Thrive!

I love art. One of my earliest memories in school is of making copies of the great masters. As an adult, I like to read a favorite artist’s biography and watch an art history documentary.

Whenever we travel we visit art museums. My favorite is the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The building itself is art. My favorite artists are chronicled below, polished into pithy observations. Check them out. Look them up. Who is your favorite artist?

Rembrandt and Vermeer invented light; Monet and Seurat reinvented it.

Chagall painted magic animals; then he taught love how to levitate.

Artemisia Gentileschi gave women back their bodies.

Michelangelo turned a ceiling into the Bible.

We love Frida Kahlo; she painted our pain.

Renoir made paint party.

Charles Burchfield painted a cathedral using a forest.

Rembrandt van Rijn out-detailed reality.

Emily Carr turned trees into saints.

Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, Warhol and Pollock threw a geometricized, essentialized and energized reality in our faces; that somewhat frightened us.

Mary Cassatt sat down in a crowd of men and turned mothers and children into paint.

Giotto brought the icons to tears.

Kandinsky payed the piano with paint.

Monet gave the haystacks dignity.

Van Gogh — if only he could have known how much we would love him.

Jacob Lawrence painted a migration so he could teach us to see a people.

Modern art is life — with the arms knocked off.