Backdrop by Hockney

My generous friends Sarah and Shirlee gave me a gift membership to the Portland Art Museum for my birthday in July, and Sue and I have been wanting to go there ever since but could not find a day when it was open and we were both free for a few hours, till today. The current traveling exhibit is magnificent. It features thirty-nine masterpieces collected by a Microsoft billionaire, including paintings of Venice by Turner, Monet, Canaletti, and Moran, and several artists' impressions of the Grand Canyon, incuding David Hockney’s (seen here, behind one of the museum directors who was giving some matrons a personal tour). There was a Klimt, a Georgia O’Keeffe, some Hoppers. Oh, it was grand. I want to go back.

It was a splendid day altogether, because my turn finally arrived to borrow from the library Hold Still, a rowdy, hilarious, brilliantly written memoir by the photographer Sally Mann. She became a controversial figure when she published a book of photos of her children, including nudes that some found troubling. She writes in gothic detail of her life and work. Expect quotes for the next few days.

Here are a couple I have copied out already:

I get a little panicked when I have before me what the comic-strip character Pogo once referred to as “insurmountable opportunities.” It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles. --From Hold Still, by Sally Mann (Little, Brown, and Co., 2015), p. xii.

She comes from the Appalachian south, as do I, and her sensual descriptions of those landscapes and that light make me homesick, at the same time her family tales evoke my crazy family and its dysfunction, and her description of “the white problem that everyone called the Black problem” is astute and accurate. Describing herself at 17, she writes: 

I had found the twin artistic passions [writing and photography] that were to consume my life. And, in characteristic fashion, I threw myself into them with a fervor that, from this remove, seems almost comical. I existed in a welter of creativity--sleepless, anxious, self-doubting, pressing for both perfection and impiety, like some ungodly cross between a hummingbird and a bulldozer (p. 37).

A hummingbird and a bulldozer. That might be me.

(The extra is an amazing piece of Japanese ceramic sculpture by Fujikasa Satoko, beautifully lit.)

P.S. My camera did not begin to do justice to the saturation of color in the Hockney. It's eye-popping. Much more than here.