Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Homer in Boston
This weekend I was in the Boston area and managed to get into the city to see the Homer show at the Museum of Fine Arts. Its a small show of the museum's collection of Homers that includes etchings, drawings and a few paintings. Homer started as an exacting illustrator and moved into that realm of painting that it is hard to talk about. Yes, he painted nature and guys fishing. But that is almost irrelevant. He became an alchemist after years of focused labor. His paint is magic, full of truth and unsentimental obsession. My two favorites were of some cows on a dark silhouetted hillside and his last, Driftwood, of the wild sea and a lone man trying to rescue a tree trunk from the surf.
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Oh! I envy you!
When I was just a very small lad my mom gave me a book of great paintings and one therein was The Gulf Stream. How that image did work on my brain! My imagination ran with it. On first viewing I was frantic with anguish for that fellow. But the more I looked at it, the more calm I became. It remains one of my favorite paintings.
No one else captures water like Homer.
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