I wanna be a Warhol...

"We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity." - Desmond Tutu

Cliff walk at the Pourville

Claude Monet

I often look at people and see an animal that they remind me of. It’s not always physical features, but also their personality and mannerisms. While discussing this older gentlemen in our office my co-worker made a comment about how if he were a painting he would be a painting of an office with browns and blacks. Leather-worn furniture, with a single cigarette burning in an ashtray. The line of smoke making its way up the middle of the painting with a single malt on the rocks glass on the table next it. 

It got me thinking that what if we looked at everyone as if they were paintings or art? What would we see? What kind of painting would we assign to ourselves? Would be something in nature? Or a figure in a room? As I look at others and then to myself I find it hard to nail down one specific painting that really symbolizes who I am.

Often I am chaotic and everywhere, like a Jackson Pollack painting. On rare occasions I am a Degas Ballerina, elegant and poised. Sometimes, I am Edvard Munch’s The Scream, everywhere all at once, but connected and balanced while feeling pulled in every direction.

Three Musicians

Pablo Picasso

In the end I think the painting that would best describe me is a Monet. Specifically, Cliff Walk at Pourville.  The reason I chose this specific painting can be summarized by a quote from Clueless, “From far away, it's OK, but up close, it's a big old mess.” From a distance I seem held together and whole. But as you get closer you see fragments of “paint” that make up the pieces of me and without the far away perspective, the painting almost seems unrecognizable. However, in this specific painting it shows two people on a cliff, looking off into the horizon. I like to think that it symbolizes peace and tranquility in my own desire to look towards the future and look ahead of me.

My challenge and question to all of you is to think of yourself and think about the type of painting you would be. Would you be dark and twisty? Calm and collected? A single item surrounded by vastness of color? Maybe you’re Michelangelo’s Angels. The possibilities are endless and all depend on perspective. I’m also going to challenge myself to look at people as though they were a painting and try to figure out what type of image they conjure up. 

Because the truth is we're all works of art, some of us are just easier to perceive. 

"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance." - Aristotle