Has a work of art ever made you cry? i can think of two paintings, Gericaults The Raft of the Medusa and Picassos portrait of Gertrude Stein and in both instances it was because of my long history with the paintings preceding the first time i got to see them in person. very powerful for me to go from art history book to the paintings presence. The Raft haunted me and carried a homoerotic pull for me as kid and then when i was older i probably projected loss and the aids epidemic onto the painting.. and this idea of the will to live, of wanting to survive. so when i saw it at the Louvre on my first trip to Paris when David and i first started dating i completely fell apart. just sobbed. i had been through so much and truly felt like i had survived, that my life had turned around from darkness and drug addiction. the scale of the painting. being at the Louvre. it was all so overwhelming. the second painting, the portrait of gertrude stein for me held all my romantic notions of living as an artist..reading the autobiography of alice b. toklas as an art student at CSULB with my best friends Maw Shein Win and Adrian.. creating our own punk rock salon and living in our imagined avant-garde life. well.. when i saw that painting at the Met it held/holds that friendship and my youth in it. the joy of being an artist.strange how art can hold our memories. how i can project and pour so much into a work. Rothko can always make me cry. Joan Mitchell too. i hope someday that i can make a painting that people can pour their life into. what are your works of art that have made you cry?
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 23:58:46 +0000
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