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Tuesday, December 25, 2012

A Christmas Present for the Rurally-Inclined

"Plein Air" (detail))

"Plein Air" 650cm x 505cm, oil, by Ramon Casas.
In the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya , Barcelona

If you're like me and prefer living in the wide, open spaces, you may find it difficult to get to a good museum. I love looking at art, but frankly, a lot of the art I see is either in magazines, coffee table books or in tiny, highly-pixelated images online.  It's rare when I can view good art in person.

So here's the Christmas present for the rurally-inclined.  It's called the Google Art Project.  GAP has over 36,000 pieces of art, many of them in ultra-high resolution.  If you're the kind of museum-goer who is always told by the guard to step back from the paintings, this is an opportunity to get inches close to the canvas.

In the painting above by Ramon Casas, I zoomed in as far as I could on the tabletop arrangement of bottle, glass and hands.  You can see every brush stroke!