Washington, DC - December exhibitions

I had not been to the Phillips Collection since its 2006 expansion, so it was a surprise to see the new entrance and a bit of a puzzle to find the galleries and get oriented. Wandering through, I think I found most of the art, but it seemed that I was sneaking down little hallways and up and down little staircases to discover more rooms of art. Light, airy galleries house Washington School abstract paintings; the rest of the permanent collection looks quite lovely in the arcaded galleries upstairs. I had the idea to see the Man Ray exhibition there and then compare it to the Man Ray exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. However, we never got to the Jewish Museum, perhaps in part because I got a little bored in the Phillips show. Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens included a lot of Man Ray photographs of African objects, plus several of the objects he photographed and other photographers' images of them and other works. I understand that the thesis of the exhibition was that Man Ray's interest, and his photographs, effected the change in the understanding of these objects, from their being ethnographic specimens to being works of art in the Western sense. The Phillips' website explains it quite clearly. Nonetheless, the disjuncture between the photographs and the descriptions of the objects' purpose, and the display of the objects without real cultural context, became frustrating. I believe this is an important exhibition, but sadly, it seemed to reinforce the modernist and contemporary practice of separating African objects from their meaning at the same time it uses the photographs to increase our awareness of their beauty and abstract power.

Perhaps this is where I should mention the Yinka Shonibare MBE exhibition at the National Museum of African Art. Shonibare was born in Britain in 1962 and raised in Nigeria. His figures, figure tableaux, and videos of people in 18^th-century-style dress made of brightly-colored and densely patterned cloth that is popular in Africa refer to European colonialism and its effects on Africa. While each composition is different - the figures do different things – the theme is always the same. The opening work in the exhibition is a sculpture based on Fragonard's painting The Swing at the Wallace Collection in London. I love the idea and appreciate that he embraces the sexual reference in the woman's shoe flying through the air. But the work would be so much stronger if he had left out the very fake plants that surround the swing. Perhaps his intent was to make the object look tacky; if so, he succeeds. Shonibare purchases much of the cloth for his costumes at Brixton Market in England; for some sculptures he commissioned fabric designs specifically related to the subject of the sculpture. For example, the headless man drinking from a water fountain wears clothing with plumbing designs. The variations in activities and number of actors did not significantly expand his view, to my mind. I had seen individual works by Shonibare in several exhibitions and was looking forward to the retrospective. Perhaps one Shonibare makes a strong visual impact and historical statement; several together may actually dilute that impact.

Also at the Phillips Collection I stumbled upon Intersections Art Projects, described on the Phillips' website as "intersections between old and new traditions, modern and contemporary art practices, and museum spaces and artistic interventions." Tayo Heuser had 3-dimensionally shaped canvases titled Pulse, apparently inspired by Mark Rothko's works in the museum, but in much softer colors and much more linear compositions, that were displayed on the walls of the main staircase. They are very pleasant to look at, abstract and tactile. A hand-drawn video by Jennifer Wen Ma, Brain Storm, of a person and a horse walking through an increasingly turbulent landscape, caught and kept my attention (very unusual for me), although I hardly noticed the images from it on the windows of the museum bridge. While the changing textures and shadows of the landscape were visually appealing, the steadfastness of the horse and man and their loneliness and togetherness kept me thinking. Finally, a wonderful string construction by Barbara Josephs Liotta, called Icarus, shaped and occupied space, had an elegant shape, and moved slightly with the currents of air in the gallery. It seemed to connect to other string compositions I've seen lately – the Tomas Saraceno at the Venice Biennale and a wonderful installation in the London Hayward Gallery's Walking in My Mind exhibition last summer, in which Japanese artist Chiaru Shiota stretched black cords across an entire room, leaving just a path for the viewer and some white shapes. And it makes me think of Fred Sandback (1943-2003), who made enormously evocative huge sculptures from single strands of yarn.

Washington, DC, The Corcoran Gallery of Art

On December 16, on the way to see the exhibition Sargent and the Sea, I wandered into the Corcoran's exhibition of its own collection of 19^th century American sculpture, which included some wonderful bronzes by Bessie Potter Vonnoh and Abastenia St. Leger Eberle (1878-1942), women artists who are known but not famous.

