Moby-Dick Domes by Frank Stella

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Happy New Year!

It seems with Moby-Dick on our opera radar (sonar?) we keep on finding references to this work everywhere we go. The holidays saw the Aria Serious crew in San Francisco and one beautiful afternoon we took a tour of the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. And we're glad we did. Since we were seriously debating another trip the California Academy of Sciences.

In one of the rooms, a piece of art popped out at us (literally, it's three dimensional) by artist Frank Stella called The Cabin, Ahab and Starbuck from a series of works called The Moby-Dick Domes. Familiar with Frank Stella but totally unfamiliar with his Moby-Dick Domes we jotted it down on our museum receipt to look into later.

Well today we were wearing the same pants we wore to the De Young and happened to find our note in the pocket "check Moby-Dick Domes, Frank Stella [something unintelligible]" and found this great article on this series that the artist spent 15 years working on.  The series tries to capture the power and emotion of the novel rather than attempt to narrate it and it's an impressive body of work consisting of 135 pieces: prints, reliefs, sculpture, murals, and other ephemera with each work relating to one chapter of Moby-Dick.

On the cusp of presenting Moby-Dick we're just amazed at how much art one piece of literature has engendered over the years. 

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