Art

Saint Veronica Giuliani*. A huge portrait of her, gently bleeding (she was a stigmatic) hung in an ornate frame in my mother's living room. I knew it had belonged to her mother, and I accepted this as sufficient reason, and do not ever remember being told her story. The print was dark and looming, although she had a pleasant look on her face. My first exposure to art. I had never looked it up before, to see if it was a print of something famous, it's not. I would recognize it at once. It disappeared from the wall after I moved out, with a vague reference about it falling and the glass breaking. I miss her, and I would like a copy, although not on my wall. My mother liked pretty art, religious art that told a story, and not much else. She was one of those who saw abstract art as 'what any child could do'.

Balance this with school trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). I cannot remember the first time, they all run together, I basked. Meandering from room to room, stunned. There is a painting of St. Peter's basilica in Rome, such a sense of immense space, which I conflate with an image, photograph probably, of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. I imagined myself there, in that immensity, and I yearn for it still. The tiny lapis figures in the Egyptian cases, the waxy translucence of real, and ancient alabaster. A mosaic of fish from Greece, the wooden medieval Madonnas with their weirdly adult and often grumpy babies. The suits of armor. The bright modern sculptures that invited exploration, or Oldenberg's electrical outlet of giant proportions. I could not understand how one would not be awed, delighted and amused.

My love, talent, was to gaze. I sat before an Italian renaissance painting of a young girl asleep on every one of my many visits. Or of a German expressionist sculpture of a woman, actually almost certainly a man, but I saw it as female, solid and thick, but rushing forward with a sword held over her back, ready to swing. Such a sense of solidity and movement, paradox holding her together. I entered a gallery, and startled, at a Segal figure, white plaster, lumpy, such the improbable presence of someone very real. This was not mundane, not safe, not about being pretty, but about expressing the inexpressible.

I saw naked men! Actually it confused me more than satisfying my curiosity, since it appeared that they had Three somethings dangling down, and the concept of intercourse from that angle.... it boggled in my head for a very long time. But any kind of naked was fine by me. Still is, to tell the truth.

Several classmates told me I had a double, in one of the French expressionist paintings at the DIA. And I do, several. Insight struck, that was my genetic heritage, those beautiful French girls gathering nuts were my cousins. I felt less ugly, less alien.

So when I went to Wayne State, the campus adjacent to the DIA, lived just off campus, worked at the Main Library just across the street.... I spent a lot of time there. I ate lunch next to a copy of Rodin's Thinker on the steps. I puzzled over the strange awkward portraits in the Early American wing. I learned to tell the greater from the lesser works, and keep my personal preferences separate. I came to love them all, and to "get" the new works- well, mostly. Got to see special exhibitions, Diego Rivera, El Greco, the art between the World's Fairs, Boucher.

Then I moved to Salt Lake, and a great void opened up in my life. Natural beauty in the wide high desert, mountains, dramatic canyons. But the art, the human interpretation, was.... small. The galleries there were... nice. D and I stumbled upon the Sister Wendy series, it came on right after Dr. Who. I was sent a dumpy buck-toothed nun with a beatific smile to remind me of my love. I was a work of art -modeled for art classes at the U, got tattoos to make my art permanent- paid for in pain. The growth of the internet had given me some access. I took pottery classes- but I am at best a craftsman, not ever an artist.

When I finally took D to the DIA several years ago, we were both awed, him for the first time, me all over again. To be in the presence of the very old, the larger than you expect, the vibration from the subtle colors on the canvas, feeling the weight of soaring steel, cannot be known from a screen or book. I stood before a painting that was explained to me as a kid, that I have sought and contemplated ever since. It is about seven feet by three feet, red, dark intense slightly varying red, with a single narrow intense white line down the center, top to bottom. I'd like to think I would have found it myself, without it being pointed out to me, but I was urged to it by a docent. Standing before it is like standing before god. It was not just me, I made D stand there, and he was struck by the power of it as well. I think it is the idea of heaven being right here, if only you will look. Be silent and let it draw you in, the sacred is beside us always.

Then there is Oldenberg, who blows everything to such a size, Wonderland like, and I laugh. There is no Tao without laughter. God from all angles. Buddha's eyes. An ivory carving of a girl in a rice bowl, as she looks inside the bowl. The best art does not just look at us, but also directs our gaze deep inside.

Now I am exploring the art of Boston, human habitation over hundreds of years. Collectors and crowds. Political and public art. I am back to puzzling over what it means, and where it fits. Where I fit.

*St. Veronica Giuliani (1660-1727)

She was born in 1660 at Mercatello in Urbino and became a Capuchiness at Città di Castello when she was only seventeen. Because the bishop who confirmed her had prophesied that she would one day become a saint, she was given a hard novitiate which was further complicated by illness.

In 1694, the crown of thorns was imprinted upon her forehead and in 1697 she received the stigmata; but what is most remarkable is that towards the end of her life she seems to have had an accurate mental picture of the physical constitution of her heart. She even drew a chart on which she indicated the position in the heart of the several emblems of our Lord's passion: a cross, a chalice, a crown of thorns, three nails and seven swords. On her death, the heart was examined by two professors of medicine and surgery before a committee of notable ecclesiastics, and a formal testimony was made that a number of minute objects corresponding to those shown in St. Veronica's plan were to be found in the right ventricle.