This Sunday, I went to the Palace of Legion of Honor with my friend Tony. It's an odd name for an art museum, but it has one of the most spectacular settings of any art museum I know, near the cliffs tumbling down to the open sea a couple of miles West of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a gorgeous blue-skied day, but a cold wind was in the air, breaking the waves in the Bay into white caps. It felt good to be in the warmth of the Museum.

View of the Bay from the Museum grounds

We were here to see the Georgia O'Keefe exhibit, "The Poetry of Things", which has been running for a couple of months now. She's not an artist I know a lot about. Like many, I suppose I've always looked a little down my nose at her, because you see her imagery in cheap poster stores, and her style has become so familiar that it can come off as "craft" rather than art.

Which I guess is one of the reasons behind the show - to remind people that when O'Keefe first produced these works, they were revolutionary. They confronted the senses so viscerally, that, of course, they became wildly popular in prints and posters, and hence, over-exposed (like Elian Gonzales ... okay, I promise I won't mention him :) But if you see one of her originals, up close, you can be transfixed by it's beauty - a wealth of color saturating the frame. The canvas, in fact, isn't big enough to contain it.

Morning Glory with Black, Georgia O'Keefe, 1926

Her placement of objects on the canvas made me think about what art is, and what art isn't. I don't pretend to be an expert, by any means at all. In fact, I know comparitively little about fine art painting. I remember going to one of my first every gallery shows when I was a grad student at Penn to see the work of a good friend of mine, Dennis. I had the nerve to say "Is that art?" But that was just the beginning of my education!

At any rate, this O'keefe show certainly made me think. I thought about my collection of stones and rocks back home. The way I've arranged them on my bookshelf - does that constitute art? Probably not. It may look pleasing to the eye, but the objects only have meaning to me, and the arrangement was done with very little conscious artistry. In fact, I think I'm lacking a good sense of visual artistry - that's why the design of my page is so simple - I don't have a good sense for placement of objects, choice of colors and shapes and so forth.

Stones and rocks on my bookshelf. They all have meaning to me. The first I picked up in Sedona, near Phoenix, when I was on a long, very romantic weekend with someone I was crazy about at the time. The second two are paving stones I hurriedly extracted from the promenade along Copacobana and Ipanema beaches (sorry Brazil!) in Rio de Janeiro when I was on the holiday of a lifetime a few years ago. The next stone I picked up on a beach in Connecticut on my trip last year. There are two stones and a third near the end, all from Fire Island, when I went there with a good friend during a rare warm day in late Fall a few years ago. The big lump of onyx I've had for almost thirty years - I bought it at a store in the English Lake District when I was there on a family holiday.

I've always wished, though, that I could create art. In fact, I've tried my hand at most art forms - everything from playing piano and trombone, to modern dance and acting. Yet I've either not had the patience or self-confidence to follow through, or I've truly bombed - I was a lousy modern dancer! I have the strong feeling, though, that one of these days, I'll try just about the only major art form I haven't attempted, and I'll try to learn to paint. Perhaps when I've retired, and I have lots of time (if I can think that far ahead!).

In the meantime, I've been lucky enough to find a means of expression which fulfils some of my need to express myself. I'm talking about the web site, of course. I'm not pretending that much on my site is art - I'd be a fool to make that claim. But I do get to be creative, and I do have an audience - and those two are two of the prime ingredients at least.

In fact, many real artists labor all their lives and never have an audience - my friend Dennis, the artist friend from Penn I mentioned earlier, comes to mind. When I first got to know Dennis, I was really completely raw and uneducated about modern art. I had no vocabularly for describing it, and no context in which to make my own judgements about what I liked and didn't like. Yet, despite being in an engineering field at that time (Energy Management & Policy), I was lucky enough to fall in mostly with artists as friends, whether they were painters like Dennis, or composers like my roommate Ricardo, a true renaissance guy from Guadalajara.

With Ricardo, our apartment on Walnut Street was always full of student artists, all passing their opinions constantly and raucously on every aspect of life around us - whether it was something as common place as "M*A*S*H*" on the television, or something as esoteric as the new show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I went with my friends like Ricardo and Dennis to shows at the Museum, and at galleries, and learned to identify artists that I liked. After a while, I grew to like my friend Dennis' work so much, that I even bought a painting from him! It still dominates the walls of my apartment. But I was saying how some artists never find an audience - Dennis is one of those. Fine artist that he is, he's sold relatively few paintings in the ten years since I bought mine.

The first original artwork I bought - painted by my friend Dennis. It has meaning to me because I understand what it's representing - it's Dennis and his two brothers playing "I'm the King of the Castle", and my fondness for Dennis is echoed by my fondness for the painting.

Yet I didn't buy any more art for several years. I was really too poor. I can't imagine how I afforded the $400 I paid Dennis for his painting back then, on my salary as a research associate at the Wharton School of Business. After I moved to San Francisco, however, I was finally earning a decent wage. My office was in Berkeley, and student artists often exhibited their works in local cafes. One day, I was struck by the color in a work on the wall of the cafe across the street from my office, and, on a whim, decided to contact the artist and buy it. She mustn't have been used to such offers, since she let me have it for the scandalous fee of $200. And I've always loved this piece. I can't say all my friends love it the same way, though - I think they think it's a bit weird, for some reason.

My second purchase - "Spider Boy"

For a while, I was on a bit of a roll. I spotted another piece I liked in another cafe, and bought that too.

Third piece - untitled.

With the purchase of one more work, my buying dried up. This last piece was a limited print from a photograph by an artists' cooperative named "Olivus".

My last purchase

I'm not really sure why I've bought no new pieces in the last few years. I've been tempted now and then, yet I haven't been willing, for some reason, to spend money that way. It's true that I'm running out of wall space, particularly in my new apartment. But I don't think that's the real reason. For one reason or another, I've temporarily lost the urge to own something unique, beautiful and different - the urge that led me to buy the other works. Hope that urge comes back some day. Either that or I'll have to take my courage in hand, and pick up the paint brush!