Wandering the Museum

I spent a hour or so wandering the National Gallery of Art. Wanted to reconnect with some pictures I hadn't seen in a while. I've written about the plague of hipness and its detrimental effect on modern art at some length already in previous posts. So it was with some irony that I noticed a book on the new books table of NGA's bookstore called The Birth of the Cool. Yes, well, I suppose that proves my point.
But if hipness is the illness, what then is the cure?
I looked at many things, a very odd assortment -- Dutch 17th century paintings generally, including a new acquisition by Salomon Van Ruisdael, and "Mary Queen of Heaven" by the Master of the Saint Lucy Altarpiece, some French 19th century landscapes by academic painters, and a whole mish mash generally.
But I stopped among the Degas sculptures and drew horses briefly, using the only thing I had, a ball point pen. As I was drawing, I was struggling a little with being able to see (my contacts were not good drawing eye wear), but I focused on what I was seeing in the sculptures by asking myself this question: "What was Degas looking at or remembering when he made these sculptures of horses?" So I let myself get lost in the forms and just doodled the ideas that I had, my ideas, as I looked. I was, in other words, trying to "draw from life" while drawing from his sculpture of, his idea of, a horse. The drawing at the top of the post is one of Degas's off-hand horse drawings, and below it is one of the drawings I made today while looking at his sculpture.
I was thinking with the pen in my hand