An artistic day

My Aunt Pauline and I had a fun outing to the Seattle Art Museum for lunch and an artistic experience. There was a show of Edward Hopper paintings of women, etchings, and some images by photographers who influenced Hopper. The paintings are intimate glimpses of women in an age of flux. The Victorian era and its mores had passed, and women were emerging into public as independent individuals – and judging by Hopper’s vision, as lonely individuals. I took a photo of my aunt looking at one of the pictures, and remarked that her coat matched the clothes in the painting. Minutes later I saw a woman in a red hat admiring a painting of another woman in a red hat, and I was about to snap that, when the guard came up and said, “Sorry, no photography.” I was disappointed, and so was the woman in the red hat – the human woman, not the oil painting woman who didn’t seem to care. Then we had a yummy lunch in the Museum restaurant, where, given that it was an art museum, even the salt was artistic. Photography did seem to be allowed in the restaurant, so I took a Hopperesque photo of a couple at the bar.