One of the great things about renting a beach house is getting to experience another person’s aesthetic sense (or lack thereof). And the place my inlaws rented for a week this summer was a veritable Louvre of quality art (if by quality art, you mean unironic pink flamingo stained glass in the bathroom and purplish seascapes that looked like they were pained by R. Crumb in the midst of a Prozac binge).
And like in the great museums of the world, proper placement and setting really enhanced our studied consideration of the great works on display. Consider the enigmatic riddle suggested by placing a portrait of Robert E. Lee and a crucifix on the same wall (answer: both the South and Jesus, it seems, will rise again).
Then there are individual works that merit hours, if not days, of careful study. Consider this portrait of a wisened sea captain that hangs in a place of honor over the television (I realize the picture is a tad on the underexposed side, but perhaps that’s because the sheer artistic triumph of this grand oeuvre was just too much for the camera lens to handle).
Give yourself a moment to take it all in. If you close your eyes, you can almost smell the salt in the air, the wisp of his pipe, all tinged with the scent of the artist’s desperation after many an hour studying the legend to the paint-by-numbers kit.
But wait, there’s more. Consider the following details -- I didn’t go to art school or anything, but I still know that details are what make a piece of art a Piece of Art.
Note this will-o-the-wisp thing in the background. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be St. Elmo’s Fire (and if it is, what explanation do we have for the conspicuous absence of Rob Lowe?), but the colors would change subtly as you walked around the room. Spooky.
Again, I’m no artist, but I do know that it’s tough to draw a beard so it looks like a really cheap, fake clip-on beard -- impressive. Also, note the scale of the cap’n’s hands in relation to his pipe and his face. A symbolic message that he’s capable of steering through any storm? Perhaps. A sign he’s afflicted not only by bad weather, but also Marfan Syndrome? Almost certainly -- an artist of this caliber wouldn’t have problems with something as elementary as three-point perspective, after all.
As for the pipe? To quote Freud, sometimes a pipe is... well, just a pipe.