Wine and art

You know you're getting older when your idea of Friday evening fun is to meet your friends for a party at the art museum.  The cheap wine flowed.  The hors d'oeuvres were thin, and the lines too long. So, slightly tipsy in a place that normally commands more serious attention, we ducked inside to look at some art.

The first sight was eight wax heads hanging from the ceiling, bound together with black wire. Seven were the color of pink plastic baby dolls. One, the green of a suspiciously healthy smoothie. Prominent veins graced the scalps.  Tongues hung out, and the necks were cut off in such a way that you could peer inside the dark hollow cavity.

Across from the heads was a set of caribou, reindeer and foxes stacked tall in a circus-like pyramid. The most noticeable element was a plethora of thin legs in unnatural poses.  A Berenstain Bears book instantly came to mind, Bears on Wheels, where the bears wildly ride bikes in pyramids and all crash together in a heap in the end.  Undoubtedly not what the artist intended.

The signature exhibit was Ellsworth Kelley, a famed modernist abstract artist whose paintings are bright, flat, vivid fields of color, in simple geometric shapes. The kind of art where the form is the content. My artist friend Arthur, told me that you're supposed to feel the emotion of the color, line, shape and space playing off of each other.  All I felt was cold.

Our last stop was a look at some bright and diverse paintings from the California Impressionists who worked in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In front of a small painting depicting the crest of a wave, I was reminded of my great grandfather.  He was a painter in both Maine and the Bahamas during this time.

I wonder whether he became an artist because he was driven to do so, or whether he simply saw it as his way to make a living. What exactly is it that makes people create? And what makes us hold back?

I'm curious to know what I'll see when I return in the light of day.