Meeting old friends for the very first time

When was the last time you met someone for the first time and felt like you were already old friends? Not just the sensation that you liked and understood one another upon first meeting, which is rare enough, but that you had a shared history of life experiences that were so similar, that you must have passed one another at events or in the hallways of your lives. Was this a perception from the past or a precognition of the future? This thought rambled through my mind from the moment I first met Monina Von Opel, and her husband Edward, at my studio this past weekend. Both having lived in Paris, and she as a fashion editor, had me convinced we had more in common than baguettes and brie.

They had arrived for a studio visit to select an oil painting for the permanent collection at the Martha's Vineyard Hospital. The recently built modern facility contains many works from some of the top artists known on the island and elsewhere. I was thrilled to be sought out for the honor and had cleaned up the studio for the visit.

Works bubble wrapped for their long term protection were freed from the encasements and sparkled  like new again. As we poured over the works, my artistic past in oils and watercolors flowed before our eyes, with many attendant stories of how and where they came about. Though the works have been with me all along, they felt like children returning home and showing me how much they had grown. For artists, the distance of time is the only way one's works can be truly appreciated by its creator. In time all the unmet desires for the work falls away and the art stands on its own in the artist's eyes.

Monina and Edward selected "Rose Dawn" to grace the walls of the gallery, as a memory of our new found friendship. https://www.mvhospital.com/art/collection