Thursday nights boast free admission at the Art Institute; Mum figured a quick, two-hour tour would be a great introduction to the city -- a little taste of what makes Chicago Chicago. We walked the mile-ish over, stood in a long. long. like a block long line, but only for fifteen minutes, then beelined for the Impressionist gallery, on the hunt for Claude Monet. The museum was startling. Having lived in Pittsburgh my entire life, I am quite used to and comfortable with our art museum's massive rooms, vaulted ceilings, and overall open and intimidating -- yet inspiring -- flavor. The galleries into which I now strode were small, personal... intimate. It was like going to a mansion and viewing a rich widow's personal art stash, but without her express permission. I began to creep (yes, creep.) around the rooms, hugging the walls and avoiding eye contact with the scores of other patrons around me.
Free admission is an ingenious publicity stunt. There were absolute gaggles of people strolling the galleries. University kids with sketch-pads, chewed off, nubby pencils, and dreadlocks (totally clichéd...totally legit.). Mothers with two and three and four small, bored, and irritable children. Asian teens with big, fun cameras with lots of external next-tech gadgets and gizmos. Middle-aged men on duty dates with their adorable, tottering fathers. Bedlam. Mayhem. Too many people. And yet, even amidst all the chaos, hullabaloo, and claustrophobia-inducing closeness of these strangers, I felt like I was intruding on something private. It was as though the artists might at any second come chuffling back to their breathtaking canvases -- after a quick visit to the lav or something -- and give me the evil eye for having dared to peer at the bits of soul they'd splashed, brushed, dashed, and dotted onto the myriad fabrics surrounding me.
I felt shy. Insignificant. Scrutinized and found lacking. I felt myself begin to retreat, to fade into the beige walls.
I adored it.
This feeling of being on the sidelines, moving about off-stage, wall-flowering -- this is what I'm good at, what I love to do. Outside any circle of lamplight, one is free to observe, to listen; to muse to think to breathe in and digest and live and love both art and artist.
I escaped from the first gallery; people were rubber-necking and gawking, loudly analyzing and wildly gesticulating. There weren't any Monets featured there, anyway. I scanned the next room as I entered, quickly maneuvering through that, as well. Too realistic, this room in the Impressionist wing. Give me suggestion, brilliant interpretation. I wanted my Monet.
Treading ever-so-carefully, nearly holding my breath, I wove between more open-mouthed observers, tiptoeing in too-big gladiator sandals that required constant attention, lest they slap the light hardwood floors beneath me.
A painting on the left-hand wall of the next room caught my eye. Target lock.
To be honest, I don't remember which painting it was that I saw; they've rearranged themselves in my mind.
My only certainty is that I stood in front of that first one for but a moment, then moved on, slipping out of the way of an excited Japanese couple to give them a closer look. I stepped to my right, focused on the next piece. Lovely. Next. And next. A wall, a corner, another wall, another gallery, another universe. I was gone. Longer and longer I began to stop in front of each work, peering at individual brushstrokes, absorbing their shapes and tasting their textures with hungry, insatiable eyes, sometimes stepping back far and long enough to glimpse an entire scene, then sidling up close again to be washed in the motion, to let the sensation of rocking overwhelm me. I didn't know where my family was; I didn't care. I assumed they were still in the building, and if they weren't, I was lost in an art museum. Far worse fates have been endured.
I finally lost all connection with time and space when I stepped in front of this piece.
Cliff Walk at Pourville.Isn't it heavenly?
At a dead stop, I bathed in the sheer magnificence emanating from this portrait. I was reveling in its beauty, gorging myself on the mastery -- I mean, do you see it? Just look at his clouds -- it's like he looked up, yanked some wispy cirrus and some cottony cumulus right out of the stratosphere, mixed them, and said 'Hey you. I'm painting this landscape and I need you to sit there and be clouds over the ocean, right? Great.' They're delightful. Genius. Look how imperfect -- no fluffy, scalloped edges, no uniformity, no interpretation. They're just...real. They're clouds. They are beautiful. They're glowing, for goodness' sake. No really, look. Can you see the light coming off them? It's brilliant.
