Quiet Moments

Helen C
Jun 21
2 min read

I've enjoyed spending the last week documenting more quiet moments up here at the river. I told a professor of mine that some of my favorite artwork isn't the loud, large, and chaotic masterpieces like "Wanderer above the Sea Fog", "Liberty Leading the People", or "The Slave Ship" . My favorite pieces to look at are quieter and more personal. I learned about the word sublime at PAFA. It is work that's aim is to overwhelm the viewer with awe, power, drama, or emotional intensity. When I told my professor about this, and how I didn't necessarily want to make work like that, he said that even the "quieter work" still gets a lot of attraction and attention. People travel from all over the world to see the work of Giorgio Morandi. His work just slows you down. It's modest, humble, lyrical, and domestic.

Through staring at his work and observing the color relationships, the weight of the objects, the lighting...I start to think about, "what is worth looking at", "how long should we look?", and "what happens when we truly pay attention"- he had a way of making the ordinary extraordinary.

Here are some of his works:

I learned about his work back in college. My life was a bit chaotic then and I was making very personal work about events in my life and I looked to my professor and told her I wanted to make work that was less personal. I wanted to slow down. So she told me to look at Morandi's work. So I set up a still life of a collection of small delicate things I had in my dorm room at the time. A jar of sea shells, a vase, a purple blanket, a turquoise mason jar...and a few other things. I do love a good still life, but it's not my main focus right now. I want to show those quiet, still moments in life. That being said, it was fun to buzz around this week and try to document them with my camera.

This kind of mirrors how I feel about music. I've found that while I love a good pop song that hits the top charts and one that I can sing along to with my friends (sublime), the songs that have really touched my heart for as long as I can remember have been the quieter, more intimate songs by lesser known artists. I'll put some of those songs at the end.