Art as a daily dose

Today is Andy Warhol's birthday as well as George Washington's birthday, and the coincidental natalities bookend the father of a revolutionary country and the father of the country's revolutionary post-modern Pop art.

George Washington inspired a lot of paintings, most famously George Washington Crossing the Delaware, one of the most recognizable paintings in the world, as well as one of the largest, at 12 by 21 feet. It is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This link is a treasure, if you've got a moment and a decent internet connection, go explore one of my favorite haunts.

The Met is where I spent many hours moping and musing as a teenager and young adult--hours that shaped and changed me as well as inspired and comforted a troubled youth. It was there that I learned to savor and cherish art and learned to value and serve the creativity in myself.

My art is in words and ideas, I have little visual art skill to speak of, but artists, much to my enrichment, have always constellated around my life. I've been fascinated and informed by them, the master mime and line-drawing guy in New York, the painter in Prague,the jewelry designer studying painting in Amsterdam, the man who carves dragons in Bolinas and countless others.


Art is a nourishing and transcendent pastime, and I am recommending to you today, to take a moment anywhere you are, to look around and let your eyes rest on a piece of art, let it occupy and transport you and stimulate you to see something, anything, anywhere--even your own face--in a way you've not seen it before. Which is part of the appeal of Andy Warhol, who fomented as much controversy as product, but in the end left us all looking at things differently.

Perspective is everything.