By Scott Shephard
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte - Georges Seurat
This story took 55 years to develop and it probably isn’t all that interesting but I’ll tell it anyway. I’ll try to make a long story short.
At age 13 I read a book about Michelangelo. He was a genius. I thought maybe I was a genius, too. I took painting lessons. No, I’m not a genius. (I gave up painting at age 13 1/2)
But nevertheless I fell in love with other peoples’ paintings and wore out the “Painting” section of the “P” volume of the World Book Encyclopedia looking at the pictures. I also read about other artists, including Seurat, who experimented with points of colors.
By the time I was 40 I had seen pictures of the painting featured today (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte) hundreds, maybe thousands, of times.
On a free afternoon at a social studies convention in the 1990s, I visited the Art Institute of Chicago. I had no clue what I would see but I saw many wonderful things. When I turned a corner, there it was: Seurat’s masterpiece. It wasn’t 4” x 3” as I had seen it in the World Book. It was huge! And it was so much more colorful than in print.
In my memory of that day the gallery grew quiet, the other people vanished, and tears came as I met a very old friend face to face.
So it’s 2023 and, as I’ve said, I’m enjoying a reunion with some of my acquaintances from so long ago. Do I cry when we meet? I’m sorry to admit it but - no. Am I jaded at age 70? I’d like to think that I’m not. Maybe I’m saving my tears for less frivolous things than a painting on a wall?
As if I could control that . . . .
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