Portland Art Museum

The Portland Art Museum is provocative at every turn, in every room, on every image-filled sheet. Through cold, bare spaces, huge canvases of messy paint project myriad emotions so intensely that I am barely able to breathe as I trip all over the stories in my cream and white-gold heels. I am inspired to write.

Twists of copper, iron, and other metals stand jagged on the floor. They almost look like dangerous benches, pianos, and even a swing set. I want to sit on them, but I feel afraid the communicative curators will shoot me with a 1957 rifle or just whip one of those statues of the head of Jean Baptiste off its rocker and whack me with it. Ideas, though, are what I pull from the complicated, detailed, and technical pieces, the ones that I can move if only I was allowed to touch them, like a giant chess set.

I can’t wait to finish some sketch pieces as inspiration consumes me. I like black and white, and I learn how bare minimalism is. Previously, I had guessed that minimalism was tiny drawings full of detail. But no, actually, it is big and uses the least of “items,” if you will, on the canvas to portray what I think is emotion. Think beautiful pink dots on white mixed with yellow; a long, shiny red board leaning; or a cohesive parody of Divinci's and others' famous works complete with an upturned mustache and a dollhouse sized men's toilet hanging from a board.

As I am making my way out, I learn from a security guard that a collection of abstract pottery coils were juxtaposed for the reason that it represents the unity and diversity of the museum itself. I swear I saw a green banana peel hanging from that board earlier (in fact, it's still there). I begin to grasp that a little bit of clay intertwined from the base is all woman, to appreciate femininity from someone else. I think it is a dancing representation.

Geometric structures can also be organic.