Stuck at home in the snow, I had the freedom to fill my day as I chose. I made art and wrote as much as I wanted. I decorated envelopes and writing paper to make mail art to send my friends. I rubberstamped and glued snips of colored paper in altered books for the women I am swapping with. I collaged postcards and trading cards for my monthly art exchanges. I did initial layouts for the artwork I plan to exhibit. I wrote letters to my daughter who is out of town. I did the next assignment for my writing class. I was perfectly content! And I pondered quite a bit on the career I am pursuing as an art critic/commentator.
I love the fact that art is everywhere. The possibilities for enjoying art are all around me. I can save wrappers and labels, scraps otherwise known as trash, to make a free-form found-object collage. I can create an altered book to commemorate a special vacation. I can sketch my son's face, or study the shapes in shadows the sun casts on my living room wall. I can visit nearby museums like the Walters Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, or the National Gallery of Art.
In these museums I've admired the exquisite detail in the pages of medieval illuminated manuscripts. I've seen the soft emotion in Mary Cassatt's paintings of women and children. Been captivated by a froth of bubbles foaming down a glass in the hand of a girl in a French champagne poster from the 1890s. Gazed at the ingenious use of patterns in a Pierre Bonnard kitchen scene with a table set for dinner. Experienced the drama of Egyptian painted mummy caskets and carved hieroglyphic tablets. Wondered at the tiny watercolor paintings of plums and roses on the postcards Edouard Manet mailed to his friends.
Art is my passion. I can't imagine life without art. I'm happiest each day that I make art or learn something new about the history of art. When days go by that I'm not in my studio creating art, I feel out of sorts. It's a drive I have inside that I don't understand. When my family and I walk into a restaurant, they are smiling at the patrons and enjoying the smells coming from the kitchen, while I am admiring the art on the walls. If we are under trees at a picnic, I am looking at the texture of the bark and the details of the leaves and the shapes of passing clouds, wishing I had my sketchbook with me.
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