Number Four: The Walls of the Museum
Timer on. Ten minutes. People moving in and out of adjoining rooms. Some pause for a moment. Others slow their walk to a crawl and continue through the exhibit. I sit. Until the timer goes off. In front of me is a large painting. I’ve never been a patient guy. I want to see so quickly, to understand immediately. So I set the timer. Look for ten minutes. Ask questions about the painting. What do you notice about the colors? The compositions? The brushstrokes? Take it in. I jot some notes down in my Phone.
It’s almost like time stands still for me in the classical painting wing of the Getty Museum. As I write this, it has been almost a year since I’ve been the museum. Most museums have closed due to the global pandemic. I do miss those times. I didn’t grow up as a museum-goer. In fact, I didn’t make my own personal trip to a museum for an exhibit until 2019. I attended a photography exhibit at the Broad. I was arrested by the scale of the works. The pieces, the lighting, the quiet conversations, the meditative ambience. Truth be told, I believed only sophisticated and boring people visited museums. I always figured you needed to be cultured to visit places like that. I didn’t and still don’t consider myself cultured. That belief was shaken when I went to the Getty Museum at the end of 2019.
I can remember quiet afternoons in my hometown of Colton, California. A stretch of land stretched behind the housing projects that we lived in and connected a string of duplexes along the northern end of the projects. It was a shared field but it was larger than any yard I had ever seen. Especially during a sunset as the sun glazed the surface of the blades of the grass, setting the fields ablaze with a golden sparkle. I’m going somewhere with this. It was like time stood still. It was home.
Home. I didn’t live in the museum. I didn’t own the museum. I wasn’t cultured. I wasn’t sophisticated. But I was home. In front of those works. I couldn’t speak. It was like a religious experience. I was filled with joy not just because the works were astonishing and beautiful. I was filled with joy because I was home. With the museum goers, families and tourists, I was quietly in my space. In front of these works of art, I knew my purpose. And if it wasn’t my purpose, I wanted to be around art as much as I could for the rest of my life. When I returned from the museum that day, I collected as many books as I could on art history and began to dive in.
I decided to drive out and visit once a month. I only made the trip three times before the museums closed and the state declared lockdown. I eagerly await the reopening just like everyone does. To feel at home again. Finding your place in the world. Finding or creating your purpose. Your tribe. Your quiet afternoons. Your open fields of Colton or wherever you’re from. Your home. My home. Amongst the walls of the museum.
Oh yeah. And here’s a few of the names I discovered during my studies at the museum:
Jean-Francois Millet
Edgar Degas
John Everett Millais
Franz Xaver Winterhalter
John William Godward
Jan Gossaert
Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli
Sebastiano del Piombo
Amongst others. Cheers!