If you take the time to look

On Wednesday, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts for this year’s (belated) birthday trip, just as I did last year. While I was there, I read the journal entry I’d written but never blogged last year:

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and I’m having lunch at the MFA: my belated birthday trip. I’ve spent the past almost-hour wandering the galleries, not looking at anything in particular: just looking.

Several years ago, before the pandemic, A (not her real initial) and I coined the term “museum bathing” for this activity of wandering a museum, soaking up the space. They say spending time in the woods–what the Japanese call “forest bathing”–has a beneficial effect on one’s mental and physical health–and I’d argue the same is true of museums and other sacred spaces. The act of being in a space devoted to beauty has a healthful effect. I can feel the outside world and its worries falling away.

You could even go so far as to say a museum is like a forest–an indoor, curated one, with paintings and sculptures and tapestries instead of trees and rocks and streams. A museum is a kind of ecosystem: the individual galleries are microhabitats, and they all work together in a harmonious whole.

The challenge when you visit a large museum is seeing the forest for the trees. Usually when I visit the MFA, I have a specific exhibit I want to see, so I zip through galleries to get to that particular thing. Today, though, there isn’t anything in particular I’m here to see, so I am free to wander without destination, turning this way or that depending on what looks interesting at the moment.

I can wander from Greek statues to Egyptian mummies to Buddhas being restored to contemporary posters to postcards to Regency interiors and back. When you don’t have a destination, there is no hurry; instead of making good time, you can take your time, stopping to look when something looks good.

One of the delights of the MFA, like any good forest, is the abundance of places to sit–benches in front of individual art works, and tables, chairs, and occasional couches in visually interesting corners–and in a museum like a forest, every corner is interesting if you take the time to look.

So that is today’s task: to wander and watch, letting my inner eye guide me. There is no need to see everything, just a chance to find a secret, interesting vantage point to watch and wait.

Although I wrote the text of today’s post last year, today’s photos are from Frank Bowling’s Americas, which is currently on view at the MFA.

 

Art and the ordinary

This week when J and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see Botticelli’s Venus, we also saw “Matisse in the Studio,” which places the personal belongings of Henri Matisse alongside the paintings they inspired.

The exhibit does a wonderful job juxtaposing art and the ordinary. It’s obviously true that every artist paints in a particular place, surrounded by furniture and decor. What this exhibit explores, however, is the direct connection between artistic creation and its material environment. How do the paintings of Matisse provide a window into not merely his mind, but his actual studio?

An artist might start with a blank canvas, but that artist isn’t a blank canvas. Artists are visual creatures, so it’s no surprise they surround themselves with visually interesting objects that subsequently appear in their works.

We don’t normally think about the material conditions of an artist when we view their art, however. Usually, we mentally erase any image of an artist standing in a studio or behind an easel, focusing on what the artist saw rather than the place from which he saw it.

“Matisse in the Studio” invites viewers to place the artist back into his artworks, suggesting that Matisse wasn’t merely a painter of images but an assembler of objects. Before a museum curator decided which artworks and objects to include in an exhibit, Matisse’s studio was curated by the artist himself, who handpicked these objects to be his domestic cohabitants.

Browsing “Matisse in the Studio” is an almost magical experience: at several points, J burst into laughter upon seeing a painting of a chair or vase displayed alongside said chair or vase. There is an electric moment of recognition–the satisfaction of turning a key within its fitted lock–when you recognize this pot, figurine, tapestry, or table as the very one depicted in a painting nearby.

It’s the same satisfaction you feel when you’re sorting socks and set one alongside its mate: a perfect match. In an ideal world, art and the ordinary walk hand in hand, and it’s the job of a skilled curator to reconcile them.

 

Love incarnate

Yesterday J and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see “Botticelli and the Search for the Divine,” a small but impressive exhibit of paintings from Renaissance Florence.

The highlight of “The Search for the Divine” is Botticelli’s Venus, a life-size painting of the goddess of love. Whereas Botticelli’s earlier, more well-known Birth of Venus depicts the goddess arising from a shell attended by mythological figures, the painting currently on view at the MFA is deceptively simple. Set against a plain black background, Venus gleams like a diamond set on velvet, her skin glowing and flawless, her limbs long and languid, and her hair snaking free from an elaborate tangle of braids and curls.

Equally impressive is a large crucifix painted on a cut-out wood panel, as if to be carried in procession. Looking at this crucifix, I was struck by the physical similarities between Botticelli’s Jesus and Venus. Both figures are idealized, nearly nude figures almost entirely free from blemish, and both exude an air of restful power and athletic grace.

