highlights

• Making an art museum security guard laugh
• Being complimented on my toenail polish
• Spending Edward Hopper's and my birthday with his most famous and most parodied work, Nighthawks
• Seeing A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
• Being moved to tears in multiple museums by beauty and wonder
• Amazing Fajitas Combinadas con Res y Pollo at Nuevo Léon
• New original art for my walls, made by up-and-comers
• Sharing laughs with strangers
• Free sweet soul music in a park
• Running through a summer rainstorm in a sundress
• Smiles from strangers
• Reconnections with old friends
• Long walks in new places
• New perspectives
• 
  

My Birthday with Seurat

Today, I visited the Art Institute of Chicago for the first time. Four hours wasn't enough to do the museum justice, though my eyes and brain were overwhelmed by the time the museum closed.  Following my tradition of taking notes of things I see in new museums, I traversed the galleries with my pencil and small notebook, recording significant works and making comments.

The AIC is home to one of my favorite paintings, which, surprisingly for me, is an impressionist work.  Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884, painted from 1884-1886, is...all day I've struggled to find the perfect adjectives for it.  Large, magnetic, magical.  None of the combinations I've tried so far have done it justice.  Ever since first seeing a picture of this painting, I have wanted to see it in person.  Today, I did.  Below are the notes I scrawled in my notebook while in gallery 240.

Georges Seurat

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte - 1884

1884-86

Has red & blue & orange border -- Seurat restretched painting in 1889 to add border.  Provides visual transition between interior of painting and his specially designed white frame (reproduction here).

This one keeps making me tear up.  It has always been a goal of mine to see this.  It's beautiful, intricate, engrossing, magical.  I want to be able to step through the frame and spend the day there.

Listening to 'Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want' by Elefant. (Remake of song playing in Ferris Bueller when they show Cameron viewing the work.)  Once the song was followed [in shuffle mode on my ipod] by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Hysteric.'  "You suddenly complete me."  Good lyric for this experience for me.

The gallery room is strangely noisy.  Thankful I had already been listening to music.  I can still hear sounds of the din through my playlist.  Thursdays from 5-8p are free.  I knew immediately when it was 5, due to the suddenly higher # of visitors.  Checked my phone clock and sure enough: 5:03 pm.

I'm enjoying watching people's faces as they view it [the painting].  Or as they enter the gallery and initially see it.  It commands one wall, with doorways on either side.

I lent my pencil to a lovely, smiley old couple with European (German? Belgian?) accents.

Spent 30-40 min. in gallery 240.  Time to move on so I don't regret not seeing others.  In the hallway 4 steps up from gallery level, the painting's astoundingness still chokes me up as I turn and view it.

trains and cheese monkeys

There was a man on the train yesterday (Jeff? Jeb?) who gave up his seat so that a family could sit together, and in so doing, sat next to me.   I felt like that was a bummer, but it ended up being a bigger bummer than I had predicted.  Jeb wanted to know where I am from, what I do, whether I want kids (REALLY? None-a yo’ bizness, old man), and wanted to tell me all about these things in his life.  Great.  His job – rebuilding houses and renovating the interiors – could be interesting, but not the way he told it.  Though he loves his job, he is a terrible storyteller.  And I probably wouldn’t care about his kids or their jobs on a good day, but especially not on three hours of sleep.  I eventually stopped trying to hide my yawns from him, hoping he’d open the book he held and let me sleep.  At one point, he said, “This is probably boring to you.”  I tried to leave a significant pause before halfheartedly saying, “No, it’s not.”  And danged if he didn’t pause, then pick right up where he left off.  Touché, Jeb.   

Thank God for the phone call he received, which gave me time to pull my book out of my bag and begin reading.  Once he was finished with his call, he turned to me and said, “…but to finish what I was saying….”  Thankfully he said only a couple sentences, then also pulled his book back out (it had been relegated to his bag once he saw that I was receptive to small talk) and opened it.  He looked at the pages for a few minutes then smiled at me and said he was going to the observation car.  Thank goodness.  My earbuds went in, my seat reclined, and I settled in for a nice drowsy read until I slept.

The book I began reading, The Cheese Monkeys, by Chip Kidd, has this observation in the first chapter: “Small talk is small in every way except when you try to get around it.”  Too true, Mr. Kidd.  I smiled when I read it, and crossed my fingers that I was done with the worst of the day’s banalities.

sandwich tears

Once, someone I knew offered to make me a sandwich.  The gesture sent me behind the closed door of the bedroom, sobbing into the duvet.

I am woeful (yes, woeful) when I realize that simple interactions can fill me with such pain.  Thinking of that makes me scared to face the world.  You are the only one you can count on to care about yourself, right?  It's a frightening and lonely thought.