I walked over to the Metropolitan Museum  after spending a few hours at the Whitney Museum on Friday.  I spent more time in the European Painting section and I was happy to see Manet’s Woman with a Parrot was back on display.  I then realized that Courbet’s painting of the same name was on the other side of the room.

The two paintings were very different though both were painted around the same time.  I did not realize that Manet died of a whasting disease when he was but 51 years of age and that his last paintings were of flower vases as that is all he could handle, it was sad but I never made that connection.

I was also struck by a painting by Richard Parkes Bonnington, a young British artist who died at the age of 28 and was a friend of Delacroix’s.  The particular landscape is shown below but the black and white photo does not capture the power of that painting which pulled me from across the room.

Also, the painting by Jules Bastien-Lepage of Joan of Arc has always been a powerful experience.  I did not realize why Joan of Arc was part of this painting.

After the province of Lorraine was lost to Germany following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Frenchmen saw in Joan of Arc a new and powerful symbol and Lepage was from Lorraine.  Unfortunately, Lepage died young also and so he never fully matured as an artist and perhaps, is not as famous as he should be, given his work.

Personally, I’d think the painting would have be better without Joan of Arc in it, as there’s quite enough going on without having the voice of God and and the image of a ghostly night floating in the upper left.

And while I don’t usually like this type of work - I think Regnault’s Salome does represent and fix in my mind what Salome looked like.

I looked at my favorite Cezanne still life and I was reminded that there’s something new I find in the painting everytime I look at it.  Every brushstroke was deliberate.

But I had another thought as I viewed this painting…I was reminded that the  arrangement of apples in clustered groups also mirrors my use of Geodemographic targeting using various search engine tools like MSN AdCenter and in my mind I connected the two, probably the first time anyone whould have made that connection.

Then I looked at a couple of Van Gogh paintings and I compared, mentally, the idea that Cezanne’s still lifes took up to 100 sittings to get to where he might feel they were "finished" while Van Gogh would paint his paintings in one or two sittings.

Today, it seems totally unimportant that Cezanne spent years on a some paintings while Van Gogh spent hours and the paintings of both artist are satisfying though they appeal to different parts of me.  Van Gogh paints pure life energy - the electric power of life while Cezanne’s work is much more measured.  I have always wanted to be like Cezanne, but my actual impulses run much closer to Van Gogh and my best work was impulsive - both in art and in Search Engine work. 

That reminds me that as a teenager I was an art assistant for William Beckman, when he tought art at Staten Island Community Collage (now called the Collage at Staten Island) where I scheduled models and occasionally modeled myself.  When I visited his studio in Brooklyn, at the time, I wanted to very much paint like him.  His works were mostly nudes of his wife or himself, all done photorealistic and tooks several months to complete.   He did not encourage me to try anything like that but I wanted to anyway.  I found that I could not paint like that - no matter how much I tried to follow through on a consistant approach - I’d get board, frustrated and attack the canvas and then go through some kind of cathartic state which occasionally yielded a brakethrough.

One day he told me about the Herman Hesse  novel Narcissus and Goldmund, which I then read.  Beckman compared himself to Narcissus and me to Goldman; he thought my talent would  explode out of me one day whereas Beckman(Narcissus) was able to work steadly towards his goal.   I can’t honestly say I see it that way today (maybe I need to go back and re-read the book). 

Sometimes I just want to explode out but I’m afraid it won’t be good enough.  But Van Gogh did not worry about it - he just exploded out and the work itself was it’s own justification.

I find that when I go with my impulses and intuition - I’m usually ok unless my feelings get involved, then my judgement is off.  I view the metrics work as an extension of the painting work I used to do, and is mainly intuitive and I use data to support my intuitive flashes.  That leaves me with a somewhat Ad-Hoc approach, where I often forget some details.  I try to make up for it with a discipled approach, but that approach is more of support to allow me to be free to make those intuitive jumps.

I also looked at the Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David while a class of teenagers was listening to their teacher.

David rejected the French rococo style which was about Woman, Fun, Beauty and focused on Male values (as it was seen in Revolutionary France) of exact contours, hardness, fitness, a willing to die for your beliefs, very much what many who wanted to depose King Louis XVI felt they needed to do.  Socrates was convicted of corrupting youths with his teachings and sentanced to death unless he renouced his beliefs, and he chose death.

Next to this painting was a man who actually died due to the French Revolution (David avoided this morbid fate) the famous scientist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) and his wife, painted by David.

I took a brake and went and had a glass of Wine and Duck Pate in the upstairs Great Hall Balcony Bar cafe at the Met, as I listed to two classical musicians play a sonnata, I drank the dark red wine, my favorite type, reflected on the day which started with two IBM calls, and a meeting with client.

Near the end of the night I thought what it would be like if some of my works were hanging in the museum.  Would my Still Lifes hold up next to a Cezzane?  I’d like to think they would.

 Cezzane Still Life (above)

                                                                                    Mine - Homage to Manet

I painted this large, ambitious, painting before and after a trip to Paris in 1988 and it was painted in an underground studio/living space with no natural light on Avenue B and 2nd Street.  I had since repainted part of the top of the painting but I’m sorry I did as I quite like the effects I’m seeing now as I look at the photo of the painting.

The chart in the background of this painting came from a dream I had, a few years earlier, where i was shown a chart of planets in the solar system and the colors they correspond to, next to each one.  Each color, when properly charged with heart energy, captures the planetary energy it corresponds to which is transmitted through the hands and eye movements into the paint, becoming one with the painting; at least, that was my reasoning at the time.  Examples of how to apply the colors to draw planetary energies was in the vertial sections below the planets and colors.

Today I take the chart much less literaly and the energy will come through on it’s own as long its not blocked.

I was also thinking about a conversation I had with a guard at the museum; the guard is an artist but did not know anything much about the internet.  In a way, it’s hard for me to imagine not using the Internet and newer applications being built into the web (Web 2.0) as part of art.   For example, if you want to sell anything you need to have it online-it’s much easier to tell people to look at it if you can send them a hyperlink to it.  I hope I gave him something useful.

The other lesson is to be here, now, in this timeframe; the art in the museums though wonderful, is of former time(s).  When I occasionaly pass by the Art Student’s League I see examples of artists trying to emulate Rembrant using the same, dull, earthy colors.  Rembrants colors, though they are earthy to begin with, were actually much cleaner than they appear today.  But even besides that….why bother to emulate the past?  Why not do something that hasen’t yet been done than repeat what Rembrant did?   It’s like trying to redo Elvis, people try all the time but can anyone sing Elvis better than Elvis?  Maybe Clay Aiken (well, he does sound good, but he’s not really singing Elvis, he’s stays himself).

After the Museum I slowly made my way home realizing just how much I walked and when I got home, I was exhausted, but felt I had really looked at a lot of good work and was able to enjoy it for once, without having to hurry through it.