Summer afternoons that linger on

Just a postcard on my bulletin board now, this painting is my first love -- "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," by Georges Seurat (not to be confused with Stephen Sondheim). I discovered it as a young teenager after our family moved to the sterile flatland of suburban Chicago and a classmate who "did art" introduced me to The Art Institute of Chicago.

I'd rarely seen "real art" before, and I was enthralled. Partly, I was awed by its sheer size, about 7 x 10 feet, as you can see it here in its Art Institute setting. But most of all, I loved all the people -- doing their own thing and achieving a calm unity. My other first love -- my first boyfriend -- gave me a large print of it for my birthday. With my mother's help, I carefully chose a frame (this was real grown-up stuff!!) and hung it in my bedroom, where its tranquillity saw me through the remaining years of teenaged angst.

(A brief aside: The Art Institute of Chicago has one of the finest Impressionist collections in the world -- not a bad place to fall in love! And the actual island of  La Grande Jatte was a huge draw to other Impressionist artists, as detailed in this wonderful website.)

One of my important virtual teachers, Harriet Shorr, wrote in her book THE ARTIST'S EYE about the lasting impact of early loves:--

Certain objects call to the painter because they resonate with the
painter's sensibility -- an attraction to particular kinds of forms,
to particular kinds of space. These attractions are formed by the
innate visual sensibility of the artist and, perhaps of equal
importance, the art that, as a young person, the artist first saw and
loved. These primary influences, which together help to form an
aesthetic sensibility, are what lead the artist to her subjects.

Coincidentally in a bulletin board revamp  a few months ago, I pinned the Seurat postcard next to a photo of one of my early paintings, "Driftwood Pieces" (copyright 2003).

I suddenly connected "La Grande Jatte" with my tendency to pack a lot of shapes and objects into my paintings -- not always a good idea, but usually an irresistible impulse.

Might this also have influenced me to enjoy making studies that pack lots of figures on a page?

...or that connect one figure in continuous motion into a whole?

 Maybe Seurat's spaciously placed Parisians are even (paradoxically) the source of my current plan for a series of intertwined figures. Hey, maybe this was really "A Sunday Afternoon Flash Mob on the Island of the Grande Jatte."

Well, one thing's for sure. This is someone's monkey, even if it's not mine -- and it might even be someone's Schipperke puppy.