An artist date
“...I think to 21st century eyes, it’s easy to misinterpret these somewhat flashy gilded mental mounts as being excessive. It’s a style that we now know broadly as the Rococo, but it was really daring and innovative....And it is about freedom of the imagination.”
Today, I had plans to go to the Matisse “Jazz” exhibit (closing June 1) at the Chicago Art Institute with a friend but, as plans sometimes do, things fell through. While I had already seen the exhibit and, to be honest, had been to the Art Institute a few times in the past couple of months, I went anyway. Solo.
Which is actually much less tragic than it sounds.
Julia Cameron, in her classic work “The Artist’s Way,” presents a 12-week program for nurturing your creativity. Each week, you participate in different practices and complete set readings, and there are two activities you consistently follow throughout the program: morning pages and the artist date. Morning pages is a morning journaling practice of writing three pages of text daily as soon as yo wake up and the artist date is an “excursion, a play date that you preplan and defend against all interlopers” that you spend with your inner artist. As many things about Cameron’s program, the artist date has very specific rules you must follow:
It lasts two hours.
It happens every week (you are instructed to write and sign a contract with yourself that you will not wriggle out of it).
It includes only you—no “lovers, friends, spouses, children—no taggers-on of any stripe.”
I had already told myself I was going to the Art Institute, and I didn’t want to let myself down about that. So I could check off #2—no wriggling out. And while I have been an Art Institute member for years and have seen many exhibits many times, I was sure I could find two hours worth of art to admire, so I could check off #1. And, well, #3—no guests—was in the bag.
So I went on an artist’s date to the Art Institute.
Google’s Gemini (I know, but it’s a Gemini) suggested I “wander just one specific room that I usually ignore” for my artist date. So I picked a furniture room, specifically “Design in Europe 1600-1900.” I regularly ignore the furniture rooms—doesn’t everyone?—so I thought this would be a good opportunity to “listen to what my artist child has to say.”
After walking through the room, I sat down to write about the Rococo vases and the Josiah Wedgewood’s anti-slavery ornament, about the porcelain King Vulture and the cracked German punchbowl from the 1893 Columbia exposition. Then I noticed a mostly empty cabinet of little folding chairs and wondered who was using them and what they were seated in front of to draw. And on the staircase between the furniture room and the Medieval armory, a cascade of couples arranged themselves for wedding pictures. One woman annoyed by people at the museum interrupting her day. One man, his jacket already tight, holding it closed so the buttons would not pop while his bride-to-be reapplied her lip gloss.
Which reminded me of a poem I wrote about another summer’s day.
I share The Art Institute with all my loves.
With my membership, we enter in before others, stand together
alone before Nighthawks, Le Grande Jatte, and American Gothic.
Stand hand-in-hand under Sky Above Clouds IV,
meet beside the lions, under the cranberry trees, and
tell stories about Van Gogh’s Bedroom & Murder Mystery, 1945.
A summer afternoon romancing the retirees,
perched on folding curule chairs, playing hooky from life.
I share The Art Institute with all my loves.
All my loves—myself included.
