Were you to ask someone on the street if they like art, they would likely answer positively. One may not like certain kinds of art, but it's fair to say everyone has a positive connotation with at least some kind of art.   We like art because it's pleasant to look at-even if it is not a "pretty" piece. Political art or art designed to make a point about something difficult can still be a positive experience in that we can find ourselves stepping outside our normal way of processing the world-of seeing the world-to consider something more closely; to see something in a new way.   In looking at art, we are looking beyond a mere thing into an idea of a thing, as well as the specificity of that thing in a certain place, time, light, mood. In being shown something in a way that is new to us, we learn that seeing is not passive, and it is not fixed. Our seeing is a dialogue that changes with time and experience. This is why our visual tastes can change over time and it is why a work of art can come to mean more or less to you as time stretches between your interactions with it.

I have many examples from my own life.   Despite the fact that I love gardening, and I paint flowers, I am quite opinionated on flowers in general and have strong aversions to certain ones. One flower that I used to refuse to embrace on what I saw as completely legitimate grounds, is the mum. Ubiquitous in the autumn in New England, I associated them with overdone displays celebrating the harvest season, in overly hot colors: acidic yellow, dirty orange, and decidedly un-nuanced maroon. But one day, walking around the Metropolitan Museum in New York , I was confronted with caillebotte mums

Gustave Caillebotte's painting of chrysanthemums. This piece is not typical of his work in its composition, or really in its palette, orientation, etc. The more I think about it, I wonder what came over him? Maybe he painted this for himself, taken by the beauty of the simple mass of flowers. Maybe it began as part of a larger work and he ended up slicing this piece off of a failed piece. This is all just daydreaming on my part, and I digress. I was not in a place where I was painting flowers, and in a place like the Met I don't know why this painting should have stopped me in my tracks, but it did. I literally fell in love with mums at that moment, and I have never looked at them the same way since.

Childe Hassam Another example is Hollyhocks. I had always thought of them as old fashioned and a bit dowdy. My experience of them was limited. They were always so much taller than everything around them, like an awkward teenager whose growth spurt makes them embarrassingly taller than their classmates. But as I began painting flowers and looking at painters I admired I began to see hollyhocks in a new light. Child Hassam, Claude Monet and Fantin-LaTour all painted them. They saw beauty where I hadn't. Seeing through their eyes changed the way I saw through mine.

Henri Fantin Latour

Monet

The flipside of this seeing coin is that the way we experience and move through the world affects how we then see art. When I was young and a new painter, I was in love with realism. I still consider it my native tongue so to speak, but as I have matured as an artist, I have grown in my admiration for, and therefore love of, paintings that while representational, are not necessarily realist in the academic sense. As one moves through life, things tend to become less black and white. I learned of more views and perspectives, and I began to see that things could look different depending on the country, situation, time. I increasingly found that art that was less exact, less perfect, began to speak to me in a whole new way. I began to see much beauty in the whimsy- the imperfection of artists who colored outside the lines. The first artist I recall falling in love with was Claude Monet, and I was in 4th grade. By the time I graduated with an art history degree and knew everything there was to know in the world as all people aged 14-24 seem to, I found him overhyped, quaint, even, I am ashamed to say, vapid. But in time, as I began to look again, I returned to my original awe. He wasn't just painting pretty pictures, he was doing a whole new thing! Trying to capture light and atmosphere and the feeling of a place. He was interested in so much more than offering an alternative to a photograph. This place of admiration and understanding is one I would not have arrived at without doing some hard time in the world and beginning to understand things aren't always cut and dry, this or that. As time passes I grow in appreciation of art as an outworking of one's experience in the world and the way they know best to share certain feelings and thoughts with others.

Willem Kalf- a stunning realist still life

Pierre Bonnard-a delightful, though not realist still life

My only marker of liking art when I was young was perhaps whether or not I would hang it on the wall of my home...like the Monet poster I proudly tacked to my bedroom wall as a kid. Now it has grown far deeper than that, and that is because where I once saw the world more narrowly because of my limited experience in interaction with it, time has led me to a broader and deeper appreciation of all the varied threads that make up this tapestry we call life. We may not like everything we see, but we learn from all of it and expanding vision is never a bad thing.

