Listen To Take Your Time
Here is the audio version of Take Your Time #6. Enjoy!
Illustration
This week’s illustration was inspired by the Impressionists. On a cornflower blue background are pink lemonade or bubblegum pink-colored flowers flowing in the breeze on a summer’s day. The stems are the flowers are sage and grass green.
Inspiration
Impressionism focuses on experience. Its main goal is to transport you to a moment in time. It feels very fitting for summer. Artists tried to capture the transient, ephemeral effects of the changing light to depict the passage of time.
I think you already know the most well-known impressionists, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas. I recently learned about “Les Trois Grandes Dames,” or “The Three Great Ladies,” of the movement: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Marie Bracquemond. Their contributions to Impressionism were dismissed, ignored and have been sadly overlooked until quite recently. Better late than never.
Art historians looking back see impressionism as a response to rapid modernization and urbanization, following the Industrial Revolution from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century. The Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed life as we know it. It changed what people did for work, how much they worked, and where they lived. The pace of life became more demanding, faster and required more output and productivity from people. It sounds awfully familiar, right? Thinking about impressionism in this historical context feels apt and relevant now, especially with what feels like a pace of life that never seems to slow down and quickly moves from one thing to the next. Sometimes the heaviness and gravity of a breaking news story is lost on us simply because of the pace of things. What’s next? I always find myself asking. Impressionism’s antidote to the pace of life is the still lightness of the moment.
In Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, the little girl looks a little uncomfortable, not ill at ease, and bored. It’s amazing because this is how a real child would be I think if they were asked to pose for hours. You can tell she has other things on her mind. And it’s beautiful to see what would be considered an ordinary moment being given such care and close attention in painting. I think of my niece when I look at this painting. I also wonder if this is what I look like working from home, contorting myself into strange ways on the sofa or the chair in our bedroom while my two dogs sleep blissfully beside me.
With more people doing factory work, many people were away from their homes for longer amounts of time. These industrial productivity-focused jobs were (are) so exploitative and demanding that they left little downtime for people to spend at home and with their families and loved ones. Impressionist art considered the fleeting nature of life. It focused on a moment, often depicting what would be considered mundane, many of the moments that make up our lives, moments at home, with family.
Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle is the first painting of motherhood to appear in Morisot's work, although the theme would later become one of her favorite subjects. It is an intimate and familiar scene that would have stood out in that first group exhibition by the Impressionists in 1874. Morisot was the first woman to exhibit with the group. I love that Morisot painted her sister and niece.
Women in 19th-century France were also confined to their homes. They couldn’t get a formal studio degree, and couldn’t leave the house without a chaperone. “Female Impressionists—many of whom have been undervalued or outright ignored by the historical canon—exploited these confines, producing introspective works that dealt with their makers’ societal conditions.”
Marie Bracquemond tragically had a promising career that ended far too early, because her husband forced her to abandon it. He was also an artist and he must have known that her accomplishments would soon overshadow his. I find this really sad because when I look at her paintings I’m in absolute awe and totally mesmerized. She was self-taught and considered rather daring in her approach to painting.
I love her painting Under the Lamp. I want to pull up a seat and join the conservation. My absolute favorite part of the painting is the steam rising from the bowl in the center. Bracquemond “moved towards Impressionism, swapping her studio for en plein air (the outdoors), making an effort to capture the diaphanous effects of light on white gowns, cropping her work to capture transient moments.” Bracquemond’s sun-dappled paintings demonstrate her keen understanding of light, her skill, and what an intuitive painter she was. I’ll end with this visionary quote from Bracquemond, “Impressionism has produced ... not only a new, but a very useful way of looking at things. It is as though all at once a window opens and the sun and air enter your house in torrents”.
Ideas
To Be Happy, Think Like an Old Person Would you say that you experience or measure time? I’m trying to shift from the latter to the former and get off the hedonic treadmill. This excerpt was remarkably insightful and helpful for this journey: “Time still carries a sense of urgency, but the urgency of time has been transformed. I no longer see time as an endless series of appointments moving from one goal to the next. Now the urgency is to experience every moment and not waste the time that remains.”
Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries In June of this year, scientists at the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) revealed the detection of low-frequency gravitational waves believed to be from supermassive black holes in the early years of our universe. In my very basic understanding, objects with mass have a warping effect on the fabric of space and time. When objects accelerate, they generate ripples in spacetime, called gravitational waves. What does this discovery mean for us? “The gravitational-wave background is huge news for the cosmos, yes, but it’s also huge news for you. The nature of reality has not changed—you will not suddenly be able to detect vibrations in your morning coffee that you couldn’t see before. And yet, moments like these can and should change how each of us sees our world. All of a sudden, we know that we are humming in tune with the entire universe, that each of us contains the signature of everything that has ever been. It’s all within us, around us, pushing us to and fro as we hurtle through the cosmos.”
The song “That Summer Feeling” by Jonathan Richman “describes the pangs we feel when we recall what we no longer experience directly (“emotion recollected in tranquility” to cite Wordsworth, that chronicler of lost youth). This experience, according to Richman, is painful.”
Ending Quote
This feels like an appropriate quote, especially for the summertime.
“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”
-Azar Nafisi