Traveling Shoes - Baltimore, April 2012

I’m wearing my favorite traveling shoes today.  They’re reminding me of one day last April when I took the train from DC to Baltimore to meet Addie at the Baltimore Museum of Art.  I hadn't seen her in a while.  She's now living in Baltimore.  We’d never been to this museum together, though she had gone recently on her own to check it out, kind of like a scouting mission for our visit.  She reported back that it I would love it - no doubt. 

I arrived in Baltimore early in the day and decided that I would just walk the several blocks between the station and the museum.  This was after I spoke with a woman at the station who told me that it was a long walk, about 15 blocks, but on a nice day, why not?  No problem, I thought.  It was a beautiful day and I like walking in cities, so off I went.  About two blocks in, however, things started looking pretty sketchy - people and buildings, even the buses going by didn’t look very inviting.  So I kept my head down and kept walking.  About eight blocks in - I was counting the blocks - two old guys sitting on a stoop, drinking something from brown paper bags looked at me, laughed, and asked for money.  “- sorry,” I said weakly.  

With no cabs in sight, I had no choice but to keep going. Despite it being a bright blue day, the air smelled of garbage and exhaust, like one big desperate exhale.  It was a residential neighborhood, but I didn't see many residents. Through the windows I could see mostly darkness or nothing, no joy, but who can afford curtains or a plant if you're just trying to survive?  This is a reality that is so easily ignored by people who can make it different, better.   

Counting the blocks became my focus.  I was OK.  But at around block thirteen a kid approached me and circled me staring at my face and my bag. He was brazen and intimidating.  I nodded, like, hi . . .?  please don’t take my bag? - attempting to move past him, when a woman sitting on a nearby step said something I couldn’t understand, repeated it, and he backed away. I saw he was wearing an ankle monitor.  I looked toward the woman and she glared at me like I was stupid - which I was.  And I didn’t belong there - which I didn’t.  So, with my bag, I made tracks. 

When my heart returned to a normal rhythm, I noticed that within one short block - of 10 blocks of panic - the sounds, the buildings, the energy, and the mood had transformed entirely.  I was in Johns Hopkins Universityland - tony, posh, trendy . . . (I won't go into what I think about socio-economic inequality in our world) with the museum just around the corner. People were about and it smelled of cherry blossoms, croissants, and Starbucks coffee.  I did feel safer here, but somehow . . . anyway . . . it isn't right. 

Addie and I found each other at the museum entrance.  Big hug.  She looked beautiful.  City life suits her.  I told her I had kind of a scary walk, but describing it sounded dumb when I was trying to be funny and I let my voice trail off.  

“You walked!  Are you crazy?”

“I didn’t know . . . I thought . . . whatever.  Let’s go in.”  I didn’t feel like a grownup in that moment and thought perhaps there is a time when one can admit that one’s children become smarter than they are about some things.

Right away she led me into a large gallery with only Henri Matisse, a hundred, probably, paintings and sculpture.  Portrait, landscape, still-life, nude, cut-outs, with color used in ways I had never seen before.  I was energized and happy.  This was a world I could connect with.  It was all so expressive and free, I thought, kind of like Addie.  As Matisse taught me to look at art in a new way, I began to look at Addie in a new way - grownup, independent, sophisticated.

Henri Matisse
Purple Robe and Anemones

1937

It was a good day - living on the edge, taking risks, making mistakes, feeling empathy and joy.  Observing the complexity of humanity in reality and in art is important, at close range, as long as I make it back to where I am free and can find love and inspiration. 

My shoes and me. 

My Best of NYC

Joe's

120th & Broadway

(for my morning coffee)

My Train Stop

Metropolitan Opera House

Lincoln Square

Wafels & Dinges

Dante Park

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Childe Hassam

Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isle of Shoals, Maine

1890

Winslow Homer

Maine Coast

1896

John Singer Sargent

Portrait of Madame X

1883-1884

Riverside Church

Lunch

Henry Moore

Reclining Figure

1965

at Lincoln Center

Hill Country Barbecue Market
Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center

Chopped Barbecue Beef with Cole Slaw

Museum of Modern Art

Henri Matisse

The Red Studio

1911

Paul Cezanne

Pines and Rocks

1897

Pablo Picasso

Girl Before a Mirror

1932

Pablo Picasso

Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon

1907

Jackson Pollock

One:  Number 31, 1950

1950

My Good-bye NYC Dinner

Le Monde

Broadway & 112-113th

(top, clockwise) Heirloom Tomato and Fresh Mozzarella, warmed with Arugula and Balsamic Reduction; la pain et beurre (?); Merguez (N. African lamb sausage) with Mustard Sauce; Pork and Chicken Pate with Cornichons, Toasted Brioche, and Lettuce with Tomato and Vinaigrette: and a glass of chilled Sauvignon Blanc.

