The point of art in the hottest summer on record
I purchased my first painting and I am ecstatic and very, very hot
I was searching for a canvas coat during a Los Angeles heatwave. Instead, I found her.
I wanted a cheeky, boxy 90s jacket with big square pockets and candy-polished buttons, but as I scrolled through the search results for “canvas” I found a canvas painting that stopped me in my tracks. (You’ve got to love rudimentary search functions).
It is a painting of a woman, dreaming wistfully in a chair. She’s delighted. She’s luxuriating. She’s just generally vibing. Faster than I could click through for a close up, I pictured her above my desk, inviting me to chill, to lean in to the saucy summer heat with my lipstick on and my shirts half-buttoned. Her head is thrown back and her giant forearms cross gracefully on a contented lap.
All this before my husband woke for the day. When I showed him the painting, with a grin too intense for 8AM plastered on my face, he sweetly told me it was Picasso. My heart sank—did I just bid on a print?
Alas, it’s a confusing in-between: a painted study of Picasso’s Le Rêve. But it was too late to worry about that; not only had I bid—I had bid farewell to my life as it is and fallen for the new life I’d live, under the steady watch of this painting. It would be the first painting I’ve ever purchased for myself (excluding, of course, the painting I found on the side of the road).
That’s what art is supposed to do; loop your experience into its story like you’ve been part of the masterpiece all along. Because what is a painting, what is a poem, without the eyes that see it and the heart that holds it? I was moved to emotion this morning, and again when I refreshed the final bids with my breath caught in my throat, hoping she might be on her way to me soon.
And so she is.
Today’s Prompt: When I was 20, I discovered the painting A Winter Twilight in my campus art museum and couldn’t look away. The same year, I read When Death Comes for the first time, and I sit with it over, and over, and over again. It’s been my flotation device through many wreckages.
What is a piece of art that has moved you inexplicably? Let me know!
PS here is me and my colorful “trash painting”—I spotted it as I was driving, two miles from my home and later walked back to pick it up. Best decision ever.