Vonnoh,

The Young Mother

Eberle, By the Sea

I continued to wander through the Corcoran's very strong permanent collection and rediscovered its diversity and quality. Because the Corcoran has associated itself so strongly with contemporary art in recent years, it is always a surprise to find the strength of its European and earlier American collections. After wandering delightedly through a couple of rooms hung salon style and visiting the Salon Dore, the 18^th century French drawing room, I decided to stop myself at a painting I wanted to overlook. It's Renoir's View from Cap Martin of Monte Carlo, 1884. I took a snapshot, which can only serve as a reminder of the object.

Not being particularly interested in Renoir, I decided to see what I could like in this painting and immediately found myself surprised at how much there was. I thought of comparing it to a photograph and found that the painting was far more interesting than a photographic image of the scene might have been. Of course, in Renoir's time the photograph would have been black and white, losing most of what is delicious about the painting. The colors of the sea, partly greenish and partly turquoise, capture the best that water can be. Blue infiltrates the green of the vegetation and pink colors the sea and the sky. The surface of the painting shows the textures of the individual brush strokes, which suggest the movement of a slight breeze in the trees and the flow of the tide. The work is both visual and tactile. Because the bushes are in the way, revealing only a bit of the water and covering the left part of the town, you feel like the image is captured on the fly, as you might glimpse it driving around the bay into town; at the same time he allows you to see enough to understand the entire view. The painting calls to mind the sensations of the seaside and summer as well as the pleasures of brushstrokes and color.

I did finally get to the Sargent exhibition, which was both informative and a bit disappointing. The publicity refers to more than 80 works in the show, but a great many of them are drawings and sketches of fishing villages, sailing and steamships, ports, and boats on water. These sketches evoke the young artist capturing what he sees in many media, but barely suggest his virtuoso paint handling. Many of the paintings are small and not many of them capture the froth and brilliant light of Sargent's later work. For some reason I expected that the exhibition would include some watercolors of Venice, but I guess the canals there are not strictly "sea," and watercolor was not a significant component of this exhibition. Many of the smaller works came from a private collection or collections and seemed to be recent discoveries; the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to see this group of objects together and a focused look at an aspect of Sargent's early work. A map at the entrance indicated the significant travels that Sargent made around Europe between 1874 and 1880 in order to complete all his sea-related pictures, to Nice, Marseilles, Genoa, Naples, Capri, Tangier, Spain, Beuzeval (France), Cancale and other villages on the Brittany coast.

The exhibition includes many studies for its centerpiece, Sargent's Setting Out to Fish, a masterpiece in the Corcoran collection  that is shown next to another, smaller version, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's Fishing for Oysters at Cancale. Comparing the two works to each other and to the studies was entertaining and revealed how Sargent used sketches and modified his paintings depending on where he intended to show them. So, while on the one hand, the exhibition was visually a bit disappointing, on the other it provided a rather detailed look at the way Sargent approached a painting, the subjects that at least in part interested him in his early career, and the various media he used as he was developing as an artist. It was a good scholarly show and I would have found it particularly interesting in a university art museum context.

Washington, DC – History Museum

Tom was on an NEA panel in December, so I had the chance to go to museums while he worked for three and a half days. I spent a half day at the National Gallery and was surprised that there were so few people there. In fact, all the art museums were very quiet; the week before Christmas it appears that everyone in DC goes home. The following week we were in New York, where the museums were packed with holiday visitors and people home for vacation.

Most entertaining was a visit to the National Museum of American History, where my purpose was to see Keeping History: Plains Indian Ledger Drawings. This tiny display of about 15 drawings by American Indians - who were either imprisoned at Fort Marion in Florida or confined to one of the Indian schools at the end of the 19^th century - included computer stations with helpful information about the individual drawings that mostly depicted battles or hunts. While a focus exhibition like this one, especially with good educational material, is often much more informative and pleasurable than a huge encyclopedic examination of a theme, in this case there were so few objects that I did not leave with the feeling of comprehending how these drawings functioned or what they really meant. The exhibition indicated that hundreds of drawings exist, and I wanted to see many more of them. The computer stations provided really helpful interpretation of individual drawings, explaining an animal floating in the sky (the name symbol of the figure below) and identifying various objects depicted. While the hunts and battles were invigorating, the photographs of the Indians who made the drawings while trapped in schools and prisons pointed out the sad circumstances in which the art was produced. Perhaps making ledger drawings gave the prisoners chance to escape mentally and embrace their distinguished history. A version of the exhibition is available online.

