The Clark

Today we visited The Clark which is an art museum and research center founded by the Singer sewing machine heir, Robert Sterling Clark and his wife. The museum is built on their collection of art which was very substantial, and includes sculpture, silver, porcelain, and early photographs.

We saw works of James Whistler, Winslow Homer, Monet, Renoir and other Impressionists. Many familiar paintings we have seen reproduced elsewhere, except these were the originals!

My husband just started taking art lessons and began painting a couple of years ago. He had a couple of relatives who were Impressionist artists on his side of the family so he grew up around a great deal of art that was a part of our local history.

So he is the knowledgeable one in the family when it comes to art. He slowly goes through the museums and reads and studies just about every piece. He thinks about what technique he will try next. I just walk through much faster and I am guided more by my emotional reactions to different works. I usually end up sitting and waiting for him to be done.

I can't pretend to be any sort of art connoisseur, I never even took an art history class in college, and I can barely draw. When I was studying for my masters degree in Holistic Thinking we had one assignment that involved going to an art museum. We had to pick out one piece that we had a strong positive emotional reaction to and another piece that we had a negative reaction to. Then we had to research the artist and talk about what our reactions were.

After we had written our paper we had to exchange it with another student in our class and write our reactions to their reactions. It was a very interesting and enjoyable assignment for a farm girl like me who had no art background growing up and was very intimidated by the art world. I learned that my emotional reactions were all I needed to understand in order to appreciate art.