Color My World

I have the best friends in the world. Not only are they putting up with me and this recovery, they are contributing to my attempts to alleviate my boredom. As one example, my sister-in-law Amy decided that simply calling this blog The Coloring Book wasn't good enough. She actually went out and got me a coloring book. Two of them in fact:

I looked them up on Amazon. Do you know you can get a used copy of each for one cent? Wouldn't a used copy of a coloring book be self defeating?

So not having had kids who would use crayons in the house for at least a couple of years, I was faced with the quandary what to do with the coloring books. Ah, my ever resourceful wife came to the rescue. She got me the big box of Crayola, the one with 64 crayons and the sharpener in the back. Problem was the purchase of same brought up issues from her childhood. I just want to go on record here that you only got the box of 16 and not the big box because your mother was, well, cheap. You weren't poor, she could have afforded it, but we all know that Jack Benny spent like a sailor on shore leave compared to your mom.

The modern art coloring book contains several of my favorite pieces, but my absolute favorite is this one:

This is Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Mondrian, to me the culmination of modern art's attempts to capture motion and vibrancy on canvas. Each square, each color, is placed in perfect symmetry to convey the notion of throbbing, pulsating movement. You might think it would be easy to recreate this, after all it's just squares of primary colors, but have one square out of place, one yellow instead of red, and the entire painting would fall apart. It took Mondrian over a year to complete it. I would not blaspheme by even attempting to copy it.  

Art is such a personal experience to me. In the summer between graduating high school and going off to college I spent two weeks in New York seeing Broadway shows, visiting relatives, and wandering the galleries. One day while in the Museum of Modern Art I turned the corner and there in front of me was Picasso's Guernica. I was well versed in the history of the painting, it's depiction of the chaos and horror of war and Picasso's demand that it not be allowed back into Spain till Franco was ousted. And here it was in front of me, stretching across two walls, the silent scream of the woman with the lamp, the bull's head, the bodies strewn across the bottom, the horse's head. I felt dwarfed by it, as I think anyone would feel when seeing it. But to just come across it, to stumble upon it, literally my breath was taken away. Here was the worst of humankind and at the same time the best of humankind. It makes you examine not only your feelings about the immediate subject, but just what it means to be human. That's what the best art shows us. And that's why it needs to be taught in our schools, why it's not a "frivolous extravagance", why we need to make it available to all and not to just a fortunate few. It's as important to know Guernica and Broadway Boogie Woogie and Girl With The Pearl Earring and all the masterpieces as it is to know multiplication tables or how a bill becomes law.