Watching a dog be a dog…
‘’There is not a single contemporary painter in the world that does not pray in front of ‘The Dog,”’ Manuela Mena observes. As I stand before it, I think of a story she recounted. The painter Joan Miro, in the last year of his life, paid a final visit to the Prado, and Mena was assigned to escort him through the museum. When she asked him what he would like to see, he said, ‘’I want to see ‘The Dog’ of Goya.'’ He sat in front of it for half an hour… “Arthur Lubow, NYT, quoted here.
Email from Prufrock points me to Jonathan Safran Foer’s NYT op-ed on dogs in the city:
My morning walk with George is very often the highlight of my day — when I have my best thoughts, when I most appreciate both nature and the city, and in a deeper sense, life itself. Our hour together is a bit of compensation for the burdens of civilization: business attire, e-mail, money, etiquette, walls and artificial lighting. It is even a kind of compensation for language. Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness? And why does it make one feel, in the best sense of the word, human?
Good painting, Uma, even though I had not heard of it before. I recently saw a lot of French paintings and noticed gleefully that several of them have dogs.
That NYT op-ed was very touching…almost brought me to tears. I could relate to it a lot even though I’ve had a dog for less than two years now. Here’s to all the dogs and dog lovers!
Comment by Nithya — November 30, 2006 @ 3:43 pm