Why Art Matters in My Life

Tom and I went to the Virginia-Highland Summerfest last Sunday. It was wonderful and yet we wouldn't have made the trip into town or even had it on our radar if it hadn't been that an old friend of Tom's was showing her art there. We arrived early and well before noon. We were told by one artist we stopped to chat with that we were lucky -- it would get VERY crowded after lunch.

The artist market lined Virginia Avenue for several blocks between Highland and nearly to Monroe.  After parking in the YMCA parking lot, we entered the artists area from Highland. Unfortunately, the first stop had to be the short line of Port-a-Potties, as we both had to "go". Oddly, there were male emblems on a couple of these modern outhouses, and female emblems on others. The interiors didn't seem to be any different, the "girls" that I went in was equipped with a urinal just the same as the one Tom went in. Only now do I realize why that would be -- they do this because they are trying to preserve one or two "express" lanes for the guys. If it weren't designated specifically for guys, they're afraid the women would line up for ALL of the spots. Who knew the first example of why art matters to me would be the graphic for male versus female? But I digress....

We knew before we ever set eyes on Linda Bean's booth that we'd be buying a very specific painting. She'd posted a picture of it on FaceBook and Tom and I both fell in love with it. A beautiful Florida landscape. Meeting Linda at the Va-Hi Fest was a great way for me to finally meet her and for both Tom and I to meet her husband Steve. PLUS we were able to save money on shipping.

If I'd had ten thousand dollars to blow yesterday, I could have easily done it and not paid more than $2000 for any one piece.  Of course, we are not in the big leagues and have yet to make the jump to spending four-figures on one piece of art, much less blow ten grand all at once. I'd love to be able to, though.  But there were many things I wish I could have purchased for a few hundred dollars. Glass works, watercolors, photography, sculpture, oils and acrylics, jewelry... so many beautiful and thought-provoking pieces. We had some lovely conversations with a variety of artists, too.

Fortunately, the piece we bought from Linda was a 12" by 12" oil and it fit perfectly in a large pizza box.  It kept threatening rain so I was glad we had it protected. The only thing is, I would have gladly paraded through the streets advertising her wonderful work instead of hiding it away in a pizza box that produced more than a few comments about not letting our lunch get cold. (Plus it was a little odd going into the taco place carrying our "pizza".)

On the way home from the festival we drove by our first apartment on Briarcliff Terrace in a neighborhood bordering Virginia-Highland. We'd lived there back in the mid-70s when rent was $125 a month.  Don't know what the rent is now. But I'm pretty sure we couldn't afford to buy any of the houses in the area. We were feeling adventurous and relaxed, so we managed to drive by two other places we'd lived in our lives together, one in East Atlanta, when we'd lived with friends for the first few months of our marriage, and one in Riverdale, where we'd lived for a number of years in the late 80s.

Back in our early days as a couple, in that first apartment, before anything that smacked of careers, we'd dabbled at producing our own art. And in a nod to "real" artists, over the years, we'd purchased a couple of posters from art museums of works of the Masters and long-dead artists. The "Girl in Blue" by Frederick Carl Frieseke, an 8" square reproduction of the original 31" square oil on canvas, now hangs in our laundry room. (Note: I wouldn't have been able to tell you who'd done this work or what it was called if I hadn't taken it off the wall and been pleasantly surprised by my long ago foresight of having preserved the information from the original print when I'd put it in a square silver frame.)  Rembrandt's "The Night Watchmen", a dark poster-sized piece, for a time hung unframed over our half-table in the eating area of that first tiny apartment on Briarcliff Terrace. In the same apartment, we'd hung Tom's surrealistic drawings and my construction paper weavings.  Our choices were part self-expression, part desire to commune with great artists of the past.

In the intervening decades, Tom and I began to allow ourselves purchases of works from living artists whom we admired. A modest purchase of a glass paperweight at one art fair, a 36" by 36" quilt wall hanging at another.  And then, several prints from our old friend PT Nunn -- prints instead of originals to allow for more choices. But I began to want originals, too. We purchased two original mithila-style black and red pen and ink drawings from a gallery in Orlando. The "Tree of Life" with its six exotic birds filling its branches and every corner of the page filled with leaves and life is one of my very favorite purchases. Another time, at the same gallery, we couldn't afford the beautiful oils of Patrick McGrath Muniz, but we could choose a witty sketch called "Gabriel Hermes Mercury", that catches the same flavor of his contemporary "retablo" paintings.

Recently, as my mother divested herself of two lifetimes worth of stuff and down-sized from her huge house to an apartment, I saved some of  the best pieces of my father's dabblings in the art world. She'd taken the pastel portrait from its protective frame (did the glass break? did she decide she wanted the frame for something else?) and it now needs to "get thee to a framery".  My father had a little bit of mostly unrealized talent.  His worthwhile pieces can probably be counted on one-hand -- okay, perhaps two hands. But I'm glad to have some of the good pieces. In an otherwise problematic relationship, the artwork is a saving grace.

Hey, there's that word -- grace.  Is that the "why" of "Why Art Matters in My Life"?

The Google definition has the noun as "simple elegance or refinement of movement".  Yes.  If art is a representation of grace, even if it is "ugly" art, then I think it matters.  Art as a representation of an idea can be elegant or refined even if the subject is terrifying or uncomfortable.

The art I choose to live with and love is sometimes the art that represents grace in what is off-balance.  Whether it's the asymmetry of a mithila painting or the windswept leanings of the trees on the Pacific bluff in the giclee print of one of my favorite of PT Nunn's work, I often go for something that is gracefully off-balance.  It represents my world.