 

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I arrive in April.

I wake, I come alive.

The sun rises and my mind with it. My body follows and soon I am outside. I am comforted by this synchronicity with natural rhythms. It shows me all in humanity is not lost to modern advances. Would that this were my pattern year round, but I am helpless against the drowsy days and early, long nights of the darker, colder months. Somewhere in that primal part of me that is wiser and more attuned to reality, it is known that to facilitate these months of early waking and frenetic labor under the sun, long days of rest and even boredom are required to facilitate the necessary dreaming, the ever-growing drive to get outside.

I love being attuned to the movement of the sun, the waking of the birds. It all feels so right.

This morning there is a light rain so I am sitting beneath my Kousa Dogwood, dry. Thankful for its shelter, I am thinking of all the things we fail to notice in our hustle. It’s an old song, and I whistle it daily, in spite of how tiresome I find it. What would life look like, its non-necessities removed? Heaven I suppose. A want of care but for caring. Tending.

As I sit here, quiet and small under the spreading tree, a hummingbird flits up. 3 feet away it checks on a tight peony bud, then, even closer, a yet unfurled Siberian Iris. She hovers, we look at each other. I am thankful for her trust, for being able to see her up close, to hear her humming song. This is being truly awake.

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 Life imitates art more than art imitates life….

These are words Oscar Wilde wrote in The Decay of Living.

Many years ago, when I first painted a canary perched on the edge of a silver cup, it was purely as a necessary compositional element. I needed something yellow, with height. To say that piece flew off the wall  (ahem)  is an understatement. We humans are fascinated by birds. Whether because they represent freedom, or due to our attraction to their color, song, their elusiveness… They fascinate and engage us. 

The artist in me goes through periods of refusing to paint birds because it feels like pandering: purely pretty things that pull at heartstrings can feel empty, devoid of the stirrings that move an artist to create. Afterall, how silly is the idea of a wild bird sitting in an interior, on a vase? I struggle with the relative absurdity–the banality of this more than I care to admit. No one wants to create shallow art.

 

And yet I love birds. You probably love birds. We put out feeders to lure them into world, we use apps to identify them by their song. There are clubs that travel the world in search of a rare sighting, and motion-activated cameras that allow us to watch them up close. And so, again and again, I find myself pulled into the orbit of the bird as not-still-life object. My painting of birds has attuned me even more to them-and particularly as it pertains to composition: perching habits, the odd angles at which they swivel their heads or bend their bodies, the way wings wrap around their backs.

Mr. Wilde asserted that life imitates art more than the other way around because we are so influenced by the things we see in art, that we then look for and are more attuned to such things in life. Especially in our image-saturated world, the things we respond to aesthetically in images prime us to notice them when they occur in real life. 

On a recent trip to Morocco, I watched with amused amazement a certain morning ritual. Several house buntings had taken up residence in our open-air riad. Each morning we breakfasted in the courtyard and watched the little birds flit down to our level, dipping in the water of the fountain, and then routinely perching on the ceramic vases adorning the room’s mantelpiece. The first time I watched it happen, I was giddy. I was vindicated! The bird-as-still-life was real! Somehow this reality made my paintings of birds perched on things less contrived fairytale, more actual. Life imitating art. Would I have noticed and delighted in this little event taking place in a corner of our space had I not first conceived to paint it?  Mr. Wilde says no. Either way, noticing things is good for our souls and art makes us notice things within itself, and without. Just one more reason to love it.

Cheers!

 

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Here’s a little story about me. In high school I was offered the opportunity to take a class at a nearby college to augment my studies. Full of the confidence high school seniors have, I attempted to sign up for a studio art class–only to find they were all full. So I signed up for something I didn’t know existed until then: an art history class. It, unsurprisingly to those of you who suffered through the essays and slide shows of required art survey class, was not filled and I was enrolled. What followed were long sessions in a dark auditorium listening to one of three professors expound on various works of art, their historical significance, and their present importance, along with weekly round tables in a small group where I was once naive enough to take the bait and tell the class exactly why the piece of “mall” art the professor put up for a discussion on what constituted art, wasn’t. While some students caught up on sleep, I caught the bug. I was smitten. Looking at the world through the lens of how others–artists-captured it and put it in their own hand using various materials? Brilliant! This was a world that made sense to me–even when some of the art didn’t. 

