Seeing the world through the eyes of an artist
I can remember Mother taking me to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. For some reason she thought I would be interested in spooky Egyptian mummies. But I escaped and ran to rooms filled with color.
I met the Impressionists for the first time. My mother did not approve. The artists were Bohemians. Their lives and their paintings could not be respectable -- dancing legs might fly up on these walls, showing ladies ' underwear. Mother hustled me out of there, but I had begun a lifelong love of Impressionist art.
Minnie Mae and I, of course, knew the Museum of Fine Arts was the best in the world but our next favorites were the Rotterdam Museum in the Netherlands, the Art Institute in Chicago, the Munch Museum in Oslo, and the Mauritzhaus in The Hague.
To see my world through the eyes of great artists always revealed beauty in a commonplace, and sometimes I saw on canvas the drawings and paintings I have been making in my head all my life.
And yet part of me grows sad by the time I finish a museum visit. The artists were those of their times who lived the full life, seeing what others did not see. And now, one piece of a lifetime obsession hangs on the museum wall, static, held out of time, passive.
To see famous artists at work, their images changing and growing, lines tentative, shapes and patterns that have not yet been frozen, visit ``Under Cover: Artists' Sketchbooks," an exhibition at the Fogg art museum in Cambridge that runs until Oct. 22.
The 70 sketchbooks and 45 drawings are better displayed than any exhibition I remember. Here you can see such artists as John Singer Sargent, Reginald Marsh, Jean-Honore Fragonard, and George Grosz as they see through pen, pencil, brush.
One of my hobbies is to collect reproductions of artists' sketchbooks (I have 21 so far), and one of the benefits I receive in reading them is that I see the artists alive, failing, learning, working toward the masterpiece frozen on the museum wall.
I can remember my own Argus 35mm camera, which I think cost $25 of paper route money. I am just learning the possibilities of a digital camera. I have always been interested in photography but most of my photographs are too well done.
I prefer my unsuccessful sketches. In my failures, I see what I would not have seen any other way. Observe, then sketch a square of pine bark, and you will discover colors that were invisible until you took out your sketchbook. I think we should return to the days when drawing was required in school right along with Readin', Writin', and ' Rithmatic.
`` Teaching America to Draw: Instructional Manuals and Ephemera 1794-1925" is an exhibition that will run until Jan. 7 at the Special Collections Library of the Pennsylvania State Libraries in University Park, Pa.
According to the introduction in the catalog , ``It has been estimated that more than 145,000 drawing manuals by various authors circulated in the United States between 1820 and 1860. Over the course of this 40-year period, drawing instruction became a thriving enterprise: In 1870 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed legislation to include drawing as one of the nine required subjects in the public schools. Other states soon followed."
Today, we often decrease support for art education while increasing funds for soccer and who knows what. I believe every student should enjoy the discipline of observation that only comes when your pen or pencil or brush sees what your eyes did not.
If you don't agree, take a piece of paper and study whatever is near you and draw. The result may not be a masterpiece, but you will have a few minutes of quiet concentration and a glimpse of the beauty in the ordinary. A rare gift in these panicked times.
