When you can’t find the beautiful, try looking in the precarious
During the Georgetown Spring Art Walk, I went into L’Enfant Gallery, filled with antiques, collectibles, maybe some antiquities even. The type of place with minor works by historical figures I’ve heard of and major works by people I haven’t. Portraits of presidents and indigenous leaders, cubist nudes, expressionist nudes, Enlightenment nobility in finery, or on horseback, or both. Meticulously detailed ceramics from Asia, tableware, silver, and fragments of wooden altarpieces from Europe, cabinetry and western landscapes from America. I fell into a reflexive pattern of assessing craft, second guessing the way a particular hand was rendered, questioning a color choice, noting and comparing prices.
I recognized that I had slipped into this passive commoditized way of looking and refocused to engage my empathy and imagine how the maker of a given piece might have been feeling or thinking as they went about their work. (I feel like I can sometimes tell whether a painter of a commissioned portrait liked and respected their subject or not, but I could just be fooling myself. Fun game to play though.)
I was looking at a small dark painting in an ornate gilded frame, umber peasants at a table in candlelight, when I felt a sort of vertigo. I was struck by the finiteness of this little thing, of each of these fragile, expensive things stacked about, taking up space. This dim, brown, outmoded image, obscured by the shine of its own varnish, is in the world as merely the thing it is, inanimate, stripped of context, fortunate to have passively survived fires, mildew, divorces, migrations, inheritances, Nazis, neglect, whatever, all after the death of its maker, about whom it tells me next to nothing. And yet, there is this moment, real or imagined or both, with its particular light and atmosphere, something that someone felt the need to preserve, a little flame cupped against the wind for generations, still here when all the people born after its depicted world was long gone are also all dead, and I can yet light my own candle from it.