Profound Play

An Epic Artist's Date to Celebrate the End of The Artist's Way Reread Series

To commemorate the end of Hibou’s reread of The Artist’s Way, I took myself on a monster artist’s date that was really several artist’s dates in one. There was the train trip between Boston and New York City at stupid o’clock where I scored a seat at a table in the quiet car and started a new chapter in my novel as the world rolled by my window.

There was the half hour I spent in the American Museum of Natural History’s blue-lit Hall of Ocean Life sitting in the middle of the floor under the life-size model of a blue whale and contemplating how we can feel like our inner lives contain worlds upon worlds yet also feel so infinitesimally small next to a creature which itself is a tiny speck in an ocean that’s just a drop in a seemingly limitless universe.

And there was a visit to the Hirschl & Adler gallery to see the oil paintings in Julie Heffernan’s “The swamps are pink with June” exhibit. These days I’m not normally a museum person—I can trace my museum ambivalence to a particularly overwhelming run in with the floor-to-ceiling display at the Pitti Palace in Florence—but I saw snapshots of this exhibit’s opening night on social media and something in the colors on the canvas demanded I see these technicolor Hieronymus-Bosch-like paintings in person, and they didn’t disappoint.

The exhibit is an explosion of color. Orange, magenta, blue. Yellow, pink, green. I’m no art critic—anyone who returns from Florence with what appears to be a lifelong aversion to museums couldn’t well claim to be—but Heffernan’s paintings moved me deeply.

I was particularly drawn to a canvas called Spill (Climbers), whose burning oranges and yellows kept drawing me back to look again and again. Something about that painting’s playfulness insisting I look closer, closer, closer.

A half hour after I first arrived, I finally broke down and read the exhibit materials and learned that all the pieces in the exhibit with paint splotches similar to those in Climbers were part of a series Heffernan called her Spill paintings. From the exhibit description:

Born out of the artist’s search for fresh energy in the studio, Heffernan began pouring paint onto canvas to begin each work. The splashes of color that pooled on the surface captured by accident the same energy that she would so painstakingly try to render. Working back into these spills unlocked worlds within worlds, adding a logic and a structure to an otherwise haphazard order. The artist herself writes: What I’ve found in the paint spills now is something akin to the chaos I need to describe the actual chaos happening in the environment right at this moment.

But I was less interested in the chaos than I was in the joy nestled within the chaos. The women using the backs of wild things as stepping stones to climb up, to reach higher, to swing among the branches. The tree around them might be ablaze and the world might be nipping at their feet, but these woman are still finding their way to joy. They still have time enough for play.

To be clear, I’ve probably read this painting all wrong. The imagery in the entire exhibit seemed like it was in conversation with an artistic lineage I don’t have the vocabulary to fully understand. And I’m sure there’s a profound message in the canvas that I’ve completely missed, but I won’t apologize for my ignorance because I’m sharing an artist’s date, not an art lesson, and on an artist’s date, a painting’s most profound message is the one that lights me up, and what lights me up about Climbers is the colorful reminder that it’s OK to embrace joy and playfulness even in dire times.

And, as I draft this post exactly eleven months after my mom died, there’s no more profound message for me right now than permission to play.