The patterned crosswalk that leads to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston
To me, there is little that compares to the experience of happily losing all track of time taking in artworks at a museum. And I find it fascinating that it’s a public venue in which people can respectably linger around in their own unconscious worlds, together with other people. I wrote about this a bit last year in My Dreamy Museum Day Abroad.
Visiting an art museum solo is also one of my favorite pleasures, so the Huff Post’s recent arts & culture piece, Six Reasons to Go to a Museum Alone, struck a chord with me.
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A few weeks ago I wrote that I was about to try my hand at potato carving and stamping. Right after saying that, I heard from one of my oldest and dearest friends. She had a heart attack a few days earlier. She was fine, actually, and in her usual good humor. A relief to be sure, but it made me contemplate how much I love my friend, and how grateful I am to still know her. So I suppose it’s no shock that my first instinct when I sat down to carve was to make a heart.
I carved some other shapes in potatoes that day too, resulting in a desktop full of stamped patterns and designs. Like all such images I create, they’ll get photographed and filed away to be resurrected for a future illustration or artwork.
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I really like this brief but mesmerizing video showing someone carving a Taiwanese postage stamp design with a super pointy exacto blade.
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This was a special week in that I was a Featured Artist on Artsy Shark. I chose to show and talk about my images of Boston city scenes and street life. These works are some of my favorites, partly because they express my emotional ties to this city.
Curiously enough, I don’t think I really knew how deep my feelings for this city went until the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. It was the first Boston Marathon I hadn’t gone to since moving here 20 years prior. I was boarding a plane home that day when I got a call with news of the bombs having just gone off near the finish line.
On the flight home, I was overcome by the intense feeling of Boston as my home. This crazy, frightening thing was going on right at that moment in MY HOME. I spent that flight thinking of all the people I had come to know and love in this place I called home. I have always loved making that descent toward Boston Logan Airport, seeing the city below while flying super low over the ocean. It always seems as though the plane will touch water just before it hits the runway. Approaching the landing on that day, I had never loved seeing Boston more.
In the weeks to come, I read many stories written by people who had at some point come from other places to live in Boston. Many had not intended to stay. The unifying thread of all these stories, just like with mine, was how, inexplicably, it grows on you. Often invisibly, until something reflects it back to you.
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This weekend looks to be a busy one, and come Monday I’ll be hunkering down to pull all my tax records together. There’ll be lots of coffee.
Have a great weekend.
Paula
News from my studio 