I can't seem to help myself when it comes to buying art. It doesn't matter whether I have the money or not, when something draws my eye and speaks to my heart, that's it. I really, really tried to avoid buying this small oil study of a nude. I really did. I walked away from the artist's studio and told myself I couldn't afford it. I walked through all the other studios, visiting friends among the artists and making new ones, and yet in the back of my mind that entire time was this one piece. I told myself if it was still there when I was done schmoozing and being ADD Art Girl for the day, then I'd buy it. If it had been sold by then, then it wasn't meant to be. I thought of little else for the rest of the day. When the day was done, I wandered back to that studio. There were a lot of little red dots on her works, but this one was hanging there, utterly dot-free, and so I kept my word to myself and bought the piece. I told myself I couldn't afford it as I took it down from the wall and handed the canvas to the artist. I told myself I shouldn't be doing this as I handed the cash to her too. I told myself that this was bad, very bad, as she handed me back my new painting, securely wrapped in brown paper. I spent the ride home trying to justify the purchase of yet another piece of art. And then when I got home, unwrapped it and gazed at what was now mine, I knew that nothing else mattered. Because it's art and art is all I have.
Patience Epstein, Untitled
Last night David and I went to the opening of the Harold Reddicliffe retrospective at BU and as I always am when confronted with his work, I found myself once again mesmerized and speechless. I've always been in awe of hyper realists and wish I had the ability to paint in such detail, but alas, it simply is not something of which I'm capable. I'm not wild about cameras, movie projectors, microscopes and various other banal appliances on their own, but in these pieces, arranged so dramatically, lit so beautifully and executed to absolute perfection in vivid colors, I go ga-ga over every single canvas. Thirty years of extraordinarily intricate, intimate and at the same time, bold, works and all of them in one gallery. I defy anyone to not be blown away. 
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