Distractions

Lovely day, cool morning, and they had mowed the verges of Upper Twin Creek Road; just a swath, maybe three feet wide along either side. It's beautiful when they do this, maybe six times a summer. It glistens, glows in the dappled light. So I leave early and drive the long way around, slowly, pulling over for the one car that overtakes me. I'm easy to overtake, on back roads like this one. Blackberries are set, abundantly, the canes bending under the load, and there's another beautiful plant, Trillium-like, if not just an actual Trillium that I don't recognize. I stop and pull one, to ask B what it is, the man knows his plants, before I remember he's out of town, at a poetry conference upstate. It'll keep. I get to work so early, that even after going below the floodwall to eat a monster sausage-egg biscuit, then shaving and taking a sponge-bath at the museum, I still had almost an hour to read before Pegi got there, and she's always thirty minutes early. My current museum book is a biography, not really a biography, just a long monogram, time-line and what we know, of Velazquez. The color plates are chronological, which is helpful. To my eye there aren't many players for the pile, and it depends on who I'm looking at right then, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Vermeer, and Velazquez. It's all about the light. I'm actually a modern art person, I love abstract and color-field paintings, but this conflict, between the real, and the painted surface, interests me. First off, my shot across your bow, is that it's just a painted surface. It's not reality, it's a print, and what do you make of that? And secondly, is the nature of reality such a fluid thing? I love that quote on his tombstone, in Seville, "Al Pinet De La Verdad" which I think means, more or less 'Painter of the Truth' which would certainly be true. Art is mediation, it's purpose is to strip away the world, leave you with an answer. In "The Rokeby Venus" it's that reflection, more than anything else, that's vague, and what you wanted to see clearly is not accurately defined. I had a moment in the afternoon when I almost lost it. Bev had called me down, from upstairs, to look at a piece of artwork someone was curious about and had brought in. Trish was downstairs, overseeing the ironing of some tablecloths, and had decided she was as much an art historian as anyone, which may or nor be true, and was limping over on bad ankles to examine a bad print, poorly framed. As soon as she opened her mouth I walked away. She's somehow enabled to talk about art because she's a secretary at an art museum? Maybe so, but if so, not a club I want to belong to. That's harsh, but true, as Mark Twain famously said, I forget exactly, if they'd take me, i wouldn't want to be a member.