Painting the True Picture

While in Seattle, earlier this month, my wife and I visited the new Seattle Art Museum (affectionately dubbed by the locals, SAM).

The new SAM downtown occupies the first fifteen floors of a new high-rise office building. Traditionally, art museums have been set in retreat like park settings—surrounded by trees, fountains, manicured lawns, and the like. Not the new SAM. It’s all about urban downtown, sidewalks, glass and steel, vertical rise.

That makes the museum experience a bit different. The collection is displayed against a backdrop of floor-to-ceiling windows, high above the traffic and pedestrians below. The floors are polished hardwood, everywhere—and the whole design is minimalist— you know, in the Danish-modern kind of way. Clean lines. Egg-shell palate. Less-is-more. Etc.

It works, though. The art stands out, dramatically, thoughtfully. I was especially impressed by the way the art is accessible; you can get up close and personal—and the explanatory information throughout makes everything understandable, even for art-appreciation duds like me.

One of the most remarkable oil paintings on display is Albert Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast. This is a large canvas (about seven feet across and almost five feet high), commissioned in 1870. It represents a beach scene, shadowed by mountains and a threatening sky, with violent surf pounding at the feet of boats and men dwarfed by everything else. The colors are both bold and dark, the images vivid and felt. It really is masterfully done. You can feel the wind blow and hear the surf crash as you stand there staring, agog.

Bierstadt was one of a class of late 19th-century New York City painters called “the Hudson River School.” These artists were conservative in their approach—nothing avant garde about them. They were also globe-trotters, exploring the planet and recreating landscape images in paint—snapshots, if you will, in an age when photography was mostly limited to portraiture.

What’s interesting about Bierstadt’s Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, though, is that he captured an image he had never seen. Although he traveled adventurously throughout the American West, he had not visited the then Washington Territory. His Puget Sound painting was, simply, the figment of his imagination, a speculative stab at what he thought (based on other people’s tales and what he had read) it would look like. His beach scene was not a real place, at all. And, to be honest, it really doesn’t look much like Puget Sound (even though the painting looks very cool).

Hmmm. I’ve painted a few pictures like that in life, myself. I heard somebody describe someone or something this way or that. I imagined that “it” or “they” really looked like so-and-so or such-and-such. I created my own image of reality and believed it, too. And, because I was a good “painter,” I was believed—when, in fact, I had no first-hand knowledge of what I was depicting in the first place.

“George” really wasn’t such a bad guy, after all, when I met him. When I actually sat down and talked with him, he was nothing like the previous image I had imagined of him. And “Sally?” I had always heard she was like this, when really after meeting her, she’s nothing like that.

And the church down the street? I thought they always … when, actually, they never. And those people from that other country? Well, yes, I did know about their cuisine, but as a culture, there’s so much more. How could I have ever believed I could paint a picture of them without actually visiting with them?

And so it goes. So much of what we imagine is fanciful. There’s no substitute for first-hand experience. Be careful that you are not prejudiced (to be prejudiced is to pre-judge). Don’t just paint crashing waves because you think that’s what the surf is like on Puget Sound. There are mountains (like in North Carolina) and there are mountains (like in the Pacific Northwest). They really don’t look the same.

And Madison Park? Just because it’s big doesn’t mean it isn’t friendly. There’s no substitute for actually being there. In fact, just last Sunday, a young woman told us that she had visited at Scatterfield a couple of years ago and has been wandering from church to church since. She walked into Madison Park and felt immediately “at home.” “I was surprised,” she said, “because it’s so big. But, it’s so much more friendly than where you were before. How do I get involved and belong?”

Bierstadt was a great artist. Too bad he didn’t know what he was painting.

I want to be careful with that, too.

I love you, Madison Park. See you this Sunday, as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds opens our eyes to Colossians, chapter 2. Sgt. Pepper’s continues August 19. Share your thoughts on Jim’s