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| The Portal, Morning Fog |
I always want to spend what is, according to the judgment of most, "way too long" looking at art, but as it is I'm always rushed in museums. My women walk quickly, boot heels clicking in a purposeful tempo across museums' mirrored floors, bodies determinedly sashaying from wall to wall, from one room to the next, taking all the walls in like a tornado indiscriminately sucking in all that flies across its path, taking it in with wide sweeps of Hercules's broom.
Most people don't realize that examining — no, experiencing — a single piece of art for hours can be far more fulfilling and enjoyable than examining many in a cursory manner. Perhaps my favorite painting to dwell on (or, in) is Monet's Cathedral in the Fog, a pointillist rendition of the Rouen Cathedral, which Monet returned to again and again, during different times of the day and year, painting it over twenty times. Whether together or alone, his many dabs, his many cathedrals, become a single cathedral, an ur-cathedral, a Cathedral in its most unabashedly perfect form.
I can stare at the piece for hours, sinking further and further into it, seeing the cathedral emerge from the billows of fog in all its golden glory, and then fade back again, receding into nothing but a spectral imprint in my mind. I fall into the cathedral, becoming divine as I flatten myself against its crown, before diffusing myself far from it, becoming just another distant fleck watching the cathedral in all its gloppy glory.
This watching is a learning curve — like getting to know someone with whom you feel you will one day fall in love but haven't learned to be with yet, the painting does not surrender its entire essence to you at first glance; you get to know it over time. It whispers to you, intimating great grey thoughts through the fog and you're both arrested and unsteady. You're pulled forward and you wrench yourself away, testing the experience of being an intimate while remembering the importance of seeing as an outsider. You musn't forget you're not a part of the cathedral, but Monet makes it so easy to slip under its seemingly-translucent skin.
As with that of most people, the beauty of many paintings blurs upon closer inspection. But the world of Monet's Rouen . . . that only grows wider in scope the nearer to it I pan. I stare at pictures, at paintings — at Monet's cathedral — to see the world, to know every stroke and dab of it even with my eyes closed, to love it as it is; a memory truer than truth.
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