Day 338

My favourite room at the new wing of the Museum of Fine Art.

My black dog and I ran 5.04 km (well, she didn't really run that far, did lots of shortcuts because she had already had an earlier run with Tim).  It was late afternoon, with grey blue-shadowy clouds and the birches shining silver in the gloaming.

An easy run again, at 7.08 minutes per km, lovely cold air pressing against my face and arms, big wide sky and in the west the sun descending, (ixesha abantu bahle) touching the tips of the bare trees of the meadow for a brief moment, a warm soft light, a last goodnight kiss for the earth.  And as we finished our run, the sun dipping down, down below the tree-lined horizon (funny how some words can't do things other words can, like storm and tree, you can say a stormy horizon, but not a treey horizon), the air colder and colder, my breath misty, my cheeks pink, I fell in love with the natural world for the umpteenth time, with the beautiful act of running, with the fact of my good strong hard-working body.

Ellen Day Hale - Self-portrait

At the MFA I realise that I am strongly drawn to portraits, to the human figure, to realism.  I breeze through the abstract galleries, I am disappointed with Georgia O'Keefe's paintings, which are small and flat, nothing like I imagined from the beautiful reproductions in books.  But oh, the portraits of John Singer Sargent, of Whistler, of Andrew Wyeth, of Ellen Day Hale, of Larry Rivers, are so beautiful, I stand rapt before them.  As Scott Prior, author of one of the paintings I love (the one to the left of the sculpture in the first photograph), says in his artist's statement, "I get a lot of satisfaction out of creating an illusion of reality, turning something that was once white canvas into an illusion of trees or a chair or a person.  Up close you know it's a painting, but from a distance there is an effect of reality."  Ellen Day Hale looks so bolshie, doesn't she?  Wonderful!

Me and my creations.

A whole day of art, in fact, because this evening we attend a function at G-studios in Dorchester, where the owner does event shows for local artists, so tonight was for Imprevue, a magazine begun by a poet-teacher inviting a collective of artists and poets affiliated with Ecole Internationale.  There was a poetry reading and some of us had our paintings and creations on the walls, lovely and warm and good music and many languages being spoken!