I visited the Blanton last Friday and here are a few links to artists and items of interest from my notes:

Adolph Gottlieb along with Mark Rothko is the kind of artist who makes me wish I had a lot more money and a gargantuan ultramodern concrete and glass house so I could have some of their gigantic pieces of my own.

The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints (Google book search) is a book I should read in order to better appreciate Renaissance religious art.

Marilyn Minter takes fashion photography and turns it into larger than life, supersaturated commentary on our image obsessed and superficial society.

Kehinde Wiley makes art that is unlike anything I've ever seen. His masterful execution of these images with meticulous attention to detail and decadent incorporation of patterns is hypnotic.  Furthermore, the way he co-opts the work of the old masters by keeping the titles of their work and the poses of their subjects but using young African Americans in contemporary clothing is a clever and insightful commentary on our society that I can't fully comprehend.  My new obsession is to own some reproductions of his work.  I need to look for prints or books but I haven't even searched Amazon.com yet.

The color theories of German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe promise to make for an interesting read.