29 May 2023
Museum shelves
It’s the late Fall here and yesterday, though not cold as I was putting the laundry on the line and I heard the faint drone of the cicadas telling me that summer is gone. But in this Painting game, each season offers up its own varied response to the angle of the sun.
The other evening was magnificent with rich possibilities. I was able to made six smaller studies, This was the fourth one after the sun had buried itself behind me and by the end of the session the sky had looked like an inferno. A hot spicy set of clouds left wide scarves of pink and purple overhead. Below, the sea glowed like embers in a fireplace.
When I took the studies from the boot of the car the next morning to shoot them with my i-phone 7, I suddenly had the feeling that I’d really like to see them lined up around several long walls in a white gallery space in a renovated ‘Hotel de Ville’ somewhere in France. In these lovely places there is an unusually large respect for how artworks are spaced around white walls of different sizes and configurations. They’re often broken up by discreet marble fireplaces and usually connected throughout by either six-sided tile floors in the South, or worn, creaky wood floors up North. Such was my imagination.
Of course, these are just dreams and mostly desires which live on the highest shelf of my personal bucket-list because they always seems just out of reach. I’m sure that everyone has these dreams too, ones which they secretly yearn for yet appear unattainable. Would it be a better home, or nicer neighborhood? Would it be a loving partner? A family? Or just a lover, a cat or a new car? Maybe it’s just a pile of money in a big bank account somewhere in the Caiman islands. There’s enough room for everyone up there in dreamland. I think in everyone’s head there are bucket lists that live on several shelves. Some high up and out of reach, are accessible with a stepladder for those well balanced and poised while others below are readily attainable. Can one be patient enough to reach hold of any of them? But what then? What do we actually do with our dreams and desires once they are within reach?
In this chapter of my life, I imagine that my own mine would find me an exhibition space large enough where these small pictures might live with enough room around them to breathe easily. I must be old-school and somewhat traditional. In the culinary world of restauration I’d be a chef advocate for Slow Food. When I digest a picture in a show or museum, I like a space to appreciate what it is I am taking in. It’s the space of time to contemplate something with an unhurrid mind. But it’s also the space between pictures in which I can breath easily as I move along a wall full of images, each one just out of reach. I only need to put all my attention upon the painting in front of me, not on the next one further down the wall nor in the next room. In this impatient digital world, where do we ever have the opportunity to just be slow and present in front of something? Thankfully for those with access to nature, it certainly does the trick for a lot of people, but so does art.
I really love museum exhibitions in France where they take all this stuff very seriously. Museums there are like churches where everything is rather sacred. Normally, I’m not someone too constrained by time like a lot of people, but when I go to see a big popular exhibition and somehow running late, my habit is come into the show and immediately zip right out to the end of it in order to size it up. I need to see how many rooms there are and what’s at the end so I don’t miss anything I know I’d like to spend time with. Then I dutifully return to the entrance and begin again. If it’s crwoded I slowly cruise leisurely into the slip stream of the crowd hunting for open spaces. I’m not such a linear or chronological kind of guy when it comes to much in life, but like I said, when it comes to art I’ll take space anytime.
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