The Artist’s Eye
The Daily Post had a Daily Prompt today called The Artist’s Eye, and the questions were:
Is there a painting or sculpture you’re drawn to?
What does it say to you?
Describe the experience.
(Or, if art doesn’t speak to you, tell us why.).
These are my answers:
Yes, there was a print of a painting that I was drawn to many years ago right before going to college, and it was The Young Shepherdess by William-Adolphe Bouguereau:
I can not really describe what this print of a painting says to me exactly, even when I would still get several hard to describe feelings when looking at this painting, I still could not really describe those feelings well or at all unfortunately; I just know that it caught my attention, it was like the shepherdess in the paint was looking at me, and I was drawn to this painting.
My experience happened many years ago when my mom and I were shopping late during the night at a store to buy stuff for when I leave to college because I was going to be leaving for college soon, we passed by a bin of prints of paintings and images that were on sale for a very low price (under $3), and as I looked through them The Young Shepherdess painting kept getting my attention and drawing me to it and I felt various hard to describe feelings when looking at it so I bought it along with a print of a photograph of a train that I can not remember.
I brought the painting with me when I went to college and I would keep it in my window, I would look at it sometimes as I thought to myself while looking out of the window during some of the hardest times of my life as I struggled with depression and social anxiety disorder and generalized anxiety disorder and suicidal thoughts and a change of world view when I lost faith in the religion that I grew up in (Christianity) and as I struggled with various other things (college, deaths in the family, adulthood, et cetera), and so this painting was there during the times when no one else was there for me who I felt could help me and as I tried to struggle and suffer with my problems alone.
This painting got damaged a bit (the protective plastic covering it bent the painting when heat warped the plastic) when I left it in my automobile too long after a hurricane so I finally got a frame for it and I have had it hanging on a wall ever since, I used to use an image of this painting as a background on my blog back when it was on Windows Live Spaces and on my YouTube channel and I even briefly used it on WordPress.com, but I stopped using it for those purposes years ago; and this painting has been in more of my dreams than any other painting or work of art.
I probably do not get the same feelings that I used to when looking at this painting, maybe sometimes, but it is still a special painting to me with sentimental value; and it is the only painting that I still own because I gave my other print (it was of a photograph of a train, but I can not remember much else about it) away and/or something happened to it after the hurricane.
Dream
I think that it is interesting that the Daily Prompt was about paintings/art, because surprisingly the only dream that I can barely remember from last night involved paintings/art, and I had some other dreams and there was more to this dream but I somehow forgot those dreams; and most of this dream unfortunately, but I do remember part of the end of the dream.
All that I can remember of this dream is that the end of the dream took place during the day at my parent’s house and all of my family and I were there except for my brother CC, my mom was in the kitchen cooking hamburgers for everyone, and I remember that my dad was constructing an easel-like thing/stand/wooden album or connective frame or whatever for several large wood framed rectangular paintings that were connected by another wooden frame at the top so that they could open like an album or book or notebook but vertically instead of horizontally; and you could partly open them in a V-shape so that the paintings could sit on a desk/wherever, and so it was like the frame attaching them was also a stand and you could flip-up each painting to show the next one.
At some point the hamburgers were ready and so we started to eat, somehow my male cousin DE was in the house eating in the dining room as well, and this even surprised me in the dream because I did not see him earlier and no one mentioned that he was there or was going to eat with us; and I remember having my glass cup that I drink water from, and I had water in it.
At some point we finished eating, my cousin DE said that the food was good and he thanked us and he left, and then I went to wash the dishes and I think that we were out of bleach; and I remember talking with my mom briefly as I washed the dishes, and then I went to go outside near where the basketball goals used to be to help my dad who was working on the thing that he was constructing for the connected paintings.
I used a ladder because my dad was using two trees to hold up the large connected wooden framed paintings because he seemed to be making a huge/tall easel-like thing for them, and so I helped hold the paintings still just in case to make sure that they would not fall from the tree if they got shaken too hard.
At some point my dad wanted to take a break for the day and so we moved the connected wooden framed paintings into the storage building, but I woke up after this.
The end,
-John Jr
John Jr's Blog 