When I was a young man, I often looked at paintings of still life with considerable amazement. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why a pair of peaches on a lace tablecloth or a vase of drooping tulips in front of a curtained window had any appeal. I mean, when you’re young, you want action. Still-life images were downright boring, and no one I ever asked could explain what he saw in them.
Visiting a friend in a hospital recently, I found the explanation for myself. The hallways and waiting rooms were filled with enchanting pastoral landscapes and still lifes of all kinds. Engulfed by the hum of hospital life and the lives of so many anxious patients, I suddenly found those images gently nourishing me.
What once struck me as anemic now spoke to me of strength. What at one time I saw as dull now intoxicated my mind with comfort.
When life gets complicated, when health becomes problematic, when the world around us no longer feels within our control, we are instinctively drawn to places of hope. They refresh our spirits and renew our confidence.
Great art? I hardly think anything I’ll find in our Chicagoland hospitals will interest the Art Institute. But perhaps those curators are missing a good bet, because isn’t art supposed to speak to the soul?
As I watched my fellow visitors, young as well as old, that panoply of pastels was speaking feelings of reassurance, because it was reminding us that there are places of peace amid chaos, moments of calm in storms, beautiful objects in seasons of ugliness.
I don’t recommend you spend a lot of time in hospitals, either as a patient or a visitor. I would, however, offer this thought. Hospitals are one of the few places in our otherwise bustling, self-occupied city where you are compelled to stop and get in serious touch with what’s important in life. Life! Helping in this epiphany is their artwork, which tends to say to us, pause awhile and remember how lovely this world of ours really is.
