I have a lot of friends who aren’t acquainted with, for lack of a better word, the “art world.” The art world is a very loosely and ambiguously used term, usually (I’ve found) used by people who feel on the outside of it and don’t quite understand it. But I love all my friends, and sometimes my non-artist friends end up at art galleries and museums with me. I have found over the years that many of them have a hard time seeing. And I don’t mean they need contact lenses or binoculars, but they have difficulty understanding what makes a great painting great or why something should be appreciated. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think EVERYthing that ends up in a gallery is worth being appreciated 
But many of them do, and it’s a growing desire in me to help people see.
The gallery exhibit in this photo is by Brett Andrus, and I for one, was enamored with each of these works. The one on the left in this photo, though, is my favorite one. And I could wax poetic to you about brush strokes and composition (because he’s done a phenomenal job with those things), but this one just had that x-factor for me… that unspeakable something that drew me in. The entire show was composed of these larger than life faces of beautiful women, but there was something about this particular woman that got to me; I couldn’t take my eyes off her. There’s enough pain in her eyes to suggest that she hasn’t always had it easy in life… even the fact that one of her eyes is in the light and the other is in the shadows makes me think she’s seen both the beauty and the pain of what life is. And she looks almost straight at me, unafraid yet not menacing, either asking me to share my stories of beauty and pain or wanting me to ask her about her own.
And I love this mother and child taking time to pause for this one. I thought “maybe this mother knows how to see.” And maybe she’s going to teach that precious curly-haired boy to see, and inspire a whole new generation of art makers.
photo taken at Kreuser Gallery in Colorado Springs. 50mm lens. This show is up for the rest of September.
