The Pink Shoe Diaries

I was looking around online the other day for some artwork for our bedroom (in spite of my best efforts, we have sort of a seaside theme going on in there). I am very picky about what goes up on our walls, especially the bedroom since I will be looking at whatever it is every night. So as I was perusing print, after print I sort of veered away from our theme and just started looking at what I liked.

I have favorite paintings in the same way that I have favorite songs, and favorite foods, and favorite places. Maybe it's the colors, or the scene, or maybe a memory I associate with that work of art. There are some paintings that just do it for me.

Growing up, I had two canvas transfers hanging in my room:

Van Gogh's Sunflowers



which I still have hanging in my living room, and Monet's The Artist's Garden



I have since lost that particular one, but I vividly remember being six years old and staring up at that painting, imagining I was that little girl in that jungle of sunflowers in Vetheuil.

Since then, I have always loved Monet. In high school I wrote a paper on him and was then inspired to buy a number of Monet art books, cut out all the paintings and made a ceiling to floor collage of them on one of my bedroom walls (my parents were PSYCHED). I felt like I had lived a dream when I went to Paris and spent a good hour in the Monet room at the Musee De L'Orangerie where giant Monet paintings cover the entire circular room and you can sit on a bench in the middle and feel like you are in that pond at Giverny, surrounded by waterlillies


(picture credit: Vantan on Flickr)

After high school, I remained pretty much stuck on the impressionists, and in my ignorance of anything else, scoffed at everything deemed "modern art" (my only experience with modern art was whatever was in the modern art section of the MFA). A few years later, when I visited my friend Kristen in London, she wanted to bring me to the Tate Modern and inwardly I was thought it wouldn't be my kind of thing, but of course I was wrong. It turned out to be one of my favorite museums ever! Jasper Johns, especially really made me see there is so much more out there that I could get into if I let myself be open to it. Life is too short to say "I only like this kind of thing" whether it's about art or music or anything in life. You never know what might inspire you.



Which brings me one of my current favorite paintings, by Barnet Rubenstein who used to teach at the MFA School



Although it is entirely too pink for Adam to agree to let me hang it in our apartment, a small print of it is hanging in my cubicle and it brightens my day a little every time I look at it.

So now that I have nerded on about my favorite paintings (and I could go on all day), let's hear yours!