beholder

 I Walked around in the National Museum of Art today.  Out of hundreds of paintings and sculptures, I saw 3 that really grabbed me.  One was a portrait of a very rich venetian gentleman in the fifteen hundreds.  He looked very unsatisfied with his life of business, even though he was posing in very luxurious surroundings and dressed in rich fabrics.  But in the back ground, outside the window behind him, was a man on horseback riding free as the wind.  I thought it the gentleman's deepest desire revealed in the fine detail.  It also reminded me how, fundamentally, nothing really changes.

The second was two paintings: both of St. George slaying the dragon. The first was painted in the early 1500's, and was a very modest rendering of the story; there were traces of fear in his gaze mixed with the excitement of the kill. You could almost feel the relief he may have felt. The second painting, done a hundred years later, showed parts of bodies strewn all around the dragon, angels above and below watching over St. George, who looked full of rage as his spear broke off in the beast. I thought, 'I guess artists who couldn't produce anything original did remakes back then, as well.' Again, it reaffirmed my first thought, that, fundamentally, nothing really changes.

There were lots of paintings from artists whose names you would immediately recognize from ancients days. There were lots of portraits and landscapes from old Italy, lots of Madonnas and the infant Jesus suckling at her breast, and well, paintings with just lots of breasts... Most of these would be deemed wonderful works of art. To me they were hopelessly redundant, and had somewhat of a catatonical affect upon my consciousness. After a whille I was lost in this museum full of rooms with seemingly all the same subject matter, that all seemed very familiar to me, because, fundamentally, nothing really changes.

Until I walked into a room that immediately gave off a different vibe. It was the first room I had come into where there were paintings of seascapes. There were no bare-breasted women in any of the paintings in this room either, which led me to hope that I may, yet, see some kind of true artwork. And there it was in the corner. It was painted by Abraham somebody... I cannot recall. The rendering was called "View of Van Hooren" or something like it. It was the light that caught me at first, coming from behind a horizontal pillar of clouds. It looked as if there were actual light being shined through the painting just where the sun would be in the sky, behind the clouds. But the light was only an artist's touch of the brush on the pallet, first, then on the canvas. It was alive, the scene was amazingly real. Then I looked at the picture as a whole and felt a serenity filling my senses beginning at the top of my head and running down, as if someone were pooring this feeling over me from a pitcher. I felt the calmness the artist had captured, I could smell the sea from the light breeze meandering up from south of the port. I was lost in the scene, and was even refreshed by the stillness of that ancient moment. And, for moments stacked upon themselves, I stood, spell bound, until I heard my wife's voice calling for me.

I have seen art before. Beautiful, amazing art. But today, among so many dull pictures of just olden people in olden times, I was delighted to EXPERIENCE art for what feels like the first time.