I so often feel guilty because I see something pretty, don't think much of it, and feel only a passing glimmer of affection for even the most famous of art pieces. I can try to write this off as being a hopeless geek, a typical engineer, or an overall, stuck in my left brain kind of girl. Yet, I know several of my own kind who seem to have something intelligent to say while viewing pieces of art and can manage to sit or stand still while gazing at such art for more than seconds at a time.
Every time I go to a museum, I hope things will be different. I hope I will suddenly have an inspiration, an insight, or an appreciation that I haven't tapped into or experienced before. More often than not, I skulk out of the museum, having seen only half its galleries, feeling like an impostor for a human being. Surely, an MRI would reveal that part of my brain is simply missing: the part with the word ART tattooed on it.
I amble through gallery after gallery during museum visits trying hard to look like I am taking my time to observe carefully and consider genuinely every painting gracing the walls therein. Typically, my thoughts are off in some other world, one which has little to do with the art before me. I have to force those renegade rascal thoughts back into focus. SEE, THINK, FEEL.... I remind myself. Ignoring me, my brain wanders off into yet another cubicle of la-la land, content to dwell on things that have little to do with art and nothing to do with the gallery in which I am standing.
Every once in a while, however, things are different. Imagine my delight when during another forced stroll through a gallery, I suddenly have an emotion which comes forward, unbidden and spontaneous. Such is the case this past Thursday with the Blue Madonna (Carlo Dolci, Italian Painter, 17th Century) on display at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida:
The first element of this painting that catches my eye is that this Virgin Mary is so very different from the many, many other Marys painted around the world and through the centuries. This portrayal casts Marry as Young. Gentle. Peaceful. Pensive. Humble. Yet, in the middle of this genuinely holy, innocent, and near perfect image also lies a very realistic tinge of "I am in this thing Way Over My Head". And wouldn't she be? Wouldn't you feel that way if as a young teenager, God just popped into your life and informed you that you were pregnant with His Son? For me, this portrayal of the young Mary is achingly tender, real, and very human. A step beyond the typical portrayals where the Virgin Mary seems always to have her holy act very together. And, in looking at her, I feel that very tenderness even before thinking a single thought on the technicalities of the painting.
Perhaps, there is hope for me after all. Emotion springs forth only once among a hundred or two hundred paintings, but it does show itself, reminding me that I may have the equivalent of a right brain after all ... untrained, unsophisticated, but nevertheless present. Hope rises within.
As I turn away from the Blue Madonna and step forward to the next painting, however, the mystery between Art and me returns. I am now facing a dead hare and a dead turkey, both hanging upside down on canvas over a dinner table filled with a bounty of fresh fruit and other tasty morsels. It is a morbid melange of dead flesh and fresh produce.
Who commissions this stuff? Who hangs it on their walls? Can you imagine eating dinner while gazing into the dead, limp eyes of poor Peter Cottontail, brutally murdered on his way down the bunny trail so that he can take his place in a piece of Art?
I rest my case. I am a hopeless cause in this respect. Art evades me. And, concurrently, I evade Art.
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