Permanence

One of my facebook friends only posts famous paintings.  It is nice, as long as I am wasting my time on facebook it is good that I get a bit of art education.  Also, it is a welcome respite from the woman who only posts about GMO’s, the guy who only posts about unions and  the Civil War (in both cases he is pro Union), the old friend whose every post is blindly pro-Israel, the two or three whose every post is about the reasons why marijuana should be legal, and the dozen or so who only post pictures of their children.

It could have been painted yesterday

I’m not saying that any of these are bad things, I just wonder how people can be so single minded, so obsessed with one aspect of existence that they never bother commenting on other subjects.  Life is complex and multi-faceted, fortunately.  It has its problems: illness, death, financial uncertainty, political injustice, and too much violence in movies, but one thing it is not is boring.

Anyway, back to the internet art show.  Today, he posted the painting you see here, Giverny Hillside, which was painted by American impressionist Guy Rose in 1891. I am not particularly knocked out by the painting, although it is a pleasant enough scene.  Looking through the artist’s other works, I see stuff I like better.  However, it made me think.

Whenever you see a painting of a landscape from times gone by, whenever words like ‘hillside’ or ‘garden’ or ‘pond’ or ‘wood’ are in the title, it looks just the same as a hillside, a garden, a pond or a wood looks today.  You know they didn’t have mobile phones, or the internet, or TV, or even cars, but they had the same trees we have, the same grass, the same ponds, the same flowers, the same sky.

Of course, these scenes of natural tranquillity are harder to find today, which makes them all the more precious, but they still exist.  I hope they always will.