Getting Here From There

On Sunday, as I was driving home from Chicago, I called Mother to check in. She asked why I had gone to Chicago, even though I had told her on Friday as we chatted on my drive to Chicago.

I told her I had gone to see an art exhibit by the American painter Edward Hopper at the Art Institute of Chicago. She doesn't know the work of Edward Hopper or Winslow Homer. She's never been to the Louvre or the National Gallery of Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And you can bet I didn't tell her why this one specific work of Hopper's was so important to me. There were two reasons: a) she wouldn't have understood; and b) she would have cried. A true narcissist never understands "it's not about you".

When Mother and Daddy moved out of the house on Lake Maitland when I was in my first year of college and moved out to Spring Valley, they contracted with an interior designer named Adolf Widmaier to decorate the house. He was the son-in-law of a family friend and had decorated Daddy's offices for a number of years. The year was 1968 and the result was fine and pleasing to their eyes. The only thing I couldn't understand was the artwork.

Over the buffet in the dining room, in twin dark heavy frames, were two prints. Different periods, different artists, different styles, held together only by their identical frames. One of the paintings is Van Gogh's "Sunflowers". I don't remember what the other is—I can't see it in my mind's eye right now. I'll look when I'm down there in five weeks and report back. I think the reason these two paintings were chosen for that venue was simply that the colors were harmonious with the colors in the dining room.

Could that be? Could this man have passed himself off as an interior designer without knowing art, without having developed enough taste not to push reproductions on these trusting people? We're not talking trailer park here. We're talking people with money and taste but without knowledge of the visual arts.

I don't want to make it sound like I live for museum visits. During my sixteen years in Washington, I only went to the museums when there was a special exhibition I wanted to see. If I had an unscheduled weekend, "let's go to the museum" didn't just pop into my head. In fact, I've never been to the Textile Museum, a sad fact that I plan to rectify soon.

So back to the conversation with Mother. She has a nasty habit of listening only peripherally to what you're saying, then finding some little factoid that you stated, grabbing that factoid, and pulling the focus back to her. When I said these were beautiful paintings and I had enjoyed seeing them, she started telling me about a man who lives in her building who paints. He has hung one of his paintings in one of the hallways in the apartment building, a painting of two peacocks. Mother said, "It's the most beautiful painting I've ever seen."

I can't even find the words to adequately express my astonishment at this statement. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Seurat, Monet, Manet, Cezanne, O'Keffe, . . . . I don't have the next hour to elucidate the artists whose work I love and admire. I would be hard-pressed to say one particular work was the "most beautiful painting I've ever seen."

I crave learning and education. A day is not complete if I haven't learned something that day. I like who I've become. I like that my friends refer to me as a renaissance woman. I like that I know a little about so many things, and yet there are so many things I don't know. Lots of food to fuel my desire to learn, for many years to come.

I'm just not quite sure how, given where I started, I got to here and now.