Day 0005

Today I spent the afternoon at the Met. I confined myself to the European paintings section, and skipped a good deal, and yet I still feel quite overwhelmed. It is a truly staggering collection, in size, diversity and quality. I'm not sure the 30 remaining days I have here are enough to do it justice.

Amongst so many things, my attention was arrested by some landscapes by Claude (primed no doubt by my walk through North Woods in Central Park), Velazquez (because of Goya yesterday in London), Bronzino for his beautiful creamy, sculptural skin tones and finally Filippino Lippi for his breathtakingly beautiful Madonna, who almost out-Boticcellis Botticelli. I stood and sketched today's drawing from it, working slowly and lightly in 2B pencil.

A significant motivation for choosing the Lippi to copy was a practical one -- it is located in a less busy room, so the distraction of passers-by is less than the rooms with more famous paintings. This got me thinking about the practical concerns of art - the logistical, the human, the contingencies of chance and convenience. Standing still, being tired, aching, being hungry in front of a work today made me remember that these inert, lifeless, silent objects were quite literally painstakingly created by real, living people who suffered to produce them. Feeling physical discomfort myself whilst sketching made me really think about how much physical, tiring, sweaty labour went into these works. I have a tendency to see art as pre-existing, rarefied entities quite unconnected from the human everyday world. And then I sneeze on my work and realise that the great masters probably did the same, and that probably bits of their hair got stuck in their paint as well, and their cuffs brushed against the still-wet surfaces of their canvases, ruining their clothes like I do.