Venus and Jesus both represent the best of human nature embodied: two complementary answers to the question of what love looks like in the flesh. Venus represents carnal love and Jesus represents spiritual love, but both are beautiful, flawless beings because they represent love’s transformative power. Viewed through the lens of love, all is perfect and well-formed.

 

A chorus of colors

On Saturday as I approached the Museum of Fine Arts, I saw a young couple walking ahead of me. It’s not unusual to see young couples walking in Boston, but what caught my eye was the young woman’s pink, pointy-eared hat. Although I’d read about the Pussyhat Project and knew knitters across the country have been making pink hats for the Women’s Marches that will take place across the nation next Saturday, I’d never seen a real live pussyhat in the wild.

As I watched the couple ascend the stairs to the Museum’s Fenway entrance, I knew what I had to do. Although my own hat is black and store-bought, I’m planning to attend next week’s Boston Women’s March for America, and I realized it was time to come out as a Pussyhat-in-Hiding. Since my museum membership allows me one guest, I approached the couple as they stood in line for tickets, complimenting the woman on her hat and offering to get her into the Museum for free.

While her boyfriend bought his ticket, “N” and I chatted about next weekend’s march: she is knitting pussyhats to give away to marchers, and I’m looking forward to marching even though I don’t have a pussyhat to wear. You can see, I suspect, where this is going. By the time her boyfriend had bought his ticket, “N” promised to mail me one of her knitted hats, and I gave her my email address to arrange logistics. None of this would have happened, of course, if “N” weren’t wearing a pink knitted hat with cat ears that inspired me to approach her. The simple act of seeing someone in a distinctive (and politically significant) hat inspired me to reach out rather than quietly minding my own business.

There’s nothing stopping any of us from walking up to a stranger and doing something kind: inviting “N” to be my Museum guest cost nothing but the nerve to approach her. And yet, I would have never dreamed of walking up to a stranger before November. Suddenly, the election of a man who promised to Make America Hate Again makes simple acts of kindness feel subversive and powerful, a revolution powered by knitting needles and nice gestures.

Inside the Museum, in the sun-drenched enclosed courtyard that connects the building’s old and new wings, there are artworks made by local schoolchildren in honor of Martin Luther King Day. The most eye-catching of these are quilts bearing quotations from King, each letter whimsically decorated: a chorus of colors.

These quotes from King seem particularly relevant in today’s political climate, when the voices of hate have grown loud and it’s easy to give up hope. “I have decided to stick with love,” one quilt proclaims. “Hate is too great a burden to bear.” I’ll confess to carrying more anger than I’d like these past few weeks, unable to fathom how some voters could choose a mean-spirited, hot-headed bully over a woman with a lifetime of experience. But this, indeed, is a burden too great to bear: as King himself exhorted, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

So how do we move forward, regardless of the burdens we carry? Dr. King said “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter,” so what are these things? From where I sit, kindness matters, and so does compassion. Truth matters, even if some don’t want to hear it. Lending a helping hand matters, as does protecting the sick and vulnerable. Love matters, and random acts of kindness, and both solidarity and sisterhood. So next Saturday in Boston and beyond, women and men of all colors and stripes will march together for what matters: a chorus of colors, beautiful and harmonious.

 

A visual feast

Today I went to the Museum of Fine Arts: a belated birthday treat. I went to the Museum to see an exhibit of paintings by William Merritt Chase but found more interesting an exhibit on Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock that I wandered into by chance. That is the serendipitous nature of museums: given the abundance of riches at every turn, you can wander until you find something that speaks to you.

One of the things I like to do at Museums is hunt for images. This means I roam from gallery to gallery looking rather than reading: I just wander, looking at everything, not just the art. I look at other museum goers, shadows on the floor, and reflections on the wall. You might say I’m interested in observing the entire museum space: not just the art on the walls, but the habitat the art lives in. While other museum patrons are snapping photos of their favorite paintings, I’m looking for interesting views through doorways and down corridors. It’s not that I’m not interested in looking at art, but I find museum spaces to be equally interesting.

You could argue that my way of cruising through museums is intrinsically predatory: I’m perpetually on the lookout for images I can use. Instead of seeing paintings and sculptures as finished artifacts, I see them as stimuli. An interesting image scratches an inner creative itch. When I see interesting paintings, drawings, or sculptures, they stimulate the part of my brain that wants to think and make connections. Going to a museum is a way to feed my Inner Artist, so I circle the galleries like a vulture scavenging shapes and shadows. If I find and photograph enough interesting images, my full memory card can last me for weeks: a restocking of inspiration.