I was much more excited when I wandered into the display of the Star Spangled Banner, where crowds of adults and children were busy trying to fill out questionnaires about the exhibition, where I learned that the Francis Scott Key song only became the national anthem in 1931 and where the enormous flag itself (decreased from its original size of 30 by 42 feet by the owners cutting out sections to give as souvenirs) had a profound impact. The information on the maker of the flag, Mary Pickersgill (1776-1857) was enlightening; I had never thought of a person making this particular flag.

In another part of the museum an ordinary Woolworth's lunch counter from Greensboro, South Carolina called up the entire Civil Rights movement. In a history museum an everyday object with no special design qualities can have a powerful emotional impact because of the context in which it played a role. The flag is really big, but identifying it as the source of the national anthem adds enormously to its power. The lunch counter, symbolizing more recent history, reverberates in ways both painful and heroic.

Finally, I visited Julia Child's kitchen, where, with several other people my age, I watched videos of her making crepes Suzettes and baked Alaska and wondered how obsessive she must have been to have outlines on her peg board to be sure her copper pots would always be returned to their proper places. It was helpful to see the actual person after having had her transformed into Meryl Streep by the movie Julie and Julia.

Orchard asleep

A while ago I was going to write something just to acknowledge that the orchard and vineyard had gone to sleep after a few days of hard freeze in early December. The leaves were either gone or brown and the grass was brown. Finally it was time to start pruning. But then we went away for 10 days, we came back in a blizzard, we were snowed in, and the snow has drifted deep enough that walking in the orchard is even difficult for the dogs. Without the sun, under clouds, it looks like a black-and-white art movie or Russia during Napoleon's retreat (in my imagination, of course; I have never been to Russia). I've never found snow to be so dreary. So pruning has been put on hold for a few days; we'd like to wait till the temperature is above freezing. Maybe next week....

New Museum Joannou Exhibition controversy

The recent blog entries and articles in the New York Times and New York Magazine about the exhibition of Dakis Joannou's contemporary art collection have been fun to read. Deborah Sontag (Times) Jerry Saltz (New York and blog) and Tyler Green (Art Newspaper and Modern Art Notes) were venting pretty actively there for a few days in November. Not being personally familiar with the individuals involved, I've been thinking about this all from my Baldwin City, Kansas vantage point and trying to sort it all out.

The New Museum has scheduled an exhibition of works from the Joannou collection, a widely admired private collection of contemporary art housed in a private museum in Greece and never seen in this country. The collection includes 40 works by Jeff Koons, an art celebrity whose early work inspired Mr. Joannou to collect contemporary art. Jeff Koons will be the curator of the exhibition. Among the concerns stated are that Joannou is a trustee of the New Museum; that Koons is not a curator, will likely be choosing his own work for the exhibition, and is beholden to Joannou as a major collector of his work; and that by showing the collection the New Museum increases its value, thereby financially benefitting its trustee. Several of the writers also are very critical of museums showing private collections at all. Additional blog information documents a range of connections in this instance between the New Museum staff members, the collector, several artists, and the dealer Gavin Brown.

Museum codes of ethics usually include a statement that trustees should not profit personally from their association with the museum. More specifically, museums should not exhibit the collections of their trustees. Obviously, the trustees, who hire (and fire) the director, should not use their power to influence the artistic decisions made by the museum staff and should not use their positions to enhance their own reputations as collectors or the value of their collections through exhibiting them in a museum over which they have fiduciary responsibility. This rule is especially important because most museums have trustees whose collections are not appropriate for exhibition in their museum, but who want to have their collections displayed. The ethical rule saves the museum staff from the danger of offending museum supporters and saves the audience from being puzzled as to why objects unrelated to the museum's mission or of inferior quality are on view.

So, when the trustee has a collection that is widely praised and internationally respected, it presents a conflict between following the standard codes of ethics and taking advantage of a rare opportunity to have an exhibition of interest. In some circumstances it may be more in the public's interest to show the collection than to adhere to standards. From the standpoint of the ordinary museum goer with an interest in contemporary art the Joannou exhibition would appear to make a contribution to the New York art scene, especially if it includes major or exciting works of art that have not been seen publicly in New York before, or have only been seen in the galleries from which Joannou purchased them.

