Art in a Garden
I sometimes stroll through the garden of art. You can do that in a museum, an old village, or looking through a book of prints. Or, I can walk around my house—I have made and collected art through the years...
History has given us a wonderful garden. Yes, there are a few weeds—things pretending to be art—but there are the wonderful works by people of all eras, ages and backgrounds. Art is simply the magic of the mind. Art became a dwelling place when the first brains became human. Yes, many things in nature are beautiful to us, but only we can see and make “art.”
The art garden is where imagination grows and flourishes, gathering all of our emotions and crazy impulses along with our instinctive need for beauty. Our brains need a constant diet of imagination to live, to expand. Art is not painted on canvas or carved in marble; it is in our heads. It’s our imagination that makes it come alive.
I recently wandered about the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam—a true garden of delights. Most of the names there are as familiar as your own...Jan Steen, Vermeer, Rembrandt. van Gogh...even if some of the van Goghs, like “Landscape at Twilight,” are not as familiar as others.
But the lesser known works are just as wonderful: such as Wijnand Nuijen’s “Shipwreck off a Rocky Coast...
Or, “Piano Practice Interrupted,” by Willem Bartel van der Kooi. He was a master of joyful childhood and what we call “realism.” We categorize art to make it easier to talk about: Realism, Impressionist, Expressionist, Pointillism, Cubism, Abstract, Symbolism, and others. Regardless of category, it is only our imagination that makes it come alive. It’s in our heads.
The Rijkmuseum invites visitors to draw or paint the plants in its flower garden. As adults labor to make the sunflowers and lupines look real, the children catch a ride on the nature of nature. Imagination soars.
I hope to take up residence in the art garden in the coming months, buzzing like a bee, flitting like a butterfly—happily searching—exploring each patch, each terrace, every corner of the garden—ignoring the raging wars for political power and control.
To prevent the PTSD from taking over, I may have to bury myself in the global planetarium of living color and vision—stay immersed in the earthly universe of wonderful art, like “Lake with a Boat” by Theophile de Bock. Move over Theo.
Thanks, Mary. For some reason, i struggled a lot with this post...wanting to make it light and fun. (Also, I had problems sizing the photos--especially the emails. The Substack app works OK ) I have had doubts about my painting of the church near Taos. Putting it on the same page as a van Gogh or a de Bock takes a drink or two. It was very cold that day and my hands kept freezing. I wanted to get the hope of a rising sun and whatever warmth it could bring--along with the spirits of the mountains.
I absolutely loved this column today. What you wrote, and the art/pictures you chose. I had never seen the first painting shown, your own, buts it’s glorious!