A day at the galleries

And a lifetime on the riverbank

Last Friday my good friend and art obsessive Gisela Gueiros took some of the The Painting School community on a tour of Chelsea art galleries. (Side note: Do you read Gisela’s amazing newsletter Take That Step yet?)

Louise Nevelson at Pace Gallery

Gisela has one speed in life - super fast - so we covered a lot of ground and looked at a ton of art in two hours. As we rushed around I was reminded of the many Saturdays that I spent in Chelsea when I first moved to New York City in 1998, back when most of the art world was clustered on the windy, long blocks around 10th Avenue. Back then the area hosted much of my social life and my nights out often began by meeting friends at an art opening where we helped ourselves to free, and truly terrible, wine before heading out to bars or parties.

I don’t get to Chelsea as much as I would like these days and Gisela’s gallery crawl reminded me that art treks serve to help us define what we like and don’t like in a work of art. But thanks to a brief talk that Gisela gave on the front end of the tour, I was less strident and less immediate in my critiques on our tour than I usually am.

Gisela told us that the strong feelings we might have about the work of somebody like Raoul de Keyzer are rarely fixed, that over the course of the next years we will change and the world around us will change. Those transformations will transform the way we react to art. The person I am five years from now might see something in Raoul de Keyzer’s work that I do not see today.

Raoul De Keyser, Come on, play it again nr. 2

Gisela quoted the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: 'No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.'

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I’m a river girl. I grew up in a city encircled by the Big Sioux and spent my favorite summer days on the wide Missouri River. I love riding water taxis on the East River. My favorite cities, like NewYork and Paris, Dublin and London, are all built on the banks running along flowing water.

I’ve been painting the Missouri for years because it means something to me and because it is a challenge to capture something so impacted by Mother Nature. My river paintings are never the same because, as Heraclitus pointed out, I am never the same artist painting a river that is never the same river.

One year I am an artist with a terrible day job suffering from the effects of late nights in dive bars who is painting a river that flows high on the banks, rushing by me following a winter of endless snow.

Another year I am a sleep-deprived and economically-unstable new mother staring at nothing but storm clouds and crests from high winds.

Last summer I stood on the river as the mother of teens with an eye towards my own third act and the final act of many people I love. I worried about the river’s water level and what that could tell me about the climate.

We have many examples in art history of evolving people documenting a changing world, including Cézanne's commitment to painting Mont Sainte-Victoire, a mountain in southern France, which he painted thirty times.

Mont Sainte-Victoire (1895)

Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904)

Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir, 1904–1906

The Heraclitus Exercise: (I know, I know, it sounds more like a Cross Fit move, but that doesn’t change the fact that is a great name for a painting exercise!)

Do you have a Mont Sainte-Victoire or Missouri River of your own? A place where you return to year after year to witness time’s impact on it? Or are you staring with disbelief in the mirror at the way time is altering your face? Or maybe you keep returning to paint a stoop on a brownstone, a jungle road, a mountaintop, a pet cockatoo.

For this exercise let’s commit to documenting something for the next ten years. I know, that’s an insanely long time. That’s an entire decade! But imagine looking back in 2035 and considering the body of work that you have completed and the story of a place or a face that you have created.

Start today. Do it. I’ll do it too! I’m going to start painting this giant cottonwood that stands guard over the neighborhood and is just outside the front window of my Brooklyn apartment.

Here is my first one.

Happy Painting!

Sara

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