I'm Italy Mons and this is The Slowdown.

One of the things I love about art is how we bring ourselves to whatever it is we are

experiencing.

Whether we want to or not we see ourselves in the film, the poem, the painting, the song.

Art is like this room we walk in and it's not a mirror exactly but if we're finally quiet enough

we can see ourselves reflected fully and so we move from room to room and confront ourselves

again and again.

Growing up with a mother who was an artist was always interesting because if I saw something in

her work when she was standing there sometimes she would say well not really it was funny to have

the artist there to actually disagree with you and put you straight about her intention.

But sometimes I was spot on once when we were driving from San Francisco to Sonoma I was on

Highway 121 and right across from Ramsgate Winery I saw a tree that sort of stuck out to the side of

a soft golden hill and said oh my god mom that's your tree that's your painting and it delighted

her to know that I had seen it and could point it out among the hundreds of trees that

reflect the landscape in the valley.

But most of us don't have the opportunity to talk to the artist or even if we do we might be

disappointed. Georgia O'Keefe famously denied that her incredible flower paintings were meant

to canot female sex organs in any way to which I will only respond a hem and then of course

there's the paintings that can be interpreted in many different ways.

Once right after my stepmother died I went to Amsterdam with my friend Jen and everything I saw

in Vincent Van Gogh's paintings were things that were absent, things that were missing,

loneliness, a grief because when we walk into a room of paintings we often find to our confusion

...