An Introduction to "Images"

I got interested in the fine arts in my late twenties, around the time I got interested in poetry. Partly this was because I moved to an apartment near the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.¹ If the normal museum experience is something like I’ll only ever visit the Louvre once in my life: I’d better overdose on ten hours of art appreciation, my VMFA experience was more like I think I’ll walk down the street and look at a few paintings for an hour: I can always come back tomorrow. It really is a wonderful way to experience a museum.

Ever since then I’ve been collected images of paintings, prints, sculptures, furniture, buildings—whatever—on my computer. I’m aware I don’t need to download and label them myself: the Google Art Project does that now. I’m also aware an image on a computer screen is a mere shadow of the real thing: Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Sky Above Clouds IV” is eight feet tall and twenty-four feet wide, and this doesn’t do it justice:

Georgia O'Keeffe - 1965 - Sky Above Clouds IV

But downloading, labeling, and organizing the images makes me feel a bit like they’re mine, and looking at them on a computer primes me for seeing them in real life. To the latter point: I’ve been looking at Georgia O’Keeffe’s New York paintings² on my computer for more than a decade, and when I finally got to see them in a museum it was like meeting an internet friend in real life for the first time; the experience was richer because of how much time I’d spent with them beforehand, even if the time beforehand was in a diminished context.

All of this is to say I’ve become quite fond of using the paintings³ I love when posting to Substack. Some of the connections are obvious (“Suicide” uses the Manet painting “The Suicide”) while others are more oblique (“The Paperback” uses the Félix González-Torres art installation “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)) None of this will make any sense if you only read the poems via email; at any rate, if you want the uncropped images with the artists, years, and titles, they’ll be posted here.

Which reminds me! Here’s the image for my publication logo / welcome screen:

Harold E. Edgerton - 1964 - .30 Bullet Piercing An Apple

And here’s the image for my avatar:

Félix Edouard Vallotton - 1898 - The Irreparable, Plate Ten from "Intimacies"

1. A wonderful museum that punches way above its weight.

2. Did you know the master of giant, abstract flowers and sun-baked deserts had a “New York” period?!

3. Et al.