I’m home.

It feels good/strange to be here. Just a week away and everything is different. My garden is blooming, bursting with flowers—the rhododendrons are more full than ever before, the asparagus have sprouted up, as have the weeds. The building project progresses, nears the end, but not over yet. I picked Lila up as soon as I could, went directly from the airport to her Doggie Resort. She had a wonderful time playing with other young dogs. Apparently she was a perfect guest, full of energy, very entertaining. I missed her a lot and am glad to be back together. She seems to have settled into our routine here again easily.

I did get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday. It was a warm sunny day and I sat on the steps (with many other tourists and native New Yorkers) for a while and called home (the builders). Such a luxury, cell phones! Inside the museum were many memories (as well as exhibits). One of my first jobs was selling Christmas cards (in October!) there. I spent a lot of my breaks looking at the art, roaming the halls. I would also hire a sitter and go there often when my children were young. This time I went directly to the Betty Woodman exhibit. She had spoken at the Art College graduation ceremony and I was eager to see what she had created instead of making beds and washing dishes. It was impressive. Large decoratively painted vessels, grouped together to form conversations. The wall pieces did not appeal to me as much. I overheard people talking about the interesting glazes she used but I know nothing about ceramics, so that was over my head. I personally prefer less decoration. The shapes themselves were enough for me.

From there I went to the modern art section. It was a feast of interesting paintings: some Guston, Stella, Kline, Klee, Twombly, de Kooning, Rothko. It made me feel good to be painting, to be part of that history of expression. Tamar and I had gone together to the Hirshorn Museum in Washington on Sunday (while Dan and Damian went to the Air and Science Museum). We stopped at each piece of art and told each other how we felt about it. Mostly we agreed, which was interesting to me. The ones we didn’t feel the same about were the more refined, meditative pieces of Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly. I always wonder if my education, coming to these paintings with a sense of history, affects the way I see them or is it just a difference in perspective. I feel the same way about Ellsworth Kelly. I love his work, but I know that if I were to see some of it (like the plain color panels) today without having seen what preceded them (or having seen them together in large installations) I’m not sure how I would feel. Sometimes, it seems, the history comes along with the artwork. I would hope that a painting could stand on its own, like a Rembrandt or Vermeer, forever. But in those paintings, there is a familiar subject matter that acts as a reference to daily reality. To take that leap into the visual unknown of abstract art, let go of logical reference, step off that cliff of the known into a ocean of feeling response . . .