With Sarah having ice cream girl time with Sharon, I snuck in a few solo hours at the Portland Art Museum. There was alot to see and only four hours to see it, so you have to be intentional about how you go through the museum. So what do you do when you go through an art gallery? Take an audio tour through every room? Find the most famous names and check them off your list? Art Museums can be daunting.
My strategy for the day is to go into a section of the gallery, briefly walk around the whole room, and then spend at least ten minutes with a single painting. What ended up happening is I spent 10 minutes in a room deciding which painting I want to look at, and then I spent twenty minutes staring at one and jotting down notes.
How do I choose you ask?
I once read something profound about the impact that an artwork can have on a person. Art is created because language cannot describe everything that can be found in the human soul. Our feelings and thoughts are not limited to the words that have been made to define them. We are not shallow beings and words are only one way of expressing our experience of being, which is why so many people have chosen alternative ways to express themselves.
Joy can be made with a guitar, grief can be told with a color, need can be carved, revolution can be written into symphony, feelings can live in a ring; and when someone finds a way to bring to life a piece of themselves, it brings to life an experience shared by someone else that they never thought about before.
How many of us fully understand our grief, our anger, or so many emotions that we live with everyday? We all have more to learn about who we are.
So in a way, I let the paintings choose me. I walk around and trust that in all of history, there were a few artists who have felt what I have felt or who have put on a canvas something that reaches something deep in my soul.
This has happened enough times to know it's worth looking, but no, there's no guarantee. Sometimes you quickly understand, but often you have to spend time with a painting that strikes you. I think it can be because you're trying to understand the artist's motivation, maybe the historic significance; but sometimes being vulnerable about your own life experience reveals what's behind the artist's intentions, or it could reveal something else.
There's one painting of my sister's that I have stared at for a significant amount of minutes. There's nothing about it that immediately jumps out at you, but it has always struck me. I don't know why she painted it, and if she told me, I think it would lessen it's impact. I can't tell you what it means, but looking into it, new thoughts have awoken about the complexity of life. I don't really want to say much more, because these thoughts are very personal to me, but I love those thoughts, and I hope for you that art could slow you down and awake the mysteries in you.
So you didn't really get a tour of the Portland Art Museum, but it was really great, so next up I'm going to post some notes I wrote on a few of the pieces I spent some time with next.
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