Skip to main content

My new favorite painting.

I, generally speaking, love art. I wish I understood it better; sometimes I can articulate its effects on me and what I think; at other times, that's tough for me. This is an attempt at understanding art, if only by trying to understand my experience of it.¹

The title of this post is a bit funny, tho: "New" is misleading—I first drafted it 6 years ago in Dec 2017, updated it in Aug 2018, and revised it a bit this week (Feb 2024). I'll write more about visual art and my ability to interact with it another time, but here's what I've got for now.


So I finally went. There's a show right now at the Phillips Collection on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, my longtime favorite artist, and I went. I got to see more of his work at one time than I ever have before. And I found myself a new favorite painting among them—not just a favorite out of Renoir's work, but perhaps a favorite among all art I will ever see.

The exhibit itself explores the story behind one of Renoir's most famous paintings, The Luncheon of the Boating Party. It seeks to do so by putting together dozens of paintings by Renoir and others, as well as photography and other media, related to the people figured in that main attraction.

Among them were many and varied examples of his way with faces; that gentle vigor and humanity I so adore about his work.

But among those many little marvels, I found one that took my breath away, that almost brought me to tears. It was—and I never use this word lightly—sublime.²

It also wasn't the main attraction.


It looks so minor and dinky, here in this post, but it is stunning in person. It's called Country Dance, and it's stunning.

I cannot tell you by what niceties of art it goes to work on me—except to tell you that, in case you weren't aware, it's stunning. I know that, as ever, much of the explanation for me lies in her face and his closeness. But beyond that I'm useless.

And that kind of bothers me. I want to tell you what makes this such a singular piece of art, but I can't say much beyond my mere impressions—barely analyzed and poorly articulated.

It gets me, though; viscerally, compellingly, somewhere deep. Her face has such depth of...an expression of...joy? Life? This is where—for me, at least—the painting begins acquiring something of the sublime.² It was more than I could handle, and not just because, as I've said, I'm something of a dullard about artistic techniques and terms. It was simply too beautiful.

I can (and did) stare at this painting for an age and a half—wanting to cry, wanting to stay before it forever, wanting to understand it even a little, wanting to make all of time hold its breath with me—because it is beautiful beyond, literally, my comprehension.

Image from Renoir.net.

End notes:

1. So yeah, I started this post back in Dec 2017 but never finished it. I came back to Aug 20, 2018, intending to update it, but felt it was too independent—and frankly, dated (literally). I had wanted to say so much more with this post—about art, about me—but it'd been so long that I'd lost the thread. So I decided to "finish" it and try again another time. 

2. The "sublime" is sometimes identified with a special kind of fear that exceeds your ego and causes you to lose yourself & your sense of self to it etc., but I swear I've also seen it used to describe the feeling of being overwhelmed with awe etc. So, perhaps I'm misremembering the term and misusing it (unclear), but for now I mean it in more of the latter sense: There was no fear in this painting for me; just losing myself in the painting's beauty. Existential comics has two comics about the sublime that I'm aware of, the first and the second.

Note: I did go and see the whole exhibit over again, but the second time I went with my mom; knowing my feeling about this painting and likely agreeing with my sentiment in some shared way, she bought me a print of it that I now keep on my desk at work.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or just tell me what you think.

Other things that might interest you...

On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oatmeal is tasty.

{slurps up berry-oatmeal-deliciousness} Indeed. I need to work on rebuilding a morning schedule. I can be zombie-like enough that I'll waste a perfectly good morning, and have often slept through many. And, really, it's such a useful time of day.
4 comments
Read more