I visited the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery in D.C. earlier this week. Have you ever had the experience of coming across a work of art in a museum or gallery, maybe by somebody famous or maybe by someone you've never heard of, being incredibly moved by it, thinking how wonderful it would be to have it in your home, and then, in the next moment, thinking "heck, I could do that...I'll just do it myself and then I'll have it!"? I had that experience with this piece by Linn Meyers called "at the time being". It is a work painted directly on the museum walls---really, it is only squiggly lines....
But then you look closer....the lines are complicated, beautiful, a subtle blend of white and yellow. You soon realize you are in the presence of something singular. A museum essay describes this piece which is inspired by a Vincent Van Gogh painting in the museum's collection:
"Linn Meyers spent two weeks working steadily on this project. She started by painting the walls a dark blue that evokes Van Gogh's Starry Night. Then she laid out the circular shapes around intersecting horizontal and vertical lines that generate the overall composition, or what she calls, the matrix. Thin lines followed, twisting and turning, connecting and disconnecting, looping around it and filling in the central blanks, resulting in a dazzling field of optical sensations."
"Meyer's circular forms are completely off-center. Like lovers, they embrace and drift apart. At once intense and loose, systematic and improvisational, controlled and impulsive, Meyer's drawing sucks us in, simultaneously inducing vertigo and offering solace."
mmmmm....you can see more of Meyer's work here.
Strangely, just to the right of this wall was another painting I had that "i-could-do-this" feeling: Paul Klee's Arab Song (1932). It is a painting in oil on rough burlap. So muted, primitive, quirky and peaceful.....
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