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Sep. 16th, 2004 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI expect a lot of what people get out of art is made from what they, themselves, bring to the table. Here's an essay about someone who took Hamlet to the African bush to see what the people there would make of it. Turns out they had a lot to offer Hamlet and Hamlet had quite a bit to offer them. Interesting reading, that.
This morning, on the drive into work, I was thinking about Andrew Wyeth art because the overly-long, gone-to-seed grass (still haven't cut it) in my yard is turning rusty and brown and it reminded me of Christina's World. That painting, as it happens, shows up as a plot point in Preacher, where it's Jesse's mom's favorite painting because it reminds her of her own life. (I'll post that panel later tonight when I get home so that all ya'll can see it.)
I was also thinking about the Helga pictures, by the same Wyeth fellow, which my mom and I went to see in an exhibit in the days before we decided that *art* wasn't really a good choice for our mother-daughter outings. (We do opera nowadays.) I looked at the pictures and pictures and pictures of Helga. There were a lot of them at the exhibit. I saw a rough-boned nordic woman, a strong woman, painted over and over, variations on a theme. As art went, it wasn't bad. I liked it better than the suggestive flowers by that dreadful O'Keeffe woman, anyway. (Me to mom on O'Keeffe: I don't get it... if she wanted to paint snatch, then why didn't she? Why muck about with suggestive flowers? We gave up on joint art expeditions shortly after the O'Keeffe exhibit.)
So anyway. Looking at Helga, Helga n+1, Helga n+2... I saw lots of pictures of a rough-boned nordic woman, which were okay but not all that write-home-worthy. This was not the exhibit that my mom saw. My mom saw the entire exhibit through the haze of a woman scorned. The primary thing she got out of the exhibit, least as far as I could tell, was a sense of rage and unfairness. After all, Helga was not his wife. He did, indeed, have a wife who was not Helga. How dare he, said my mother, paint his (years and years of) affair for everyone to see? What about his wife? Mom was not appeased by my take on the situation: "Well, he's a rich painter dude and they've probably worked it out between them. It is not our problem, about him and his wife. Here, look at the light on this one... he's made her look fragile." We took different things to the exhibit, and we took different things home from the exhibit.
This morning, on the drive into work, I was thinking about Andrew Wyeth art because the overly-long, gone-to-seed grass (still haven't cut it) in my yard is turning rusty and brown and it reminded me of Christina's World. That painting, as it happens, shows up as a plot point in Preacher, where it's Jesse's mom's favorite painting because it reminds her of her own life. (I'll post that panel later tonight when I get home so that all ya'll can see it.)
I was also thinking about the Helga pictures, by the same Wyeth fellow, which my mom and I went to see in an exhibit in the days before we decided that *art* wasn't really a good choice for our mother-daughter outings. (We do opera nowadays.) I looked at the pictures and pictures and pictures of Helga. There were a lot of them at the exhibit. I saw a rough-boned nordic woman, a strong woman, painted over and over, variations on a theme. As art went, it wasn't bad. I liked it better than the suggestive flowers by that dreadful O'Keeffe woman, anyway. (Me to mom on O'Keeffe: I don't get it... if she wanted to paint snatch, then why didn't she? Why muck about with suggestive flowers? We gave up on joint art expeditions shortly after the O'Keeffe exhibit.)
So anyway. Looking at Helga, Helga n+1, Helga n+2... I saw lots of pictures of a rough-boned nordic woman, which were okay but not all that write-home-worthy. This was not the exhibit that my mom saw. My mom saw the entire exhibit through the haze of a woman scorned. The primary thing she got out of the exhibit, least as far as I could tell, was a sense of rage and unfairness. After all, Helga was not his wife. He did, indeed, have a wife who was not Helga. How dare he, said my mother, paint his (years and years of) affair for everyone to see? What about his wife? Mom was not appeased by my take on the situation: "Well, he's a rich painter dude and they've probably worked it out between them. It is not our problem, about him and his wife. Here, look at the light on this one... he's made her look fragile." We took different things to the exhibit, and we took different things home from the exhibit.
