Philadelphia and the Academy's Gems: Their Alumni
I was able to get up to Philadelphia this past week, on Thursday I drove up from DC and spent the day looking at the alumni show at the Hamilton Building and also the Bank of America's permanent collection which cost a little bit. The alumni show was free and it also showed more class than the Bank of America's collection did in my opinion. They wouldn't let me photograph it but what my eyes saw was astonishing. There was excellent control of paint shown by one painting in particular. "Smoke Dreams" was a painting about opium smokers, and it wasn't a dark foreboding painting as one might picture, it was more of a light colored and also lighthearted view of smoking such a drug. The background has a couple of Japanese people engaged in a sexual maneuver but it's painted in a newer, more western manner and it wasn't at all distasteful nor did it make me feel uncomfortable while looking at it. In the foreground stands a woman who is certainl