Bye New York!

Up Close and Personal

The Seine at Chatou
Andre Derain
1906

The William S. Paley Collection is on exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art.  I went to see it this past weekend.  I was extremely excited - I had planned for several months to see it, so as the time approached, my excitement and anticipation built.  Then it was everything and more than I expected and ever wanted.

I don't often talk about art with most of the people I know because, well, perhaps I'm a little embarrassed that I talk too much about it or the conversation may be one sided, and our relationships are based on other things anyway.  My life is pretty compartmentalized - I have my tennis friends, my work friends, my summer friends, and my family.  I know that they all appreciate my interest in art, but it seems less complicated sometimes, for me and for them, if I keep it more personal.

That's OK.  But when my excitement is building for a museum trip or I've just returned from a trip, I'm bursting and when, like today someone at work asked me what I did for my weekend and I told them about this fabulous exhibit filled with Matisse and Picasso and Cezanne and Degas and Gauguin and Braque and Toulouse-Lautrec and . . . oh my gosh I was right there in the same room with these paintings and . . . it was totally amazing . . . and . . .  the colors . . . the brushwork . . .

. . . and I notice their gaze averted and they mumble something like oh . . . cool.  So, I zip it, I exhale, and take a moment, and say, so? how was your weekend?

I got a thought at the museum as John and I were getting our tickets for admission to the Paley Collection.  I thought about how I was behaving when I said to the 20-something admissions hipster, "I'm so-ooo excited!" and I giggled and he just looked through me.  And also when John told me that photo-taking was going to be allowed for this special exhibit and I immediately got my camera all prepared and decided that I wanted my picture taken with a Picasso and Matisse, like they, the paintings, were rock stars.  I even planned how I was going to do the thumbs up, lean in, hey look at me grin pose.  And when we entered the main gallery and I walked into the center and did a slow motion spin, awed, like Dorothy discovering Munchkin Land.

And even when I did a little inside dance when I saw Matisse's Woman With a Veil, 1927.

Henri Matisse

Woman With a Veil

1927

Can't I control my excitement just a little bit?

Now, I know that I am star-struck.  I always have been.  If I am anywhere in close proximity (like a mile radius) to a famous actor, athlete, musician, and now I guess, a painting, I get star-struck.

The Seed of the Areoi (Te aa no areois)
Paul Gauguin
1892

Today my thought became a worry about the seriousness of my relationship to art.  Star-struck behavior is not sophisticated and mature, like I should be at my age.  Do I love the art or the idea of art?  Is art truly what defines me or is it what entertains me?  How committed am I to growing in my knowledge and love of art?

Tonight my answers are yes and yes, yes and yes, and very.  I believe that art is fun for me so it's easy to maintain my passion and commitment.  I can be high-brow, too, in my work at the art gallery (my summer job) where I can present myself professionally and intellectually.  But I'm also going to continue doing little dances inside and annoying hipster brats and wanting my picture taken with Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse, 1905-06.  John will even take the photo for me.

Boy Leading a Horse
Pablo Picasso 
1905-06

He would have, too, this weekend, BUT my camera's battery DIED mid gallery!  Aarrgh.  I will drive for three hours back to Portland, to get my thumbs up photo for my Facebook friends.  It's so exciting to be up close and personal with these Modernist paintings.  

    

The Beginning of My Love Affair With Art

My grandmother was an artist. I was introduced to this fact early on, while during visits to her home in Pennsylvania, she would take my sisters and I on sketching outings. She supplied us with sketch pads and charcoals and lovely locations. We became plein air artists - she’d park the car and send us off to find secret spots.   I remember she called one of my sketches "lovely". 

