Looking at Art

It's a tricky thing, going sight-seeing with someone.  Some people race through the rooms, hardly stopping to look at anything.  You see them ahead of you, not looking at the objects on display, but looking back at you, their impatience barely contained.  You know that their ultimate aim is to get to the gift shop where they will purchase something that will serve as proof that they had come, seen, and conquered.  I do not judge them.  Who am I kidding... I do judge them. Why come at all, if they can't slow down enough to take anything in.  But then again, who am I to say what is and isn't the right way to go through this world.

Then there are those who wander slowly but can find nothing good in anything they see - you point out something that you like.  "Meh..." they say, pulling their faces and shrugging their shoulders.  You ask them if they liked anything and they say "Not really."  It's very depressing to go sight-seeing with people like that.  I can't help but lose some of my excitement in their company.   Sometimes it's hard to know whether a friend falls in this last category.  Over time I have figured out that these people are excited by relationships, they like to talk about things that happen between people, themselves and others.  They like drama more than beauty.

I used to think that I would know beforehand whether my friends would make good sight-seeing companions.  I realized over time that I was really bad at spotting the racers and the shruggers.  Now I prefer mostly to go by myself.  And why do I go?

I go because going to an art museum is like looking through the windows into a child's doll house.  All the rooms are different.  Art is a window into the artist's house.  When I look in, I can see a slice of who lives there.  But I can also put myself at the window of the room that the artist was standing in when they created that specific piece of art.  I can see what they saw.  And when I am in someone else's house I see things I probably wouldn't have seen from the limited vantage point of my own house.

That is what I like about art.  Not all the rooms I look into, or views from windows I look out from are beautiful or inviting, but most of them are interesting - exactly because they are not mine.

The first time I saw a Georgie O'Keefe painting from up close I was amazed by how the texture of the paint mimicked the texture of flowers when they are seen from up close.  More than anyone else, her paintings tempt me to touch (of course I would never dare) because they look soft and velvety, just like flowers.  As a little child I remember gazing at the flowers in my mother's garden and it felt as if I could never gaze long enough.  I wanted to drink in their beauty.  Little violets and purple irises, roses.  I wish I could see the world in that same clear-eyed way now.  When I look at Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, I think that she was able to see flowers in that unfiltered way that is now mostly lost to me except when I stand in the house her art built.