Yesterday I spent a couple of hours gazing at beautiful paintings. Landscapes and still lifes of flowers most draw me. (Portraits are usually a distant second.)
(Corot, Sisley, Claude, Pissarro...)
As I strolled through gallery after gallery, I entered that peaceful state of "museum mind," an absorbed, heightened and receptive state that feels related to "drawing mind."
I let the colors, compositions and rhythms wash over me, feeding that place inside ever hungry for beauty. (I wonder why we don't have a name for that place? Is it our eyes that hunger for beauty, or our spirits? Wherever it comes from, it is a genuine need.)
As I was reading a placard, I heard a man ask one of the docents which was the most expensive painting in the museum. A question that seemed to miss the point, I thought. How does monetary value factor in to your enjoyment, I wonder? And what says more about Van Gogh's "Sunflowers"—that someone paid X million pounds to purchase it...or that it made you feel glad to be alive when you looked at it?
(Not that those things are mutually exclusive. Just an example of the weird dichotomy between monetary value and intrinsic value, and our culture's attempts to put a price on something that can't be quantified, that is more than simply an inanimate thing—like a landscape or an ocean or a fox.)
Sometimes you come upon a painting, and it feels like a surprise encounter, even if you already knew it was part of the collection.
Even if you on purpose went to the museum to see that painting.
Almost as if you're stalking through the woods, gazing all around and waiting for magic to happen, and then, there it is! Waiting for you—a wild, shy creature, pulsing with beauty and power. And you feel instant love fill you up, as if you're encountering your beloved after a long separation.
Have you ever felt that?
This was that painting for me.
Oh, how powerful it is. And poignant. Tenderness pours off it in waves; in the ecstatic, glowing colors, the abandoned humble objects, in what is being said. Maybe: I am gone, but I will come back. Or maybe: I won't be coming back, but this is what I left for you to remember me by.
Van Gogh is the most personal of artists...his paint may as well be blood. I admit that my compassion for his hardships colors how I respond to the work itself...but why should anyone want to be objective about art? I don't know that I even believe it's possible, since the point of art is to evoke a response.
Philosophical musings aside, I felt cracked open by beauty, once again. If only one could embrace a painting in thanks...I sent love back to it, the sentient, living being that it is.
P.S.: I loved the most expensive painting in the museum, too.
