Book Neat, Life Messy

In This Bloutcher

• Announcements
• Book Neat, Life Messy; Or Seeing Matisse's Basket of Oranges in person for the first time

Announcements

• My sister Miriam reports: "My iPhone has now stopped auto correcting bloutcher (to butcher) and has started autofilling "bloutcher." Made me think: iPhone therefore iAm!

• An idea to unabashedly promote Becoming a Life Change Artist. Recommend the book for book clubs you are part of

• I will be speaking to the New Jersey Professional Coaches Association on September 21, beginning at 6:30 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn, Raritan Center, Edison, New Jersey. Topic: "The Great Masters of Art Reveal the Secrets to a New Coaching Paradigm." You can find a full listing of future speaking and programs on the events page of my website: www.fredmandell.com
  

Book Neat, Life Messy

Matisse's painting Basket of Oranges, 1912, is luxuriously succulent. Just ask Pablo Picasso. You see, Picasso and Matisse were great artistic rivals, yet Picasso was so smitten by Basket of Oranges that he acquired it in the early 1940's and kept it in his home until his death in 1973. Today, it hangs in the Picasso Museum in Paris.

I first encountered this painting in an art book. The color was so vibrant, the design so balanced and clean that I acquired a photographic image and set it on my desk. I marveled at the creative prowess of Matisse that he could paint something more perfect, more flawless than the original basket of oranges. Whenever I got hungry it seemed to fill me up. I don't mean to over romanticize the thing but the painting did nourish me.

Then I visited the Picasso Museum in Paris last spring with great anticipation at seeing this painting. As I approached it I was struck from a distance by its enduring luminescence. The pinks vibrated, the oranges pulsated, the very painting seemed to want to leap from the wall.

But as I got closer something strange happened. I was no longer looking at a photographic representation of the painting in a book, but the real McCoy, up close and personal and what I saw really set me back. The surface of the painting had been worked and reworked. Parts had been scraped out and other parts had been painted over. The surface was not photographically smooth but scratched and thickened. Certain sections looked almost primitively dabbed at as though they had been put there in a fit of frustration. Yet, despite these many "imperfections"--or perhaps because of them--the painting took on a new kind of breathless beauty for me, one born out of the struggle to not accept the ordinary.

I walked away from Basket of Oranges in a sweat. I felt I had not only encountered a great painting but I had been taught a life lesson. Real life like real painting is a messy process. What may seem effortless from a distance or in a book is in truth the outcome of struggle, emotional ups and downs, fits and starts, tears and fears. It can be plain ugly.

Life can be like that also. We experience moments of grace and beauty. We aspire as Joseph Campbell said for the "experience of being alive" more than we aspire to the meaning of life. Most of the time, though, we are at the easel of our lives dabbing, scraping, painting over, scraping again, experimenting and wondering how to get the most out of ourselves.

Matisse's greatness is in part due to his willingness to endure the messiness of it all in order to create something extraordinary. I can't speak for Picasso but my hunch is that he may have bought the painting to remind himself of that as well.

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