Needles of Culture. 3500 years old Cleopatra's needle, a dash of airplane and a skyscraper, this is New York City for you /  by Mirena Rhee

Needles of Culture intersect from my point of view in Central Park.

New York City is more than a graduate school, you never graduate. All you have to do is get out of your house and you have everything you need to know about the world, if only you know to look and learn how to see.

New York City is also a teacher of the fleeting, it is a teacher of eternity, and the human condition, of the momentary, of the acquisition and subsequent discardment of objects. Whatever was in the best of shops ultimately ends up in the landfill.

New York City also teaches the value of things, a churro is $3, but 200 meters south it is $4. And the value of a homeless person is zero.

In its great galleries and museums I saw the best the world can offer, priceless works of art money can't buy.

Directly from the Red Planet /  by Mirena Rhee

Underpainting or what they used to call dead coloring paying attention to the line.

Put everything on the canvas in ochre and meanwhile figuring out how to build out different surfaces. In oil I use the mass of the paint to build out rocks, here I want to use transparent glazes because they look more 3d dimensional in acrylics.

It's counter intuitive to use subsurface scattering for rocks but I want to paint jewels encrusted gold rather than dirt and stone.