Soul dusting

How much wine did the famous Spanish painter Pablo Picasso have to drink to paint the self-portrait of a somber, intense young man of 19 with a head supported by a tree-trunk neck in 1900, or 32 years later “Girl before a Mirror,” with her breasts floating off a disproportionate trunk but appearing in different locations in the mirror? Or in 1955, when he was 74 years old and the grotesque hemorrhaging of human blood and spirit called World War II was only ten years gone — how much wine to sketch in a few stark lines the mounted scrawl of an emaciated man, “Don Quixote,” and his famous sidekick, Sancho Panza, beneath a sun even I could have drawn, and did in every piece of art I made from the age of 5 on — an imperfect little circle with a few lines sticking off it to indicate light?

But I couldn’t have drawn that sun, one that in those few sketched lines describes our dilemma and this great truth about the world: the sun provides light and warmth for all of life, and yet only just enough to create insanity, to create the tilters at windmills who might be our saving grace.

Owl, Caterpillar and Bee by Andi Rosenbaum- McCarter. COURTESY PHOTO

Picasso lived until he was 93, and I could have carried on with that single first sentence and its initial question — how much wine? — for 900 words, setting a new world record for sentence length in newspaper commentary. I could have described the painter’s blue period, his rose period, his various cubisms, his neoclassical and surrealist periods.

The answer to the question, “How much wine?” is this: The question is irrelevant. He drank a lot. He also said, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

If you get up every day and go off to dusty, soul-numbing, muscle-aching jobs for half a century, washing the dust of everyday life away from the soul might seem, at first glance, hard to do.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Art, not just painting and sculpture but music and dance, the dramatic arts of stage and screen, photography and writing are for everyone because everyone has a sight impairment, just as glasses or contacts are for everyone with a sight impairment.

Roger Williams

All of us are artists, too, even though most people shake their heads if they hear that. “To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it,” commanded the writer Kurt Vonnegut.

Do it if you’re not literally doing it by going first to the extraordinary art museums that pock the southern half of the peninsula: The Baker Museum at Artis-Naples, or the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, or the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach.

At the Norton, for example, you can find extensive collections of American and European art — works by Paul Gauguin, John Singer Sargent and Picasso — and a Chinese collection that covers 5,000 years of history. The museum also includes photography and contemporary art collections and even offers Learning & Community Engagement programming for visitors from all walks of life. Take advantage of those, and you may not have to travel to Europe or Asia, for example, to understand a great deal about cultures and artists there, or yourself, for that matter.

You’ve tilted at a windmill or two in your time, haven’t you? Art is vision, travel, and sustenance, so it’s worth a drive from anywhere. Tilt at it.

And what if art frustrates you because you think you don’t understand what you’re seeing? What if you look at the “Mona Lisa,” say, by Leonardo Da Vinci, and you don’t think you know enough about the artist to understand the Mona Lisa’s secretive hint of a smile, or who she was?

Another wonderful artist, Andi Rosenbaum McCarter, formerly of Sanibel and now living and working in Asheville, N.C., addresses that dilemma from an artist’s perspective.

“My personal narrative is crucial when I commit to creating a ceramic sculpture or watercolor painting. However, the viewer may have no idea what my story is or why I was so compelled. That is how everyone participates in art. Artists need art appreciation and art appreciators to keep it going. But not always. That’s why an artist’s narrative has to come first. To explain who Mona Lisa was or why she was painted became irrelevant over time because the beauty of the work touches people in their own way.”

But if that doesn’t do it for you, just look at art through the dollar signs, courtesy of the Florida Department of State’s Division of Arts and Culture, in 2022.

“Florida’s arts and cultural industry generated $5.8 billion of economic activity, including $2.9 billion by nonprofit arts and culture organizations (last year). This economic activity supports 91,270 fulltime jobs and generates $3.8 billion in resident household income.”

So don’t waste any more time. Support an artist or two or 10. Draw something. Get thee to a theater, exhibit or museum. Do some soul dusting. ¦

The post Soul dusting first appeared on Fort Myers Florida Weekly .