There has also been an argument that museums should never offer exhibitions of private collections, on the principle that they are vanity opportunities for the collector, lazy on the part of the museums, misleading to the public by giving more importance to the collections (collectors) than they may deserve, and that they raise the commercial value of the objects in the collection. In many cases, museums display private collections that have been donated or are promised gifts to the museum, eliminating the possibility that the collectors will sell the objects after having received that museum imprimatur.

These commercial possibilities involved in showing private collections are indeed problematic. Nonetheless, there are instances when private collections provide a unique educational opportunity for museum visitors. Sometimes private collectors have acquired groups of objects that are unavailable in museums anywhere and an exhibition of these collections is enlightening to the public and provides a unique scholarly resource as well. Collectors have individual tastes (unless they are completely dependent on art consultants, which is another issue) and it is fascinating to see which works and which artists engage one individual, as well as to have an insight into the process of forming a collection. People love visiting private collections. But visiting collectors' homes is not possible for most people and the exhibition of a collection in a museum is a more democratic way of sharing the art. (I love the way Jerry Saltz slips into his column that he has seen Joannou's collection; so we know he's an insider.)

The argument that the exhibition might increase the value of the works of art seems moot, since if the Joannou collection is as famous as it sounds, then the imprimatur of the collector should be adequate to make the objects valuable. Also, given the artists in the collection whose names have been published, their values are already beyond the means of most museums and art lovers, making the likely impact on prices of a museum exhibition minimal. On the other hand, without knowing exactly what will be in the exhibition, perhaps Joannou owns a lot of relatively unknown work that would increase in value by being exhibited in New York and Koons might choose it to show. He could make those choices because he thinks the work deserves seeing, or he might want to do the artists a favor. That is a potential problem.

Since Koons is not trained as a curator, his reasons for including works in the exhibition may be very different from the normal ones we attribute to curators. We think curators choose the very best objects, based on their years of training, careful thought, and perceptive vision, and perhaps an overriding concept that drives an exhibition. However, personal factors may also have weight for museum curators. A curator could be swayed by something an artist says, by the obvious preferences of the collector, by personal and professional alliances of all sorts, as well as by physical limitations of the space of the gallery.

The choice of Koons as curator of the exhibition seems intriguing to me. I would be interested in what he wanted to show from a large collection and I think organizing an exhibition from an artist's point of view is appealing, even if it is from a collection in which he is strongly represented. Which of his own works would he want to show? Would he be vain enough to include an immodest number of his own works? Does he have interesting ideas about art? Does he have anything interesting to say? One blogger decries Koons as curator because he sees it as further reducing the curators' role in museums. Granted, curators seem to be under fire in many circumstances, but they are also often overworked, organizing more exhibitions than they have time to do justice. It is not clear if the curators/director chose Koons to organize this exhibition, but if they did, that would suffice as a curatorial decision, not unlike the choice of an artist to organize exhibitions from museums' own collections, a popular practice in recent years, for example at the Metropolitan and Cooper Hewitt Museums.

What was most troubling about this project, however, were statements made later in blogs about the personal, social connections between the collector, the museum director, the curators, the artists the museum shows, and one dealer. Everybody seems to hang out together. For a museum to present four one-person exhibitions in two years of artists from one dealer - who also represents the spouse of the curator responsible for one of the exhibitions - is troubling. Even though I've been working in the art world for decades, I still imagine that museums choose to show the artists they think are most compelling and whom they want to share with a wider audience for intellectual, aesthetic, and possibly political reasons. But what if the art is not compelling and we are struggling to appreciate something that is exhibited as the result of personal or commercial alliances? Those tangles of associations endanger the museum's public trust and call into question the whole contemporary art enterprise. For the last few weeks it has left me pretty cynical about most contemporary exhibitions.

And, come to think of it, aside from being enormously famous, what is it about Jeff Koons that would make me want to see an exhibition for which he is the curator?

