Blind Date with Destiny Feb 2006

Art of the Day Club newsletter Feb. 28, 2006

As I sat in the Joslyn Museum cafeteria, waiting for a blind date who was a no-show, I was making a sketch of a large potted plant, I don’t know what it was, but it had several woody stalks and clusters of green waxy leaves. It was sitting by an entryway, next to a large brass art deco style arched gate. I was alone in a sea of empty tables. No rendezvous today. Then a cute little red-headed girl of 12 or 13 with braces on her teeth and freckles came up and saw my sketch and was quite impressed. I felt validated as an artist somehow.

Later, I toured the museum, I was in the modern art wing, and confronted original paintings by Matisse, Braque, Hoffman, Pollock, Stuart Davis (who I have been reading about - interestingly enough, the book is titled Stuart Davis), and others. I stood myself squarely in front of Davis’s "It don’t mean a thing, if it don’t got that swing" canvas which measures maybe 3’ x 4’ and one was one of Davis’s "jazz" pieces. I was "measuring" myself and wondering if somewhere sometime someone was or would be standing in front of one of my pieces measuring the lines, the colors, the shades, the shapes, and themselves against me.

I remembered George Plimpton’s performance in playing the triangle, gong, and bass drum, for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra - I think it was Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. And I remembered James Thurber’s "Walter Mitty" as a fighter pilot and as a race car driver. Thurber once said of his own art, "If all the lines of what I've drawn were straightened out, they would reach a mile and a half. I drew just for relaxation, in between writing." I thought that Pollock’s lines would be longer.

So am I Plimpton or Mitty, I wondered as I studied Davis’s syncopated rhythms, bright colors, and busy composition. Living in an imaginary world like Walter Mitty, or taking bold new directions like George Plimpton, or will someone someday look at my canvases like I am looking at Stuart Davis’s.