I remember going on a field trip when I was in high school to the Dayton Art Institute. The first large art museum I had ever been to. We toured all the collections and I remember being overwhelmed by years of paintings and painters. Having minimal art history at that point it was a visual blur of ideas, genres and styles. I enjoyed the experience but didn’t have the skills to sort it all out. Then towards the end we went into the gallery with the more contemporary paintings, Abstraction and Pop Art mostly. Hanging off to one side was a painting that caught my eye, Fairfield Porter’s “Self Portrait”. It was a painting of the artist standing in his studio surrounded by everyday stuff. He wore a blue shirt and tie, Khaki pants and brown shoes. There was a chair, a table, a stove, a paint rag and jar of liquid. Behind him you could see a sunlit landscape outside a huge window. Here was a plain spoken, everyday scene that I recognized. It felt familiar and recognizable and regular, just like me. For the first time I thought maybe art wasn’t just a skill but something that revealed something more about life. The field trip ended and I left not yet realizing that that Porter painting that would stick with me always.
Later on I read a quote by Porter about a painter he admired, Vuillard.
“What he seemed to be doing was ordinary but the extraordinary is everywhere.”
Both artist painted what was around them, their homes and the landscape. But by their looking at what was around them and then trying to paint what they saw they created paintings that weren’t ordinary but paintings elevated in importance because they took the time to see something there and then try to paint it. What I realized that day standing in front of that Porter was that art wasn’t just about finished paintings but about the painters’ unique experience of what he sees and the dialogue that comes through his eyes and hands to create that experience. Since then I have tried to learn simply how to paint but mostly I have tried to learn how to capture what I see. It can be brutal and hopeless at times and the goal is always out of sight but when I can take an ordinary scene and make it convey in some way what I was looking at, well then that is extraordinary. At least enough to keep me searching for it.
