A common thread…
The arts express our inner world in ways that enrich our lives for the better…
How can we read a masterful poem by John Keats and not be moved by his expression of beauty? How can we listen to the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth Symphony and not feel what it is to be in love? How can we view a painting by Picasso and not see a reflection of ourselves in his eyes? Our superficial layers are stripped away to reveal life in its deep, raw state…may we open ourselves to these priceless gifts, and in doing so, allow them to teach us life’s most important lessons…
Drawing ~ Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study of a Seated Young Man and Two Studies of the Right Arm, 1511
Painting ~ Pablo Picasso, Self-portrait With a Palette, 1906
Sculpture ~ Richard Serra, Betwixt the torus and the sphere, 2001
Architecture ~ I.M. Pei, The Louvre Pyramid, 1988
Interior Design ~ Robert Couturier, his Connecticut home
Music ~ Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 5, 1901-1902
Dance ~ Sergei Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet, 1935
Theatre ~ Stephen Sondheim, Donna Murphy as Fosca in Passion, 1994
Film ~ Merchant-Ivory, A Room with a View, 1985
Literature ~ E.B. White, One Man’s Meat, 1942
Poetry ~ John Keats, Bright Star, 1819
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –
No – yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death.
a thoughtful eye 