For 11 days now, I have been house bound. Pain, has not been a major concern, in this I know I am fortunate. But. for the first 7 days, my head was filled with cotton and my stomach was a churning sea. I did not understand the fullness of this until I woke up one morning and I felt like I had returned to myself. I am still house bound and will be for another 3 weeks--minus 1 doctor appointment.
What to do with all this time on my hands now that I have a clear head? I don't have cable, Netflicks or Hulu. I have a number of DVDs but I don't have much interest in watching all 6 seasons of Downton Abbey for some reason. That is not to say that by the end of the month, I will not have watched them, though. I am not overly interested in computer games--those seem to interest me more when I am stressed. And with my universe, slightly larger than 600 square feet, my health not a concern, and friends available to assist me with taking care of the mundane, I am surprisingly stress free. Yet, each day presents itself as a fathomless maw until the sun sets and I can go to bed.
As it so happens, I have been reading among other things, The Art of Rivalry by Pulitzer Prize winning art critic Sebastian Smee. Smee discusses the impact that four pairs of artists had on one another. Lucien Freud & Francis Bacon, Eduard Manet & Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse & Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock & Willem de Kooning. The later six artists have long been familiar to me, but I discovered the Freud and Bacon (both with famous relatives) when I visited The Getty Center this spring. I was smitten with the clean evocative lines of Freud. Bacon on the other hand, I was (and remain) somewhat ambivalent. When I came across Smee's book, I was exited to learn more about Freud and the other artists.
As I was reading through the book--I finished it yesterday--I
found myself going down the rabbit hole known as art history. More than 200 works of art are referenced in the book with no more than 20 of them depicted in the plates. As I read, I began requesting other books--I have a stack on Freud & Bacon awaiting me--and with my iPad next to me, I have been calling up images after image. And then 2 days ago, I began watching art history lectures on YouTube. Also, interestingly enough I have been delving into one of my other secret passions--ballet--on Amazon Prime Video.
But it doesn't really end here either, I have been further contemplating my own artistic tendencies that I have been working on this year--amateur photography combined with original writing.
Last month at Sam's Club in San Fernando, I got the best complement when I picked up my last batch of photos to get me through the post-surgerical period. Over the last couple of years, I have become a regular at Sam's Club and the photography clerk knows who I am. Last month, as I was checking the photos, she told me that she looks at photos all day long but is always excited to see mine. She told me that she thought that they were something special. And she really seemed pleased when I gave her one copy of each of the 4 images I was picking up that day.
With time available to me now for interior speculation that I may never have again, I am tasking myself to comb though the thousands of images sitting on my hard drive and add poetry to ones that speak to me. I will refrain from short changing my talents. I am not going to put any of the photos forth with hemming and hawing about how defective my poetry is or how inadequate my photography skills are. This is me, my art and I will be proud of it. Perhaps it it not your taste or to your liking and that is quite OK--you are not me and you do not have to think my children are beautiful.