Winslow Homer at the National Gallery [2 cents]

I think will only be there a week or so. Three sizeable rooms. Water colors, a few oils and some etchings. The Civil War, New England, the sea, travels.

You are probably most familiar with some of his seascapes and with his engravings that appeared in Harper's Magazine a hundred and fifty years ago. What you miss is his terrific ability to use light and color. That really surprised me.

What you get, and expect to see, is his ability to set the scene, so that you know you are looking at what he saw. His topics are all real, and sometimes quite mundane. but he does not drift off into make believe lands, or biblical allegory. You see a sky, ground or see, and some people doing things. Period.

Also, he is one of those artists whose work is best viewed from an appropriate viewing distance. For me that would be, more or less, ten to fifteen feet away. This is when each of the works looks the best. As you move closer, the detail fades, and you realize that what you thought was extraordinary detail was not so at all, and only appears to be so, as you move back. As someone with no artistic ability, I cannot conceive of this. How do you know, when you are painting that something which does not look very good to you from the distance between painter and easel, will look good from a further distance in a gallery or a living room? This requires some pretty complex thinkings process, it seems to me.

Can it therefore be that, in fact, painting is really more of a science than an art?