Pictures At An Exhibition

Today’s TV is full of commercials for the “Starving Artist Sale” at various hotels around the Chicago area. You can purchase “quality original art’ for no more than $59.95. Wow, I bet that
Steve Wynn is really chafing at the 33 million he spent on that Rembrandt.

As I ponder the works that hang on the wall of my home, I don’t ever recall seeking an “over the sofa painting” in my entire life. Yet, I can get one for under $60 or some smaller masterpiece for as little as $7. Nor have I ever selected a work of art based upon a color scheme. To put the record straight, I am color-blind to most hues so that would be a vast waste anyway. I flunked all the bubble tests in the Psych 101 texts.

So what do people use as a measure for what they hang on the walls of their lives?

My sister loves “the painter of light,” Thomas Kinkade. Personally, my preference for one who captures light in the most profound way would be Johannes Vermeer, but my sister and I have rarely ever agreed upon anything. I have cautioned her that an edition of 5,000 is not anything more than a poster. She disagrees.

My son and his wife enjoy fine photographs. They have some great shots from the 30s taken of New York’s Central Park structures. My daughter and her husband seem to prefer larger works – often multi-canvases grouped to form a larger whole – that make a statement.

My walls are peppered with artworks generally associated with events in my life. The paintings bring me memories as well as visual pleasure. Sometimes they provoke me.

But first, I asked myself the question: “What is the most important painting that you have ever seen.” Not important because others say it is, but important in the way that it caused a reaction. There were two that came to mind. One edged the other to second place.

As I grew up in the Deep South, my best friends were books. The only time my father got angry was when he caught me reading at 4 a.m. when he got up to go to the bathroom. Of the things that I read, the encyclopedia ranked very high. We had World Book and later Britannica. Both were published in Chicago and thus used Chicago resources for their illustrations. The first time I walked into The Art Institute was like visiting an old friend. I knew everything I saw from the encyclopedia.

I walked upstairs and into what was then called “the Morton Wing,” from the salt folks. I relished the modern stuff. But, as I traveled back, there it was: “Sunday on La Grand Jatte.” I was not prepared for the size. It was huge. It was overwhelming. Despite Mandy Patinkin doing his tiring attempts at sotto voce, Seurat had done a wonderful thing.

However, years later when I attended the Picasso retrospective at MOMA in New York. Not only was I overwhelmed but I was knocked down emotionally by “Guernica.” This has to be the most important painting that I have ever seen. It slaps you in the face with its rawness. It now hangs in Spain, so if you haven’t, do it.

So what do I live with? What do my walls say to me?

There is the group of oils and watercolors that come from my visits to Romania. I always try to return from each trip with an original piece purchased from a small gallery in Oradea. There is a wonderful pen and ink drawing of the bridges across the Danube in Budapest, a town I love. A small watercolor of the Ponte Vechio in Florence that I was able to watch the artist complete. There is a small icon from a visit to Neuman’s Vierzehnheiligen. Speaking of walls with visual delights!

There is the very large watercolor by John Bunker; reminiscent of Gustav Klimt in its style. John was our neighbor in Florida. He was also a great painter. There is the Ed Paschke which looms over the bed in my room. I purchased it because I thought my daughter really liked his work. She doesn’t. I do.

Tucked away in a corner is a small print by Mark Howard. There is another at the house in Alabama. Howard was a master at printmaking. I say “was” since he turned away from art and decided to go to business school. “Starving artist?”

One of my favorites is by an Alabama painter, Charles Hand. It is called “Study In Red.” Is is a large abstract and was my first purchase many years ago. It hangs alongside a lithograph of Brahms playing the piano discovered about the same time as the Hand. I was wandering around backstage when I was singing Melchior in a tour of “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” There was the piece, lying torn on a table in the wings. I asked the stage manager about it. He said, “take it if you like.” I had it repaired and framed and it has stayed with me since.

There is a mysterious watercolor. Actually, a three-dimensional watercolor. It is eleven images each neatly rolled up into scrolls and meticulously held in place with a paper ties. What images they hold are only hinted at. To unroll them and discover their beauty would, of course, destroy the work. I wonder if I will one day yield and crash the glass and liberate the secrets.

One large sbstract painting recalls a line from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Calverlys.” The words, “than are the moons of Ilion” are written across the bottom of the canvas. Another smaller canvas, done almost like a geometric sampler, has a line from Lanford Wilson’s 5th of July: “After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realized that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone. And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.”

Despite what Christie’s or Sotheby’s would have you believe. Art is not about commerce. Years ago I wandered into the studio of a lady up on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. She was a folk painter, totally untrained. Someone had given her a box of paints and she began to let the art unfold. On the handmade table in her one-room space was a wooden bowl of pinecones – collected carefully on walks among the trees. There was as much “good art” in that grouping of pine cones as will ever be auctioned at the finest of houses.

I don’t know what people expect to find at the “Starving Artist Sale” at the Hilton in Oakbrook, or Northbrook, or Lisle. My advice would be to move the sofa off the wall and alleviate that need and then discover a Student Art Sale at the local college.

It will be a good beginning, and if you allow it, your walls can tell you great stories while offering visual delights.