Fast forward to today when I find myself a working artist, trying to find time to read up on artists and movements I want to know more about, striving to filter all that the modern world has delivered to our eyes via our fingertips, and focus. I often feel I am losing the battle of focus. Whether this is a symptom of our modern, collective distraction, or my overwhelming hunger for and delight in all things art, I don’t know. But I’ll take the struggle.

Recently, casting about for something to paint (a routine problem when standing in front of a blank canvas, no matter that I am plagued by ideas when I am not), I looked through my recent work, as seeds of future work are often germinating in previous works, and came upon my painting of Staffordshire Dogs. I believe they are Cavalier King Charles spaniels, which put me in mind of Frans Hals’s famous painting, The Laughing Cavalier. Taken back in my mind’s eye to Hals’ eponymous museum, where one is swimming in his work, and feeling afresh the awe and delight I found in his work despite its objectively boring and samey subject matter, I knew I had to put him in a painting. 

I often put little sketches of paintings in the background of my paintings. I like the play of ideas that doing so can offer up. When I copy (loosely) a real painting, I take it as an opportunity to learn about the painter’s style, brushwork, color palette and so on. Painting the Laughing Cavalier was simply joyful. I had reacted to the immediacy, the ease, the splendor of Hals’ work on my trip to Haarlem, and every other time I had come upon his work in museums–even in books, as I was first introduced to him in my art history classes. In a world of burgomasters in black with white lace collars, he found a way to stand out. Copying his piece had a certain freedom and ease–wherein lies just one aspect of his genius: he did not torture his paint. He did not blend, he did not obsess over rendering every inch of canvas–he knew precisely where to focus and where to just let things go. At least that is what I surmised after my time spent with his piece.

A wise man once wrote that there is nothing new under the sun. This can be a crippling sentiment to a creative soul, precisely because of its truth. My daughter, a budding writer, laments that all her seemingly original ideas, have already been written. And often when I stand at my easel, looking at a vase of flowers I am about to paint, that nasty specter, doubt, whispers: What is the point? It has all been done before. 

But Hals has something to say about that. 400 years ago he painted these portraits that we are still talking about. He invigorated his subjects in a way wholly different from his contemporaries, who, in turn, did the same in their own ways. Like handwriting, no one goes about it the same way; we each leave our slant on the things we do, and generally, we aren’t the best  judge as to how worthwhile it is, or how it will land with others. Hals was by no means considered the best at what he did in his lifetime, or even in ours. But he had something to say and I for one am glad he shared it. 

So take this as an encouragement: Be you. Embrace with who you are, honing your proclivities and strengths and insights along the way. If all the artists we now study spent their days trying to conform, trying to look like the guy at the top, my art history classes would have been very short, and very boring. We all have something to say, and a different way to say it, and that, my friends, is what gives color to life. 

 

The first piece below, which isn't quite finished, pairs Hals' Cavalier with a parrot tulip in a Roemer vase--both items referencing a moment in art history. Hals was alive when Holland became crazed to the point of speculating on various tulip hybrids. The phenomenon of Tulipomania has fascinated me for years and shows we humans are the same as we ever were. The green Roemer glass figures prominently in much of the Dutch Golden Age art and I was pleased to find one on a visit to Amsterdam. I love gleaning the art historical records for fresh takes on old subjects.

 

Still Life with Laughing Cavalier, work in progress, 10x8 inches

This piece pairs a little corner of a painting by Pierre Bonnard showing a Parisian street festooned with flags for Bastille Day. The little round fan in the upper right corner of my piece captured my fancy in a shop in Paris and I bought it, the whole time thinking it was frivolous. But I just had to have it. Its colors were the inspiration for this whole piece, which plays on the colors in Bonnard's work through traditional elements of still life. It gives a little more to ponder combining seemingly random objects, don't you think?

Le Quatorze Juillet, 12x24 inches

(Pierre Bonnard’s, “Paris, Rue de Parme, Bastille Day”

 

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