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How Art Enraptures — Fourth Quarter Begins pg269
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
After the spotlights were adjusted the night before my exhibit opened, I sat alone in this gallery full of a decade of work with a question. Why these images? By now I’d walked through miles of galleries past thousands of paintings, stopping to sketch those that arrested my attention. Only a third of those sketches were ultimately translated into finished pieces. Here they all were — hung chronologically to show the progression of art through time. I sensed there was a common thread beyond the painted frames, but none was obvious since every genre, subject and style was all over the place. What’s the similarity between a crucified Christ and Parisians in parks? A bowl of cherries and London on fire? I couldn’t see it.
The next day I pulled out my art history books and warmed up Wikipedia. I looked up every artist in the series and read biographies in search of clues. Many of the painters I intuitively chose are described as mostly decent and occasionally eccentric. Their work is uplifting, even happy. You can see in their self portraits they didn’t take themselves oh-so-seriously. After more research, turns out I picked the nice artists — the good, fine, quirky ones. An historical record says Piero di Cosimo from the 15th century so loved painting he cooked eggs in his hot glue…
