The gift

In the first week of May, I received a small surprise gift package in my home mailbox. It contained a few things you could place in a scrapbook and was given to me by one of the Korean students I met on Zoom. One of the items was a matchbox-size pack of stamps. To be clear, they were not postage stamps, although they were similar in size. However, these stamps are generally placed on things like books, letters or suitcases.

What was unique about these stick-on stamps is that all 28 were grouped by the common quality of fine art, each showing different kinds of paintings by renowned and eminent persons from Europe and North America. Surely you know the Frenchmen: Cezanne, Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gauguin and Matisse. Represented also were Spain’s Picasso, Greece’s El Greco and the Dutch painter mononymously known as Rembrandt. I learned that all the acquired paintings were housed in exhibition spaces just right outside of Boston, Massachusetts, in the Worcester Art Museum — a museum that I didn’t know existed until now.

I had not revisited these artists in more than five decades since I had taken "Art and Music" as a freshman in college. In the past, I could recognize many of them by sight and recite a bit of their bios. The unique gift brought back memories of the long-ago classes about these talented artists. The gift prompted me to do a biographical sketch on each painter before placing their art in my scrapbook. While doing this biography research, I’ve come to realize how important they were — not just because of their chosen field of endeavor and recognition, but because of their intertwinement and intermixing in society with others, especially family and friends.

We can’t follow the intricate and detailed lives of everyone, but at the same time, we can know that everyone has a role to play. Everyone is part of the fabric of society. Some contribute more for our benefit, others less. As seen through the eyes of biographers and memoirists, brief portraits can reveal the activities and interactions of some. These writers serve another purpose: by examining the lives of others, they prompt us to reflect on our own.

The epoch and era of the widely admired masterful visual artists was not shared by my birth father of French descent, who believed his art was comparable to any Frenchman’s. He told me that he was not impressed with the Impressionists, that they dabbed primary mixed colors much like kindergartners, and that they had no coup de maître (masterstroke). He was under the impression that they all had cataracts or else were in sore need of spectacles. Neither did he think much of Cubism. He thought those painters had fragmented minds. But father’s own paintings, as moving and stirring and impressive as they were, did not move on the market.

Don’t you wish you had more time to meet people on a personal level and truly get to know them? I do. But like you, I know our lifespans simply don’t allow it. So, we end up choosing a few associates, friends and contacts to grow close to. Candidly, it is all we can do to keep up with the goings-on of family members and a select friend or two. But, I won’t let this stop me from peering curiously once again into the lives of the aforementioned historical artists. I may not become a connoisseur, but I’ll learn enough to pass “Art and Music."

The author (wrjones@vsu.edu) published the novella “Beyond Harvard” and teaches English as a second language.