I've always wondered what it is about Monet that is so...compelling. Magnetic. Delicious.
It's his light. He gets it. He interprets and portrays light -- and all sorts and all seasons and all times of day -- in such a perfect, real, hopeful way that you can't help but reach up to one of his paintings and say 'Oh. Please, let me go there, just as it is. I want to stand there and stretch my arms to those heavens and feel that sun on my hands and my face for forever.' Light. It can makes or break a piece, and control of it is highly sought after and difficult to attain; yet light was Claude Monet's medium. He took it in both hands, poured it out and let it flow over him, crumbled it and sifted it, worked it through his fingers. He dipped his paintbrush into it, and marveled at its glory. Light. The presence of all the colors; the full spectrum. The ultimate palate. It was his. He churned out dozens of canvases -- the same scenes, over and over and over again. Slightly different angles or minute shifts in focus; these are not the only variants in his works. It is the light. His eyes did not seem to see plain colors as revealed by light, but rather the light and the color of the light itself.
Look at it. Spend as long as you can, as long as you must, before his art. Immerse yourself, and you'll feel that light as real; you will be transported.
Another facet of Cliff Walk that I loved was his flowers. In this piece, if you walk up to it, you may look at it and say 'There's a bunch of weeds growing on this cliff.' Well, yeah. Move closer, and they become empty dots and slashes. Blink, look again. Suddenly there's this gorgeous field of wildflowers, so incredibly detailed in its very absence of exactness that you shake your head, startled; then it's gone. It's the dashes and spots again. But you saw it. By his deliberate ignorance of outline, the neglect of definition, his subjects become unequivocally and unerringly exactly what he intended them to be. He does the same thing in this one, titled, very simply,
Iris.What? What irises; there aren't any. Look; do you see how many there aren't? Particularly the one in the upper right-hand corner; as far as I can tell, it's the most not there of all.
I was positively giddy by the I came to this one; drunk on impressionist magic and high on images I could only begin to grasp. This piece pulled awestruck, stinging tears from my gut, and they balanced on my eyelids and made it impossible to see. I swiped them away and looked closer. Beautiful. His harsh, direct emphasis of the leaves and stems actually forces you to look at the blue blobs, which can't in any sense be called petals. They are blobs; they are dead on. There are no irises, and because there aren't any, that's all you can see. The suggestion -- again, manipulating the light so that it hits the apex of the petal-shapes with full force, then creating a shadow in the blob where the petal would dip down, valley, and be hidden from the light by the hilly part of itself near the pistil -- this is what creates the flowers.
I shivered with delight, wriggling impatiently as I waited for the teenager and her mother next to me to move on, so that I might gaze in adoration at this piece for a while -- weep a little more, if I wanted.
Art. It's moving, inspiring, breathtaking, etc. There's so much to express, yet so little that can be said about it. I love the way it makes me feel; I love doing my best to delve into an artist's psyche, and I love the exasperation that comes with concession of defeat. I love looking at a piece and trying to coax out motive, emotion, or message, and being blocked at every turn; I love the frustration because it provides a means to understand and interpret the piece in a whole new way every time I lose. I know I'm wrong. I know I have no idea, no clue, what the artist was thinking or feeling when he put paintbrush to canvas; but I also know I'm right. I know what I think and what I feel when I gaze at a work of art and feel that tiny, still tendril of my being that is entirely attuned to the aesthetic, that usually rests so quietly deep inside of me, snap to attention and do its best to absorb every detail and every emotion flowing into it from the canvas or the marble. I love it; and most of all I love that just maybe, that's all it requires of me.
“People discuss my art and pretend to understand, as if it were necessary to understand,
when it is simply necessary to love.” ~Claude Monet
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