brush stokes to keystrokes

 

Mama and I went to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art this past weekend and were delighted to have our very own personal docent. She’s a family friend, who I actually give full credit for giving me my husband. Aside from the many magnificent treasures on the inside, the structure of the museum, especially at night, is most breathtaking. I wanted to sit in the grass and just stare at it for a few hours. And then I decided I want to work there.

 

We saw an exhibit called “Art in the Age of Steam.” Artists portrayed their take on the introduction of trains to society in Europe and America. The exhibit was arranged in such a way that the story was told from the beginning, naturally, where steam engines were fire-breathing monsters invading nature, to the end where they were a great feat of engineering. As it was mostly a history lesson of sorts with sketches, propaganda and photos, there were a few abstract paintings that particularly caught my attention. My favorite was a piece by Thomas Benton called something like “Dream,” where the conductor of a train is dreaming that the train track has been broken and the train is going to crash into oblivion. In the painting he’s jumping out the window. I just loved the way the old man, in his dream-state, was wiggly-esque and his shoes looked like those of the dwarves in Sleeping Beauty.

 

Artists have the pleasure of being able to make their pieces look exactly how they want, to the point of changing realities and making abstract things real. I very much admire the craft of those realists and exact lines, but I much prefer to make my own world. One where blue means love and fall gets an extra month to stick around just because, one where flying is as simple as clicking my heels together and nobody gets to die without sipping a cocktail in the ocean.

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