fine whine

It’s been a long week for me at work. Monday and Tuesday I stayed well past the 5:30 mark, and even today when I was intending to leave at noon I wasn’t free of my shackles desk until after three.

I drove downtown to meet Jessica at the Columbus Arts Festival, an event that draws us every year to the shores of the mighty Olentangy even though our wallets (and often aesthetic sensibilities) prevent us from walking away with any objets d’art.

This is not to say that we did not see interesting things. Many a booth had something new and unique on display, and then many a booth had stuff that didn’t interest us or was bland or nearly commercial.

I find it very difficult to get excited over geometric abstract art (in the Mondrian mold and so forth) in that such paintings seem to appear en masse in the halls and above the beds of hotels and nowhere else, though I suppose sometimes humans (artists, even) are responsible for their creation.

Likewise the booths upon booths of handmade jewelry, largely a bunch of bent metal with the occasional gemstone or bit of enamel thrown on to justify the triple digit price tag. Minus the bent metal this applies also to all of the brightly-hued, busily-designed shirts and muu-muus and other clothes and loungewear.

The wooden toys are often neat though there is very little innovation between booths (and years), which I take to be some indication of the timelessness of the whole thing. Or the fact that everybody works out of the same project books instead of designing something new; take your pick.

One school of paintings I hadn’t noticed in years past, and I have a pretty good situation-specific memory for such things, was the pictures of windows and doors. A typical such painting would depict a blandly neutral wall around a window. Presumably what matters isn’t the hardwood floor or sparse decoration inside the room portrayed, but the view outside the window (or door) that shows this house or whatever to be situated overlooking Lake Tahoe or some other breathtaking/beautiful/relaxing vista. The whole painting doesn’t show the nice landscape, just a little window inside it.

At least three different artist were showing such art. It’s gotta be a trend.

I have a number of theories about this:

• The painter is lazy, wanting to paint a nice landscape but not at full size. Building a room (well, a wall with a window) around a small picture means the size of the ‘real’ painting doesn’t increase even though the frame does. It’s like a matte, just part of the picture. Painting blank walls must be easier than mountains and forests and lakes, anyway.
• Art buyers want something a little different from the usual painting of mountains or forests or lakes. This is a sound theory, I think, at least until these things really catch on, in which case the rebels will need to find another way to differentiate their collections.
• The current popularity of interior ‘makeover’ and redecoration television shows has prompted an overall interest in the great indoors, the likes of which was until recently relegated to the pages of Better Homes & Gardens.
• The current popularity of interior spaces is not due to television shows specifically about them but television in general, as well as video games and online computer use, sedentary activities all. America is becoming a lazier, fatter nation and people anymore just cannot relate to the outdoors except in postcard-sized form. To show another set of walls just reinforces the comfort zone, buffeting the viewer from the troublesome (and less comfortable for lounging) outdoors.

Of course that last entry, if taken to its furthest conclusion, would lead to realistic paintings of the McDonald’s drive-thru window and perhaps the Krispy Kreme counter, and maybe even for the more-seasoned traveler, the buffets of Branson Missouri.