personal palette

I popped in to the Pickett Fairbanks Gallery a few weeks ago. I hadn't been in for months and I needed a little art. I was running ahead of schedule, which rarely happens, so I decided to make the best of it. I love that little gallery. Art feeds me. So much so, that a few days later, I had another hankering. After finishing up a long day of work this past week, and feeling a dreaded cold settle in, I walked into A Gallery wherein I found a temporary cure. It was the blue and red contemporary painting in the window that caught my eye and drew me right to it. I will forever be drawn to red. Swedish red. I think I can thank my mother (and her father's mother) for that.

I know I had a personal palette prior to taking my color theory courses, but I think the true origin of my palette may have come as I sat front-row in the Brimhall building for two semesters, soaking in every last lecture, loving every single assignment. To this day Em and I talk about our late-night (early morning) talks in our apartment as she studied and I wearily pasted the last chips onto my color plates. I loved it all. Every color. Every shade. Every tone.

The colors of my life seem to be running together lately, trickling down into one big dribble. An unrecognizable color; an unrecognizable splotch on the canvas. In the end, I hope the hues and values will be part of something much, much bigger. A wonderful masterpiece. A work of art in a gallery on a wall all its own. Something I can stand back and take in. Something I can interpret, separating out the colors and the stories. Stories of nostalgia. Of sacredness. Of triumph. Of loss. Of texture. Representations of life. My Life. Forever preserved when bristles touch paint, which touch canvas. At this point, it is all very much a work in progress. A palette of oil paints. Tubes, yet to be mixed, in a tray on an artist's easel. They wait patiently, for their seals to be broken, feverish at the thought of mixing with air. With space. With the brush, under command of a master artist. Oh, how they wait in anticipation as to where they'll end up. There's green, in all it's uneasiness, wondering if it will end up next to one of it's complimentary colors, like purple or orange. The place it feels most comfortable. Or, in a less desirable spot, next to brown. Or black. Time will tell. After all, it is the artist who is in charge of their position. A work of art takes lots and lots of time. Any true artist knows that. And masterpieces take even more time. Especially when they represent a person. When the colors take the form of a life.

I suppose art can become a part of you, too. Part of who you are. It can define you, in a sense. Like the first time I saw Van Gogh's "Paris Bedroom" in Chicago or Monet's "Japanese Bridge" at the National Gallery. I had fallen in love with images in books that my parents had given as Christmas gifts. The colors seemed to jump off the page. Van Gogh's yellows and blues. And Monet's greens. Hundreds of shades of green.

When you come in contact with these true masterpieces in person - in a museum, the colors leap at you; they speak at you. You round the corner, the masterpiece in your periphery; you almost have to slow to a crawl as to prolong the experience. To hang, as the masterpiece does from the wall, between the time in your life before you had seen that wonderful work of art, and the time after, knowing full-well, you won't ever be the same. To mingle with greatness, with color and space and composition created by masters, truly makes you a new person.

"Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit." Sir Kenneth Clark

Art is and should be the essence of our landscape, of our mood, of our whole perception of the physical world, for art can be found everywhere, in every thing. I plan to build more on this, as last night was truly a fantastic art experience - full of masterpieces, in presence of the artist himself.