Herb and Dorothy: I admire their principled, relentless, but entirely private pursuit of their personal inclination. I loved that they never sold even a single piece from their collection, that they never treated them as “assets” (I loathe it when people use that word,) and that when it was time to let go they gifted the collection to the National Art Gallery instead of some soulless museum like MOMA (which is right now sunk very low in my opinion because of what’s happening with the Folk Art Museum building.)I can understand that drive to collect, a little. You see I never thought, until I bought my first piece, that owning rather than just looking at art in a museum would make a difference. After all, one could just as well go regularly to a museum and get to know the same painting over time: when I lived in Virginia I used to go to the Freer Gallery every time I passed through DC to see the four Dewing panels and the more time I spent with them the more easily I heard them speak. And it sounds like possessiveness or egoistic perversity or a kind of selfishness, to feel that if you liked something you had to own it, I always felt a bit uncomfortable about that.
But when I held my first Toko Shinoda in my hands I realised how intimate the experience is, how making a piece part of your daily life, its very presence in your personal space, could change your relationship to it. I brought my Shinoda to the office and hung it just at the place where its bold but abbreviated beauty would impress itself on my eye when I walk through the door — it made my heart leap each time — not just when I came into the office at the start of the day, but even when I went nipped out to the bathroom and came back — that momentary blaze of beauty with each return — having that moment of soaring joy was important to me.
And I felt a kind of fevered delirium too — I saw her work at the Singapore Art Museum when I was 15 and I have loved her work ever since — but I never even imagined, all those years of seeing her on museum walls, that I would one day hold her work so close, see her strokes alive before me. It just didn’t seem possible.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird