Hell of a Day

At least there's art

I was going to write about some of the latest news but, honestly, between the Supreme Court, the school shooting in Michigan, and the latest installment in the “Donald did something shocking but not surprising” series I’m not quite up to it.

Instead I wanted to share a couple of pictures with you.

Van Gogh, Bridge in the Rain, 1887

“The Bridge,” which hangs on the second floor of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, was painted in 1887, just before the last two explosively productive years in his life and (in my opinion) before his mental instability and torment began to register in every single brush stroke. It’s one of his works that was obviously influenced by Japanese artists; in this instance, Utagawa Hiroshige, one of the great masters of the early nineteenth century. I thought I had seen every Van Gogh painting, print, and drawing there was but this one was new to me. And it immediately became one of those paintings I wish I could be inside of—it is indescribably more compelling in person.

The first time I ever had that experience was when I saw Henri Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy” for the first time in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

There was something so familiar about it that I knew I must have seen it somewhere before. I eventually realized that that was because one of the older kids in my neighborhood had a Sleeping Gypsy belt buckle. So it goes.

Sometimes the greatest gift art can give us is an escape. That’s what was required today.

This helps, too:

I hope you are all doing whatever you need to do in order to stay above the fray. Please post some pictures of art that gets you through tough times.