In the Writer’s Circle at the New York Public Library, we have written letters, fiction, and non-fiction. This week we tackled art, for the second time. Initially, we had done so looking at still life objects when we were in the physical space. This time, we looked at an online image of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s stained-glass Magnolias and Irises (1908).
Writing about art can be as simple or complex as the writer chooses. The beauty of this exercise was how diverse the responses were. Participants wrote about feelings, abstractions, and ideals, and each one could not have been more different from the other.
One of the more fascinating discoveries of the session was that the postcard I was working from was more muted than the vibrant image the Metropolitan Museum of Art posts on its website, which was the one the participants used. This in itself prompted a discussion of the different perspectives we had of the work.
The exercise was a wonderful reminder that art is truly in the eyes of the beholde