It took me a while to decide on a New Year’s resolution this year. I had little plans, making sure I was doing things on time and keeping my life organized, but nothing more than I do all the time. Those mental reminders that you always tell yourself and hope that this time you’ll actually stay on point with them. But this past Saturday I finally decided on what I wanted to keep myself doing for the rest of 2012.
My resolution came to me after I realized that the show I wanted to see at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston was closing in three days. With the work schedule I had there was only one morning left open for me to see the art that had been open on a tab on my Google browser for the past two months. So, dragging myself out of bed unnecessarily early on a Saturday when I wasn’t working until the afternoon, I made my way through the chill of a January morning down to the ICA.
The exhibit I went to see, Dance/Draw, deserves its own post that I may or may not actually write. In my current line of thought, the important part was what it made me realize. Despite the fact that I work with art everyday, I surround myself with it in my school, my jobs, and even the type of people in my life, I found that I missed going to see art.
I’ve been living in Boston for over half a year now and until this past Saturday I hadn’t been to a single museum except the one where I work. Even there, I’ve only gone to actually look at the art for my own enjoyment and artistic development once or twice. There’s always next weekend, when I don’t have to work or go to class, or that friend who said they would go with me, just not today.
But there’s no excuse.
With the free entrance I get to the many museums in the Boston area, the easy T ride to all of them and the amount of holes I have in my schedule I can’t even pretend to have one. Art is my life. After three hours in the museum walking at a pace that a snail would laugh at so that I could read the writing on each of the pieces as well as absorb the visual effect, I was reminded just what that statement means. I walked out of that museum with my mind whirring so fast that it felt like I wasn’t actually thinking, I was just living the ideas of my art. Each breath I took, step I made, piece of trash I saw, was a possible inspiration for a piece of art, for my next creation.
And so we come to my New Year’s resolution. Once a month, without fail, I am going to dedicate a day to viewing art. Not to making it, not to thinking about it, researching it, or talking about it, but to actually standing in front of new art pieces. If all goes well, I’ll go to more than one a month. If all goes really well, every time I go I will be inspired to actually write on this blog. It’s a new year and art is as strong a part of my life as ever. I plan to keep it that way.