I didn’t go to the Museum of Fine Arts at all last year: not for my birthday, and not any other time. It’s not surprising, then, that I spent the majority of last year feeling like I had nothing to write about, because I didn’t. For me, writing often starts with looking, and there’s no better place to exercise your looking-muscle than at a well-stocked museum. When I haven’t been to a museum for a while, my spirit grows lean and hungry, craving a visual feast.

My birthday trips to the MFA take me away, if only for an afternoon, to a place rich with imagery and rife with inspiration. It’s a place we all should visit more often.

 

Inspires you twice

Today I sorted through a dozen photos I’d taken when J and I saw an exhibit of model planes, trains, and automobiles at the Museum of Fine Arts last December. That exhibit is long gone, so it was fun to revisit photos I’d left on my camera and nearly forgotten about.

I enjoy reliving art exhibits when I go through my pictures, regardless of how much time has passed in the meantime. Sometimes when I’m looking for inspiration, I’ll click through my Flickr albums of past exhibits as a way to nudge my Muse. Even if I don’t “use” any of these archived photos in a blog post, I do “use” them as visual prompts: something to look at to stir my creativity, like smelling salts used to revise an unresponsive patient.

Looking at pictures stimulates my noticing muscle, and for me, noticing anything interesting–whether that be an unusual idea or intriguing angle–quickly converts to language. When I notice something interesting, my Inner Narrator perks up and wants to understand and explain that thing. Even if I”m writing about something completely different from whatever I”m looking at, the act of looking seems helpful, even if only as a distraction: something to pull me outside myself, and something for me to fiddle with, like intellectual worry beads.

I suppose there are people who use music in this way, a backdrop of sound serving to invigorate, inspire, and drown out distractions. For me, though, sight is more evocative than sound. I’m adept at ignoring sounds–a skill I acquired after being married to a musician for more than a decade–so sight is the sense that most directly gets me thinking. When I look at something closely, a string of sentences automatically appears and ultimately accumulates into some sort of narrative.

This is why I stockpile pictures from museum visits. Those visits are an immediate inspiration, lighting up a visual part of my brain that isn’t accessible any other way. But long after that immediate inspiration fades, my photos remain like preserves stocked on cerebral shelves: flavors from an earlier abundance.

Henry David Thoreau famously said that firewood warms you twice: once when you chop it, and once when you burn it. In a similar vein, I find that art inspires me twice: once when I see it in person, and once when I revisit my pictures, stashed away like souvenirs from inspiration gone by.

 

Art appreciation

Whenever J and I go to the Museum of Fine Arts, I find myself spending almost as much time looking at other museum patrons as I do looking at the art itself. I find it fascinating to watch how people interact with art: how much time do they spend looking at an individual work, or how much time do they spend fiddling with the buttons on their audio guide? Do they like to gaze at something thoughtfully from afar, do they sit and consider an entire roomful of art in a single glance, or do they go straight up to a piece and snap a picture before moving on?

I guess you could say I appreciate art appreciators. I find myself wondering what people are thinking as they silently stare at a given work: do they like it? Are they puzzled by it? Do they find it intriguing without quite knowing what about it intrigues them?

Much of my own art appreciation happens on a nonverbal level–there are works I simply like without being able to explain why I like them–so I often wonder whether others interact with art in a similar way, wandering through the galleries in search of something that Simply Speaks to them, regardless of whether it’s a renowned or well-known work.

In any given exhibition, there’s always one or two works that draw a crowd, either because they’re highlighted by the curators as being Important or because they’re just pretty to look at.

But what intrigues me most of all are the quiet, overlooked corners where you’ll sometimes find a lone soul having a private moment with a particular work. What is happening in the mind of a lone observer standing face-to-face with a centuries-old masterpiece? Is it some sort of communion where the artist’s vision reaches beyond the frame, spanning the centuries to trigger a response in a person he could have never known?

Click here to see more photos from Hokusai, which is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts through August 9th.

 

Do it now

Earlier this afternoon, while procrastinating my ever-present paper pile, I spent a half hour sorting through pictures I’d taken back in August, when J and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see an exhibit of World War I recruitment posters.

The exhibit included pieces from Britain, France, and the United States, including the iconic image of Uncle Sam pointing to viewers with the caption “I want YOU for the U.S. Army.” It was interesting to see the various visual techniques artists employed to grab viewers’ attention while communicating a simple appeal to enlist. The posters featured the usual patriotic images you’d expect from wartime propaganda, along with altruistic reminders that “everyone should do his bit” and a stoic, quintessentially British claim that it’s better to face bullets on the front than be killed by a bomb at home.

