Bulgari and Hockney

For a bit of art and culture today my Mom and I headed into San Francisco to see two exhibitions that are currently on at the de Young Museum.  The first was The Art of Bulgari: La Dolce Vita & Beyond: 1950 - 1990.  Showcasing around 150 pieces and various sketches from the Italian jeweler Bulgari, it is interesting to see the evolution in design of the jewelry as it matches the fashions and trends of the decade they were made in.  They used diamonds, semiprecious stones and even coins at one point to create some colorful necklaces, earrings and brooches.  The snake designs from the 1960s were quite interesting, as well as the pieces that used to be in Elizabeth Taylor's collection.  If you are a fan of jewelry, you should definitely check out the exhibition before it closes in mid-February 2014.

Next we went to see David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition, which is spread across two floors of the de Young Museum.  This exhibition showcases the British artist's prolific amount of work since 2002, including nearly 400 portraits and landscapes done on a wide range of media such as watercolor, oil paintings, charcoal drawings, iPad drawings and digital movies.  His landscape work is particularly impressive as he visits places in different seasons throughout a year to record the transitions of what they look like, often using multiple pieces of paper/canvas and aligning these parts together to form the whole picture.  His multi-camera digital movies of the four seasons at Woldgate were quite striking to look at as they surround and engulf you on the assembled screens on four walls in the exhibition.  I was also quite interested in his use of the iPad for drawing, and that process is shown as well and fascinating to watch.  The exhibition is only on for another month, so get down to the de Young to see it if you are in San Francisco (or at least watch this report from PBS Newshour about the exhibition, which includes an interview with Hockney).