East coast: Jan. 10th to 14th

Jason spent half of last week on the east coast. We cruised around Philadelphia a bit, though we only had enough time to take in some medical oddities. We also climbed a mountain, went to the Hirschorn in D.C., and took in a viewing of "Starship Troopers", which inexplicably Jason had never seen.
The Hirschorn is an unusual modern art museum because more than half of the exhibition space is devoted to sculpture. Also, as Jason put it, the collection is more than the usual suspects, and though it has representatives of art history survey class artists, the curators prefered to show the better work of artists you may not have heard of, rather than lesser works of famous artists.

Besides have several very good paintings by Thiebaud and Balthus, a few lesser-known artists stuck out, but sifting through images on the web, I could only come up with one good example. This is a representative image from the serial work of the Californian Matt Mullican. The drawing is oil-stick-rubbing over acrylic. The imagery combines phone book icons with bird's eye view urban landscapes. The three panels in the Hirschorn (not shown) have the symbols enmeshed with the architecture.

Besides tourism, we also got in some incredibly valuable critique and play-testing of the Neverwinter Nights sandbox module I am building. But I'll save discussion of that for another day.