Art Appreciation

In my living room, I have a replica of a painting called Young Girl with Fan by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. To write that sentence I had to look up the name of the painting, who painted it, and what you call a version of a painting that isn’t the real thing. For good measure, I also looked up when it was painted (1881) and where they keep the real thing (I couldn’t find an answer). Even that didn’t solidify my certainty. Renoir painted girls with fans over and over again, never finding the girl he wanted, and he wasn’t a man concerned with unique titles. Now I have mistyped the title twice and only feel 30 percent certain that this is correct. For me, 30 percent is a good amount of certainty when it comes to art. Most of what I think about when I think about art is how to make it look like I am appropriately thinking about art. I like art, I enjoy art, but mostly I just look at it with my eyes, not with my soul, my heart, or anything else. Art is one of the only things that seeing with your eyes means you’re not seeing at all, so in that way, I don’t really see art.

I did, however, see the replica of the Renoir painting whose name I’m not entirely sure of. I was wandering through a Goodwill in search of band T-shirts for bands I didn’t listen to, aiming for an image of coolness that didn’t quite fit. I saw the girl’s face poking out of a pile of discarded paintings and I felt something akin to love. It reminded me of a piece of art that hung on the wall in a hallway of a college I hated working at. I always wanted that piece of art for my own wall but it was painted by a student I didn’t know and I wouldn’t even know how to begin asking them to give it up. All that to say, I didn’t love the piece because it was good art or because it was by an artist whose name I had heard before, it was just that the girl felt like a real person made out of fuzzy, not-quite-person particles.

Finding people is always what I look to do in art museums. I have no use for beautiful landscapes or abstracts, what I want is a painting I can look in the eye. I make my way through the white rooms of museums, bypassing the things other people find interesting until I find a replica of myself staring back at me. When I see these types of paintings the correct thing to say is how talented the artist is, mention the realism and skill, not feel anything, and then move on to the meaningful art. I play this part poorly, I stare too long and think more about who they are outside of the frame than in it. I make their life about me.

I said this to a friend I was only just getting to know. She was someone whose fuzzy, not-quite-person particles were just starting to resemble something I understood. We were sitting in a warm restaurant, over food that shouldn’t have been as good as it was. It was the type of scene I would paint in warm colors and blurry lights if I knew how to paint. She spoke about art in a way that was unexpected, with an education that made me feel inferior. She knew the names of painters and said them in a way that seemed correct, so far off from the way I would read them if I saw them on a page. She incorrectly assumed I would know these things, too. I felt her hues shift out of focus and she became impressionism to me. 

I only offered up this personal reality because I didn’t want to lose the sense that maybe I saw a person in her, but I cloaked it in a joke in case I was wrong. “I just like to look into the eyes of a 13th-century toddler and realize they were able to think and connect with others. It just feels a little wrong, like, what do you mean they were thinking in the 13th-century? I thought we were doing the thinking. Thinking is supposed to be a 21st-century invention.” Thinking was a poorly drawn replica of the word I wanted. Maybe I wanted introspection, or connection, or even a complicated version of the word “love.”

She laughed and in hindsight I tried to consider this a dismissal, but the part of me who still sits in that tableau feels the room crash into focus. The blur is gone and I want to say, “What do you mean you are thinking? Thinking is supposed to be my invention.” But maybe thinking is a poor replica of the word I want. Maybe I want to say understanding. Not one style, not one medium of us should match, yet here through the fuzzy, not-quite-person particles she carried a recognizable piece of personhood. Maybe I was supposed to say, “Wow, you know a lot about art” or “it sounds like you had a fun trip with your dad,” but instead in this blurry painting just starting to come into focus, I felt something akin to love.