Urania Explains How Life Became Cubist

I’ve only had two art history classes in my life, but they obviously exercised a huge influence on my imagination. I sometimes think in terms of images I’ve seen; maybe another way to say this is that the study of art history primed me to notice moments when art imitates life. Great paintings wouldn’t have the power to enchant us if they didn’t contain archetypal material, and that sometimes creates a feeling of recognition when you least expect it.

I’ve written about this before. I had lived in my last apartment for many years before I realized that the view of the roof lines on the opposite side of the street reminded me very much of René Magritte’s The Dominion of Light, especially at certain times of the day. Peach-colored sunsets have more than once made me think of Maxfield Parrish’s extravagant and billowing clouds. I was looking out my back window one summer day late in the afternoon when the quality of light on the opposite wall reminded me of Winslow Homer. I wasn’t even sure what I had in mind when this happened—possibly the light on the sail in Homer’s Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)—but that wall definitely looked like Homer.

Recently, I was on a downtown street near the courthouse when I was stopped in my tracks by a view of mixed architectural styles and roof lines visible from where I was standing. It instantly brought Thomas Cole’s The Architect’s Dream to mind, and although the elements in the real-life view didn’t match those in the painting point for point, there was enough similarity to make it seem that the painting had, in a manner, sprung to life before my eyes. A long, horizontal, arcade-like building, a pediment, pyramid shapes, a massy square building with rounded arches, a Gothic steeple—all were there in a jumble, just as in the painting.

A similar art-related experience I’ve had more than once is to see a painting that creates a feeling of déjà vu that I can’t explain. Sometimes I feel that I may only have encountered the place in my imagination and not in reality at all. A Pre-Raphaelite painting of a solitary knight pausing in a forest may remind me of reading King Arthur for the first time, just as a moonlit scene of an Italian bridge may bring to mind a place encountered in one of Mary Stewart’s novels.

I once took an online quiz that was supposed to tell me “which famous painting I was.” Whatever the result, was I was flattered by it—I believe it may have been something by one of the Impressionists. But if you asked me a different question—“Which artist could best paint life as you are now living it?”—I would have to say Picasso, and it would be the style of painting in which the same face is depicted from several angles at once. Of course, a Hillmanian would have a perspective like this, but more than that, I think modern life (as I experience it, at least) creates a feeling of time speeding up in some places and slowing down in others that often leaves things a little out of joint. I experience myself much as I always have, but I seem to be caught in a crosswind of dimensional planes that leaves me goggling at the unlikelihood of it all. I’m ahead of myself in some areas and lagging behind in others; my elbow may be in one place, my foot in another, and my shoulder in another plane entirely.

I never particularly identified with Cubism before, but life and art have some surprising corners. I just saw an article that mentioned some sort of a hole on the edge of the Milky Way that’s been identified by a Harvard scientist. It’s far too vast to be caused by a star, she says, and the culprit may possibly be “dark matter.” Don’t you just know it! Dark matter interfering not only with the galaxy but with my nice Impressionist life and skewing the whole thing Cubist! Just wait till I get hold of the sucker . . . There won’t be a wormhole small enough for it to hide in.