Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Behind-the-scenes Tour with...

Did you know that the Met has its own U-Tube channel? Me neither, til I clicked on an ad on The Times' website.

Here ... this should keep you busy for 12 minutes or so.



Quick final note: Why is it that curators always seem to have the loveliest voices? Are none of them from The Bronx? Is none of them from the Florida panhandle? (I'm of two minds on the are/is question here) Did you ever hear Philippe de Montebello speak? Like BUTTAH the man was.

I hear you. But I'm not crazy about the second guy's pronunciation of Montmartre.
No. Me neither.
A bit too much of a third syllable.
Exactly. Although it obviously exists on paper...
It should exist perhaps less so on the tongue.
Exactly.

Quick final note #2: I wish I had a picture to show you, and the painting is around here somewhere (perhaps in storage), but every once in a while I attempt to reinterpret classic paintings in my own style. The one I'm talking about was called "White Rothko", which I thought would speak to a bunch of things, including, obviously, Mark Rothko but also, perhaps less so, Jasper Johns. And of course my boy Jackson.

The idea was to paint an all-white, dripped interpretation of Rothko's famous one-colored-block-on-top-of-the-other paintings.

This is likely the best example of what I try to do. Obviously it is not Rothko receiving the cheese here:



Anyway, White Rothko remains an unfinished effort. Which is ok ... I mean, it's not going anywhere. And there's no rule, in painting at least, that you have to finish what you start, either immediately or ever. So I'm feeling like I'm on solid ground here.

All of which brings me to the video you have likely chosen not to watch. Near the end, they pan across several small faces on paper (Linoprints, if that's the word. Done with linoleum?), and I thought, I would be fun to take some of those and render them vastly larger than they are in real life.

There's a lot to do this summer, and this is just an idea. But still...