the
Balloon Glow.
On Saturday morning, there is a balloon race to see who can hit a precise target in the shorted amount of time.
Tonight, the racers show off their balloons for spectators.
It’s called a glow because it’s done at night, when the hot air burners make the balloons light up.
The event was held at an old airfield.
I got there pretty early.
This was important, because the parking area had only one gate, and the line was
long and painful.
The bottleneck was after the entrance, driving a single lane dirt road across the runways to the parking area.
The line was so long it backed up onto the interstate.
I skipped that exit, took the next one, and then found a back way to the entrance almost by accident.
I arrived early enough
Energizer bunny baloon
The Energizer bunny, the largest balloon at the event. to watch the balloons inflate.
The launch pad originally just looked like a bunch of trucks.
Gradually, large balloons appeared on their sides as hot air was pumped in.
Eventually, they were all upright.
The official show started soon afterward.
Nearly all professional race balloons are sponsored.
Some were sponsored by national companies and others by local ones.
There were two balloons that had no sponsors, and the owners maintained them out of their own pockets.
An underappreciated part of the show was the chance to go around to different balloons and talk with the people running them.
These visits also produced the classic photo of the inside of a balloon with flames shooting up.
Several teams gave away promotional items.
The prize of the night was the foam bunny ears given away by Energizer, whose balloon looked like a giant
Energizer Bunny.
They were the largest balloon at the event.
The biggest photo opportunity, however, was the group glow.
Every balloon on the field fires their burners at once, making the entire field light up.
It looked like rows of giant light
Night glow
Balloons lit up after dark bulbs.
The dirt road meant it would be just as painful to get out of the event as it had to get in.
Some people tried to deal with it by leaving after the first group glow.
Unfortunately, enough other people had the same idea that the road became a giant parking lot long before the event was over.
I picked a different method.
The food vendors stayed open late, so I ate dinner after the glow was over.
By the time I was done, the road was tolerable.
I got to my lodging rather late, but it was worth it.
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