Chicago-hard and easy art

In Chicago the first weekend in November, SOFA, the sculpture, objects, and functional art exhibition, is a great place to see a lot of different objects in traditional craft media – wood, metalwork, fiber, mixed media, jewelry, mixed media, and glass - from dealers from around the country and the world. We go specifically to look at contemporary glass. This year the exhibition was significantly smaller than in the past and we noticed the absence of several of our favorite galleries. Nonetheless, there was plenty to see and we were exhausted by the time we were finished. It appeared that sales were rather good, although I believe the prices were lower than in the past and the lower priced objects were selling the best.

In retrospect, most of what we see at SOFA is pretty easy; the objects are often colorful, either of interest because of their color, shape, or function, or because of the narrative they include, which is generally quite easy to read because it is depicted either though pictures or pretty straightforward texts. Although some of the work there makes you laugh or smile, not much makes you struggle to deal with it.

I've been struggling a little with Liam Gillick, the British artist who occupied the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this summer. We were completely uninterested in the nonfunctional wood cabinets he strung across the Pavilion spaces and we hardly noticed the animatronic cat perched on top of one. Learning later that the cabinets reproduced those of his kitchen did not engage my interest any further. But preparing to go to Chicago, I found that he had a small exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art there and the publicity indicated that it would juxtapose his work with that of minimal artists. So rather than think about the faux cabinets as non-functional woodwork, I felt compelled to consider them as neo-minimal and Tom and I discussed whether that works. Tom says "no" because the minimal artists reduced their objects to an essence that draws the viewer's attention to what is left. He thinks what is left is of interest because the artist has still been creative, just with much more limited media. I.e. there would not be non-functional cabinets, but wood sculptures that could never be imagined as cabinets, like Donald Judd's wood sculptures. I'm still wondering whether copying your kitchen cabinets as sculpture is sort of a minimal Pop activity, taking everyday objects and reducing them to less. But I must agree that the cabinets still would not attract my attention or inspire much reverie beyond what I've just written.

The exhibition at the MOCA included somewhat different installations. In one room Gillick replaced the frosted white ceiling glass panels with transparent colored ones, drawing one's attention to the ceiling and the fluorescent lights behind it. The label said this was supposed to make us see the space differently, and I guess the ceiling was different from the other galleries (a minimal response to the change). The colored ceiling seemed a rather obvious thing to do and was reminiscent of the bright colors Jorge Pardo had used in his retiling of the DIA Art Center on 22^nd Street in New York several years ago. The same room at MOCA was subdivided with fence-like walls and each subdivision had a grey carpet. It looked somewhat like the pens you see at a cattle or horse auctions around these parts. I suppose a prison or school might also come to mind. We didn't look at the video in one of the subdivisions – it was kind of washed out.

The other space held a narrow vertical rectangular object and a large square-shaped object. Both had colorful bars shaping them and some transparent walls. The square one was very large, maybe 6 feet high and 10 feet on the sides. Both of them enclosed spaces that you could not enter and the label said we were supposed to think of them as somehow between architecture and sculpture. I thought they looked like colorful minimal sculptures. In the adjoining room there were Donald Judd works that underlined and seemed consistent with the minimalism of the Gillicks.

A few years ago I had a meeting with a rather famous headhunter. After asking about my interest in getting a job, he launched into an attack on minimal art, saying it's the Emperor's New Clothes and really not of any interest. Didn't I think so? I couldn't tell if he really meant it or if he was imitating a philistine museum goer. And I had no idea if it was a test or a way of continuing the conversation when he knew he had no interest in me as a candidate for any of the positions he controlled. But I thought the subject was interesting and I disagreed with him (politely, of course). I think the idea of reducing an art form to its essentials, seeing how little you can do and still have it be an art work, seems a worthwhile challenge. I've loved thinking about the space evoked by Karl Andre's metal tiles on the floor, the way a bi-colored painting by Brice Marden makes you look at the juxtaposition of colors and the textures and edge where the colors meet, not to mention enticing you to contemplate rather dull hues in subtle relation to each other. So minimalism can be fine. There is some question, however, as to how long one really wants to look at a minimal object and I question whether all minimal objects can hold anyone's attention, even if they are understood to be iconic masterpieces.