One of my favorite posters featured an understated guilt-trip, with a sheepish but respectable-looking man unable to answer his children’s simple question, “Daddy, what did YOU do during the Great War?” Better to face bullets on the front today, apparently, than to feel unmanned by the earnest questions of your still-unborn children tomorrow.

There was one image I shot, however, that promptly ended my procrastination and sent me back to my paper-pile. In one corner of a brightly colored poster urging young men to “serve in France” was a simple imperative to DO IT NOW.

This is my Day Sixteen contribution to NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month, a commitment to post every day during the month of November: thirty days, thirty posts.

 

Feed your dreams

Here’s a confession: most of the time when I go to the Museum of Fine Arts, I wander without reading the placards that identify and explain each work. Instead, I eschew the edification of curatorial commentary and let my uneducated eyes lead me. What I’m looking for on these museum-rambles isn’t an art history lesson but something far more primal: I’m looking to feed my dreams.

I’m not a particularly imaginative person. Most of my waking hours are spent dealing with the-way-things-are, not envisioning the way-things-might-be. By night, I seldom dream anything memorable…and when I do remember my dreams, they tend to be filled with boring, mundane details, like yesterday’s laundry or tomorrow’s groceries. I’m the last person on the planet, in other words, who would dream of dragons: most of the time, I’m mired too deep in the daily drudgery.

A museum, however, is a stockpile of the strange. If your own imagination is starved, you can go to a museum and glut yourself on the fantasies of others. I’ve never dreamed of dragons, but Soga Shōhaku clearly has, his version of the legendary creature sprawling over eight painted panels that span some 35 feet. Shōhaku died in 1781, but the dragon of his dreams lives on, mesmerizing people like me who could never imagine such a creature on our own.

If you want to see Soga Shōhaku’s “Dragon and Clouds” yourself, it will remain on display at the Museum of Fine Arts until July 6th.

 

Make your bed

This weekend, I met Leslee and A (not her real initial) at the Museum of Fine Arts, where we saw “Quilts and Color,” an eye-popping exhibition of handmade quilts I’d been looking forward to all semester. What better way to celebrate the end of a long academic year than by admiring beautiful pieces of prolonged and meticulous handiwork?

Although I’m certainly not an expert when it comes to quilts and quilting, I’m definitely a fan. In 2009, A and I had seen an exhibit of quilts by the late Radka Donnell at the New England Quilt Museum, which I wrote about here, and before that, Leslee, A, and I had seen a juried exhibit of contemporary quilts at the American Textile History Museum, which I (unfortunately) never blogged.

When you look at a finished quilt, you see a Big Picture that was painstakingly assembled from bits and pieces. The contemporary art quilts Leslee, A, and I had previously seen featured irregular shapes, odd abstractions, and jarring color juxtapositions: all the aspects of modern painting, but on quilts. The pieces on display at the MFA, on the other hand, are more traditional in terms of composition, following block designs popularized by Amish, Mennonite, and other folk artisans, but they stun the senses with vibrant color combinations that at times seemed to vibrate with an almost hallucinogenic intensity.

Sewing a quilt is like running a marathon: it’s an accomplishment I admire with awe from afar. I know how to put one foot in front of the other, but I can’t imagine having the stamina to train for and then run a 26.2 mile race. Similarly, I know how to stitch two pieces of cloth together, but I can’t imaging having the patience to design, piece together, and then stitch the kind of intricate designs on exhibit at the MFA.

When I was younger, I enjoyed doing cross-stitch and other small sewing projects: there’s something soothing about the repetitive ritual of placing stitch after stitch. Because of this, I admire quilts as much for their meditative discipline as I do for their technical complexity. Making a quilt is a lot like writing a dissertation: you start with a blank canvas, then you fill things in gradually, one word or one stitch at a time. The end result seems impossible, but each step is doable.

Recently the Internet has been abuzz over a graduation speech given by Naval Admiral and former Navy SEAL William McRaven, who encouraged graduates from the University of Texas at Austin to make a habit of making their beds:

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.

I might not have the patience or the diligence to complete a quilt, but I do manage to make my bed every morning. Instead of a quilt, J and I have a rust-colored bedspread that complements the light brown furniture in our bedroom and brings a pop of color to the room. And just as Admiral McRaven suggests, it gives me a small sense of accomplishment to start the day with a smoothly made bed.

Someday, it would be nice to have enough time to sew a quilt, or at least to try. In the meantime, I’ll content myself with the knowledge that I share the world with a Naval admiral who believes success starts with a neatly made bed and countless quilters who have made the world more beautiful, one stitch (and one bed) at a time.

Click here for more photos from “Quilts and Color,” which will remain on view at the Museum of Fine Arts through July 27th. Enjoy!