The other day, someone I just met, a young woman named Sarah, told me, “I’m a deep person,” meaning that she considered herself to be insightful and intuitive.
I responded with a muffled, “Oh,” and swallowed a laugh. It seemed to me that only a shallow person would proclaim herself to be “deep.”
I met Sarah and her partner, Jason, on a group tour I led at the local art museum. As a docent, I engaged them in dialogue about nine of the museum’s greatest treasures. At the first painting, Sarah blew me away.
Modigliani’s “Seated Nude“ has a somber, staring expression, with no pupils in the green eyes. Sarah and Jason had never heard of this artist who lived in Paris in the early 1900s. When I asked Sarah and Jason what they felt about the painting, Sarah said, “It’s as if this person is really sick, you know, so sick that she goes blank and can barely see or feel anymore.”
My chin probably dropped as I gaped at Sarah, astounded. Modigliani suffered for many years with tuberculosis. He hid his disease from others, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. I double-checked the date he completed the painting: 1918. This was one of the last paintings he did. He died in 1920. Sarah was right on target.
At the Georgia O’Keeffe landscape paintings of Maui, which Sarah had never seen before, she said, thoughtfully, “Since I’ve recently moved to Hawaii, I’ve become aware of the female goddess energies alive in nature here, like Pele (the volcano deity). O’Keeffe must have felt them too, because I see some in these paintings.” She pointed towards the top of a landscape. “There’s a cat-like female face there.”
Again, Sarah nailed it. Many art critics see powerful abstracted figures in O’Keeffe’s work.
Sarah humbled me with her intuitive accuracy. The next time someone tells me she is a deep person, I’ll believe her.
