30 Days of Blogging, Day 9: A Piece of Art or Sculpture That You Really Like

I'm going to cheat on this one and talk about both a piece of art and a piece of sculpture because I can't choose between the two.  Not that I'm saying sculpture isn't art.  I didn't write the prompt, people, I'm just responding to it.

This is the "Bird Girl" statue created by Sylvia Shaw Judson, a member of the Shaw family that owned what is now the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois.  I've done two writing residencies at Ragdale, and both times I was overwhelmed by the spirit of creativity that just sort of oozes out of the walls in that place.  This statue, the last time I was there, sat in front of the newly renovated Barn House.  In the photo at left, "Bird Girl" is situated somewhere in Savannah, Georgia--she rose to fame on the cover of John Berendt's Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil.  I couldn't find a photo of her at Ragdale that showed this level of detail, though.  "Bird Girl" is typical of all Sylvia's sculptures, many of which are on the Ragdale grounds--they're very simple and incredibly beautiful.  You can see more of Ragdale (and Sylvia's sculptures) in this blog post.

You've probably seen this painting before.  It's Un Dimanche Après-Midi à lÎle de la Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, on display at the Chicago Art Institute.   My husband and I went to Chicago to visit a friend not long after we were married, and that was the first time I saw this paiting in person.  It's enormous.  I didn't grow up going to museums, so I hadn't seen a lot of art--and honestly, it had never occurred to me that paintings came in different sizes.  I figured they were all just, you know, painting-size.  I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. 

Then, right after I finished my MFA, my husband and I went to Paris to visit our friend Michael.  He was in the Foreign Service and living in Paris at the time, so we had a free place to hang out while we explored Europe with the assistance of our much-more-worldly friend. We saw an exhibit of Seurat paintings while we were there, including the studies he did while composing La Grande Jatte (though not the painting itself--the CAI doesn't loan it out anymore, apparently, after it was almost destroyed by a fire at another museum.)  There were sketches of all the characters in this painting in different poses, and that's when it occurred to me that artists didn't just start at one end of the canvas and paint their way across, or start in the middle and head for the edges.  Again, I know that sounds crazy, but it's true.  We bought a poster of this painting at the end of our museum visit.  It's framed now, hanging in my living room, and it's the only souvenir we brought back from that trip to Paris.  (We were young and broke.  The poster was cheap.  The framing, done years later, was not.)

Later during that trip, we happened across the Seurat family tomb in the Pere Lachaise cemetary--completely by accident, but it seemed kind of fitting, after seeing the exhibit.  I stuck some flowers through the grate on the front of the tomb, and I still remember that as one of the most important things I did while I was in Paris.