*****
When we got our tickets for the Museum of Contemporary Art, the ticket person said something about Tino Sehgal, then said "Men Who Stare at Goats, BAAAA." We started a conversation with her about the movie and its reviews and about Tino Sehgal, who apparently had the ticket sellers choosing a headline each day to repeat to the visitors. Sehgal's art without objects has engaged my interest since the "guards" at the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005 danced out singing "Oh, Zees is so conTEMPorary!" in a show of sculpture that really wasn't. Two years later we were at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt and wandered into a Tino Sehgal installation where people were standing around the room and all said something in German when we walked in. We didn't know what to do, didn't understand them, and made a hasty retreat. The next winter I saw the installation in New York, in English, and joined in the conversation, which reset every time a new person entered. I'm interested that his background is in theater and economics and that his art purposely avoids objects. But mostly I'm interested in the way his work encourages communication among strangers in art-based spaces. We don't normally talk much in art museums and galleries, except to our companions; Sehgal's work breaks down the distances among museum and gallery goers.

*****
Another purpose of the trip was to visit the new modern and contemporary art galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago. We detoured to see the very carefully presented Arts and Crafts exhibition, focusing on England and Chicago and drawn from collections in the Chicago area. It seemed a particularly good way to organize a reasonably priced exhibition that includes beautiful and unusual objects, presents wonderful ideas and coherent historical information, and connects to the specific community and its relationship to the world. The exhibition includes the expected furniture, textiles, book illustrations, ceramics and metalwork, and also includes photographs. Beginning with William Morris and ending with the Prairie School and Frank Lloyd Wright, it presented both familiar and unfamiliar works of art, most of them fascinating. We were interested in the progression from Morris's focus on the handmade object and rejection of industrialization to the later artists in Chicago embracing industrialization and proclaiming industry's important role in creating the simple clean designs embraced by the movement.

Entering Renzo Piano's addition to the Art Institute from the older museum building, you first encounter a huge white hall with plain walls and high ceilings, articulated primarily by the openings on one side that accommodate the stairs, the first floor gallery entrance, the open second floor hall, and by the lights that are suspended from the ceiling in a row that extends from one end of the hall to the other and that have cords that go diagonally from the lights to the ceiling corners; this ceiling is all that really distinguishes the space from any commercial building. Otherwise, it is a bright, white straightforward flat space. That it contains no art and no color reminds me of the Stephen Holl expansion of the Nelson Atkins Museum, but the Holl structure is significantly more sculptural. I also thought of the old expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with its huge but uninviting lobby.

Piano is known for museums, from the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Menil Collection in Houston to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Morgan Library in New York. It took me a while to like the Menil Collection building, which seems to imitate a beach house from the outside, but has the carefully balanced gallery proportions and natural lighting that, combined with extraordinarily sensitive placement of the objects, makes for an enlightening and often moving art experience. In the Morgan Library, Piano designed a large open atrium the turns a formerly intimate museum - that made the visitor feel privileged - into a more corporate and brittle interior. Galleries were not a major part of that project and the additional space is no doubt useful, but it makes the Morgan feel like everywhere else, except for the older spaces, which retain some of their domesticity and tranquility.

On a beautifully sunny day, the Art Institute spaces were bright with natural light. Some of the gallery areas have window walls with shades that reduce the sunlight, but permit one to see the skyline outside. The interior gallery walls appear to be flexible, and as configured they create rooms that accommodate a relatively small number of objects. The installation included several rooms devoted to one artist; for example, Robert Gober and Bruce Nauman each had two spaces, Robert Ryman had one, as did Jim Nutt. They are beautifully proportioned, simple white boxes, and the works all had enough space to be seen easily. So after you pass through the huge lobby, the building appears to serve its art well, in a neutral, anonymous way.

The exterior of the addition, facing Millennium Park, has glass walls, lots of white vertical ribs and a roof that seems to float. It's a pleasant-looking building, but without the impact of Aqua, the new high-rise I caught a glimpse of from a taxi. Designed by woman architect Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects, it stands out in a skyline of amazing buildings. Chicago is still a great city to see contemporary architecture in the United States.

Owl

Our farm is on a quiet dirt road. The past couple of days I've noticed a dark pile on the east side of the road not far from our driveway. It looked like feathers and today I took the time to stop. It's a big barn owl, splayed on the side of the road. Occasionally when we're driving home at night an owl will swoop right across in front of the windshield. I guess this one didn't make it. The patterns on its wings are like murrini glass, white, brown, beige, black.