And she would show us her art that she did while she was a student at Pratt - beautiful, sensitive, subtly expressive drawings. She didn’t say much as she unrolled and unbound her works that had been put away, perhaps waiting for us. I think I understand now, that in introducing us to her world of art, her belief and passion that art is important in a life has been passed on.

My grandmother studied art at The Pratt Institute in New York City around 1915, which was an amazing place and time in the world, and the world of art.  Modernism had been ushered in with the new century on the heels of urbanization, industrialization, socialism, and Darwinism.  Several artists defined this countercultural movement, this break from 19th C. Romanticism/Realism to 20th C. Revolutionary - Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Duchamp, and Cezanne.

International Exhibition of Modern Art, 1913
Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art

   . . . and  I wonder if my grandmother attended the Armory Show in NYC in 1913 (the International Exhibition of Modern Art) which was the first large showing of European Modern art in America and one of the most important events in the history of American art. This exhibition was the catalyst for American artists and patrons to liberate themselves from the constraints of what art had been and move toward independence, experimentation, and the possibility of what art could become.  I wonder if my grandmother was one of those astonished viewers who were introduced to Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, and Symbolism while “news reports and reviews were filled with accusations of quackery, insanity, immorality, and anarchy”.  I'm imagining she was pretty blown away.  This was the birth of "avant-guard".

How exciting!

 

Nude Descending a Staircase No.2

Marcel Duchamp

1912

Improvisation No. 27 (Garden of Love)

Wassily Kandinsky

1912

I wonder a lot about what she thought of this undeniable transformation of the art world, about her own art, and that she chose to leave it behind and marry a dentist and raise two sons, perhaps more comfortable following the path expected of her.  I was so young and I never asked and she never said.  But never knowing has given me the chance to create a totally romantic and dramatic story of her life as a young artist in NYC.  It does identify, for me, also, the beginning of my love affair with art.

Away From Home - Baltimore!

John, Mary, and Addie (the one posing)

Baltimore is the place Addie has chosen to live.  On Friday morning she graduated from college and on Saturday morning she moved in to her house in Charles Village.  After we hauled her stuff, she gave us a walking tour of her new neighborhood, a several block radius of early 20th century row houses, and funky shops and restaurants; facades and porches are painted brilliant, offbeat colors, especially vivid in the bright beautiful day.  We like Addie's new digs.  I can't imagine her anywhere else, for now.  

Addie and John

We continued a short distance to the Baltimore Museum of Art to see the Matisse collection - my idea, but they were happy to join me, John, Mary, and Addie.  We like museums.  I'm thinking how lucky I am that Mary, who lives in DC, and Addie are so conveniently close to world class art museums - for when I visit them, or . . . for when I need a place to stay while visiting the museums.  But anyway, Matisse was as dazzling as ever.  I was star-struck, in awe, and content.  

We talked all about Matisse, Charles Village, and what is Addie going to do now? over gluten-free Indian food and cupcakes (what?) at Sweet 27.  (We didn't miss the gluten.)  One day away from graduation, Addie is in the phase of, "Well, I'm going to make a plan to make a plan . . . "  So she's on her way.  Each of us offered our own kind of support and encouragement:  John is confident that, "whatever, she's going to be just fine."  Mary, her older sister, is honest and practical in her recent, similar experience, sure that, "well, reality will hit and . . . "  And I am hopeful, while confident that Addie is off-beat and brilliant like the colors of her neighborhood.

On leaving the restaurant I took this photo of the facade.  We strolled away while I reviewed the image and I was startled at the Matisse-like quality of the design and color.  I scanned through the other images of the row houses and saw that all the colors are Matisse colors, as if Charles Village was his canvas and his Fauvist, Impressionist, Abstract Expressionist palate highlighted roof peaks, turrets, columns, porch rails and steps.  It is all so whimsical.  

Sweet 27 Cupcakes and Cafe

I made some color comparisons.  I can't help but think the residents looked to Matisse for inspiration:    

Young Woman in a Blue Blouse, Portrait of L.N.  Delektorskaya

Matisse

1939

Charles Village row houses

Henri Matisse

Place des Lices, St. Tropez

1904

Charles Village row houses

Henri Matisse

Portrait of L. N. Delekorskaya

1947

 

Henri Matisse

Still Life With Lemons

1943

Henri Matisse

The Snail

1953