Jeannine Atkins

Waking now to L.A. traffic instead of Maine waves. My daughter put together her half of a room with pictures of her friends taped or framed everywhere, and even one of me among them. She’s been organizing and hanging out with one lovely suite-mate, wondering, but trying not to obsess, about the two young women who aren’t yet around. While Em and her new friend explored Hollywood a bit, took pictures of each other wearing matching L.A. T-shirts, and picked up job applications, I visited the Getty Museum http://www.getty.edu/visit/



You get to take a tram up the hillside for great city views and once there wind your way among several buildings that always take you back outside to views and fountains and gardens. I think because so much can happen outdoors, and because the museum is free, except for parking, I saw more children then I usually do in a museum, and that was fun. All seemed well-behaved. Perhaps less so were the twenty-somethings who struck poses mimicking those in some seventeenth century paintings and snapped pictures, as if they were in the wax museum or a theme park, under the guards’ leery gazes.



I enjoyed seeing the chair where Marie Antoinette once sat, on loan from the Louvre, but what was mosta exciting is a special exhibit called Women of Art and Science: Maria Merian and Daughters who I wrote about in Girls Who Looked Under Rocks http://www.jeannineatkins.com/books/jcagirlsrocks.html, (which I was glad to see for sale in the children’s store, and glad Dawn Publications has kept it in print for nine years). In the late 1600s, Merian’s paintings showed the links between eggs, caterpillars and butterflies. It’s said that at thirteen, Maria observed metamorphoses that weren’t written about in science journals for another ten years. Besides paintings on display, were thick old books used as field guides, written and illustrated by her and other naturalists. The copy of Merian’s The Caterpillar Book was taken on an expedition to Siberia in 1720 in service to Czar Peter the Great, and the naturalist tucked sample butterflies in folded paper left in the volume now on display.

Going back to the recent themes of dads and daughters, I have to note that while Maria’s mother discouraged her interest in nature and art, her stepfather, a painter, gave her art supplies and advice, though at that time it was against the law in Nuremberg for women to paint. Later, Maria got around this by calling her works guides for embroidery – then she moved. Including one great journey to South America to paint blue Morpho butterflies and other marvels.

An old friend from high school, who I’m lucky enough to live near, invited her mom to stay for a few days, and I asked the two of them to come with me to the Eric Carle Picture Book Museum for a bit of color to zip up our January. We had fun at the Spiderwick: from book to movie exhibit. I loved the old wooden desk and chair based on the one that Tony DiTerlizzi works at, with the plastic dinos and old paint brushes, though I worried for the artist’s back – (please, find a chair not so wooden and gorgeous, but better for your spine. One day you, too, will get old.) And, while I love to look at pictures at the Carle, excuse me, but doesn’t Holly Black use a desk and chair? Why don’t we get to see that? It’s no put down of DiTerlizzi’s great illustration to ask if we’d have Spiderwick Chronicles without their author.

Another exhibit was about the history of childhood, focusing most on the present and how play, questioning, loneliness, and community are depicted one picture at a time. It is fun to recognize art from favorite books, not from the turning page, but on still on a wall. Reading and looking at The Day the Babies Crawled Away, I had too much fun following mischievous babies to realize that Peggy Rathmann made the black and white illustrations by laser cutting linoleum. And I mean tiny tiny cuts. How did she think of that? How did she do it?

Well, there was lots to look at and admire and talk about. Sue’s mom, Helen, who’d grown up on a farm during the depression – “we were practical people. We never thought about making art.”– saw immediately that Eric Carle had made some impressions on a mural using carpet scraps. Often on these excursions, random words leave the greatest mark. I liked the kid who was obsessing not about looking, but at who or what, from the walls, might be watching him. And then Helen mentioned visiting a cathedral. We talked about the anonymous art behind many gorgeous windows, sculptures, chalices, steeples, etc. “People didn’t expect their name to be known. They made those because they believed in what they stood for,” Helen said.

I caught my breath. I’ve had moments of working like that, focused on what I’m making. But could I, would I, work without a chance to leave my name?

Today my husband and I saw an exhibit at the Clark art museum in Williamsburg, MA called “The Unknown Monet.” There were drawings and pastels that apparently Monet downplayed as the idea of doing sketches before paintings kind of downplayed the impressionist idea of spontaneity. There were wonderful caricatures, which were how Monet first made a living, through sketchbooks with quick black and white drawings of water lily patterns. Seeing those sketchbooks I felt awe. Really, they could be almost anybody’s sketchbooks, and I think that was what was so wonderful. All of us start with a line or a word. All of us can do anything from there. Okay, maybe we can’t all paint water lilies that will change how people see a pond, but it was a great afternoon wandering between small black and white images on paper and masterpieces in pink and blue oils. What an inspiration to look at a few hasty lines, seeing the small but focused spot where grandeur began.