Sketchbook Assignment 4: Keeping Time

Sunday was my birthday, and I chose to do something special and visit the Barnes Foundation, a special art collection created by Dr. Albert Barnes in the early twentieth century. The collection moved from Merion, PA, to Center City Philadelphia in recent years amid much controversy since he had planned his museum down to the views of his arboretum through the windows. I'm reading a biography about Barnes at the moment, and learning what a difficult but brilliant and innovative man he was. Well, the Barnes Foundation was filled to capacity on this rainy Sunday, so I resorted to Plan B...

I walked up the long blocks of the wide avenue in the pouring rain, in and out of the Barnes Foundation lobby, up the 72 "Rocky Steps" and into the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I found the Vermeer in Gallery 264 on the second floor of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "Young Woman Seated at a Virginal" is on loan to Philadelphia from the Leiden Gallery in New York City. Only 36 paintings by Vermeer exist, and incidentally, three feature women standing or sitting at virginals. This 1672 painting features a woman in a gold shawl, hands on the keyboard, and looking at the painter/viewer. The most meticulous attention to detail has been paid to the subject, illuminated by light from a window we do not see. The keyboard instrument is in shadow, and so is the back of the woman. The realistic drape of the fabric, gold for the shawl, and ivory for the skirt, cause me to expect that if I reached out to touch it, I'd find them to be a heavy, high-quality silk. Two gentlemen were viewing the painting with me, and after some time, one remarked, "There's a certain intimacy, isn't there?" Indeed there is, since the woman seems to recognize us and it is such a small space. There's also a certain intimacy in the man's comment, not spoken directly to his companion, but to the group gathered to view the painting. This was not the first time I've experienced this fleeting beholder-of-art (or music) intimacy.

The above is another assignment from the MOOC I'm taking from Cal Arts. The lone sentence describes something that took a long time to happen: my walk in the rain from the train station to the Art Museum. The paragraph discusses gazing at the Vermeer painting, a slice out of time. So the assignment was to write short on a long thing, and write long on a short thing. Get it?