It's been a while since I have posted. I was in Washington, D.C. most of last week, and then I returned home to a pressing deadline (which came this morning, thus leaving me to waste the rest of the day away/ “work on my thesis”). I have several blog thoughts sketched out in my mind and scribbled quickly on whatever I had in my purse at the time, so hopefully those will come through sometime soon.
While I was in DC I had the amazing opportunity to visit the National Gallery of Art. I love going to art museums. So many lessons are infused through my little eyes I always wonder how to take it all in. We only had 30 minutes to spend there, so my eyes quickly scanned the walls of splattered paint on canvas. Somehow I came to the impressionistic section. I always find these painting so interesting. Monet… Renoir… as they begin their masterpieces, surely they must have looked like utter fools to those around them.
As I approach those who are looking at these works of art, standing a fair distance away, I always like to buck the system.
I love to walk right up to the painting, as if I am going to kiss it. Face to face.
And look it in the eye.
From this distance the painting does not look so masterful. From here it is hard to even tell that it is a coherent painting at all. Clumpy textures, jagged edges and seeming random brushstrokes compose the life of this painting. If I were there, I would tell the painter that this is not what the outline of a sun looks like. There is not red in the sky. You should not put yellow in the water- can't you see that it's BLUE!
But then I step away and the chaos comes into view.
Slowly my eyes focus on the dark strokes that seemed so out of place, and I realize that they were accentuating a bridge. I look a little longer and I see that the white was not an attempt to cover up a mistake, but in fact it is a cloud.
It is only when I step away that I see that the composition was made by one more talented than I. With a mind, a perspective, that could see what I could not see.
2 comments:
I think that it is amazing what perspective can do. We rush around each day bumping up against some people, work on some of the items on our own agenda - maybe even complete one or two. So many times we can look at our day and it just looks like a bunch of blobs on a canvas; random. But when we stop, step back, get some distance between the business and the fray, we can see some semblance of order. Maybe it doesn't come clear at first...but eventually, our lives might look like works of art...on display...
I sure hope so... because I feel like a blob a lot of times :).
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