How does he breathe so enmeshed in the smeared paint gruesomely tossed upon each canvas hanging in the Expressionist gallery?
Suffocated like sketches sealed beneath layers of color, wouldn't he prefer instead the clouds of a Monet? This too is pigment on canvas, yet in a Monet, he'd float alongside suspended light, hanging in the air like mists over moors. But the skies he loves—inside and outside museums—are tossed like Turner's, jagged, quilted, and harsh at their edges. L.A. got worse since its air got clearer. With the smog went the bloodshot clouds that colored long commutes. (Dec. 22)
Like anything one consumes, art affects the body. At the most fundamental level, I see painted canvases with my eyes and in a museum, I hear my chatter and that of others. Each moment is a small sensory experience since maybe one work attracts you, another invites touch, and yet another repels, but in its entirety, a collection is a full-bodied experience.
Museums can become stimulants that incite hours of sketching. In excess, they can exhaust.
But some walls in some museums challenge me more than others. Paintings can engross us because they are so rich with imbued meaning. The scariest, however, have none at all. They look out like a calm sea — you expect to see motion and waves, yet see yourself. Works can contain traces of their makers, but they're most frightening when they contain ourselves. Museums are places in which I reconcile across that divide of space and time, across what I believe and what I see — a prospect as scary as it is necessary. Turmoil, once freed, reworks paint, reworks memories, and sometimes, settles like storms. But sometimes, you may realize, like a Turner, the storm never clears, preserved as it is, forever beautiful.