Dayton, Ohio. I was very excited to discover that I could use the hotel TV as a second display via HDMI. Other than that, and my wonderful morning runs, my memory of this cities felicities quickly fades…

Painting tl;dr

1. CITY: Dayton, OH

2. MUSEUM: Dayton Art Institute

3. PAINTING: Allegory of Summer and Winter

4. ARTIST: Giovanni Battista Pittoni

5. OBSERVATION DATE: Jan 20, 2023

Music tl;dr

1. CITY: New York

2. LOCATION: 72nd & Park

3. AUDIO SKETCH: Summer and Winter, for Pittoni

4. COMPOSER: Niles Luther

5. CREATION DATE: Feb 21, 2023

The Museum

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by Dayton Art Institute. It was small and unassuming in size, but welcoming and thoughtfully curated. I liked the octagonal layout of the building.

It was interesting to see another painting by the Italian Baroque painter Mattia Preti (he painted Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery from Saint Louis Art Museum), this time significantly larger in size.

I’m finding that the lighting on paintings makes a huge difference in my experience of them. Often, in galleries with little natural light, the canvas is lit directly and the varnish reflects that light. This prevents the viewer from being able to see the details of the painting when they are standing directly in front of it.

It also makes it very hard to capture a decent photo. That was the case with the Preti, which is unfortunate, but I’m not trying to select paintings by repeat artists anyway. Interestingly, I find that as I learn more about art history, I am increasingly drawn to the Italian Baroque. It resonates the most.

I was shocked when I entered the contemporary galleries and saw a landscape that looked like it came from the hands of April Gornik, an American landscape artist whose most recent painting (currently untitled) I’m composing a piano trio for. Sure enough, when I walked closer to read the wall text, it was one of hers! I was proud of myself for having instantly recognized her style. Even more shocking was the Kehinde Wiley hanging directly adjacent to hers. To have worked with both artists, who are completely opposite in style, and find them next to each other in what felt like such a random location as Dayton Ohio, was pretty surreal.

It was hard to choose which painting to score from this museum, although not quite as hard as it was in STL. I really liked the Rape of Lucretia, but I’ve already included one painting on a similar topic and I think the collection needs more narrative diversity.

I’m not sure how many portraits I have at this point, but I spent the week switching my project database over from my notes app to notion.so. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed with the amount of paintings I have and my lack of clarity on where exactly I am within the process of scoring each painting. Notion has a high learning curve but after several hours of exploring the template and customizing for my needs, I’ve created a fairly comprehensive system for documenting each memory I have in front of each painting, at each museum, in every city, as well as all the specific tasks I must accomplish in order to bring the music from a voice memo to a finished NFT.

All in all, a solid day at the museum. Thanks Dayton.

The Painting

I love the Allegory of Summer and Winter. The title alone pulls me in. I often struggle to articulate myself in a manner which I find worthy of any attention, so succinct yet poetic descriptions are very attractive to me.

I have always loved winter. I lost my love for the summer as I entered adulthood, and I’m not quite sure why. There’s a pain to the winter that draws me in. Perhaps it’s the cold, or the silence of snow as it blankets a forest floor, or the determination of life to continue living.

Recently I’ve been running 10k’s shirtless in the early morning when it’s below freezing. It makes me feel like a beast, a veritable warrior. Quite the opposite of the grizzled man who is pictured here, huddled around his brazier, clinging to the vestiges of its heat. Doesn’t he know the man who cuts his own wood gets warm twice? What is she pointing to as he turns his back? There’s a great story on this canvas.

An allegory is a symbolic representation of generalized beliefs about human conduct or experience. Pittoni's allegory contrasts summer, represented by a partially clad beautiful young woman, with winter shown as a fully robed bearded old man huddling near a flame. While clearly symbolizing the differences between the warmth of summer and the cold of winter, these figures also suggest the passing of time from one season to another and the stages of life from youth to old age.

These kinds of symbolic paintings, with moral messages about the brevity of life, were popular among noble patrons, particularly in the eighteenth century as religious subjects gradually fell from favor.

Museum purchase with funds provided by the 1965 Associate Board Art Ball and the Virginia V. Blakeney Endowment, 1965.57

Wall text for Allegory of Summer and Winter. Dayton Art Institute, Ohio

Musical Response

The following music NFT is my initial response to Giovanni Battista Pittoni's ‘Allegory of Summer and Winter,’ recorded on Feb 21, 2023 via voice memo at a private residence in New York, NY. The cover art is a sineprint (a graphed room frequency response) of my room.

There’s a lot going in this recording! That flickering sound in the background are my candles burning. I felt that it would be appropriate to leave it in. There are also people cooking in the kitchen, and the chopping of onions can be heard; the house isn’t very soundproof. I think it’s kind of fun to leave these artifacts in for the informal sketches, as it is authentic and comparatively will only increase the quality of the final recording.

The musical consideration for this was that the melody at 00:12 represents Summer pointing to Winter, and the melody at 00:37 represents his response.

That’s all for now.

Most sincerely,
Niles Luther