Perspective(s) from a House of Art

Most art collections are housed in halls and museums that inspire awe and reverence. One unique art collection is housed in a building that from the outside is an elegant place built of concrete and manicured gardens with quoi ponds and a lush landscape. But from the inside the museum is meant to resemble a house. Dr. Barnes’ house, specifically. The Barnes Museum in Philadelphia is a unique assemblage of art that is placed in a way to resemble the original collector’s display in his own home. The rooms could easily be his living room, sitting area, entry hall. The collection was amassed by Dr. Albert Barnes between 1912 and 1951. Seeing the collection as Dr. Barnes intended it, an intimate view inside this recreation of his house, offered such a unique perspective.

I visited this house of a museum with a college roommate who shares my love of art. We had the typical impressionist posters in a room we shared in our sorority house. It was proof that we were adults and appreciated beauty in a way we didn’t think possible while still under our parents’ roof. My friend’s tastes have evolved as she confessed to appreciating other styles even more now, while I have remained stuck with the impressionists. The color, the light, the forms evoked by seemingly errant strokes still speak to me. While I’m learning to appreciate other styles, the impressionists have my heart.

One of my favorite pieces in the Barnes collection is The Postman, by Van Gogh (1889). It hangs on the wall in a specific way so that when viewed straight on it appears to contain one dominate color, a green hue. But viewed from a different place in the room, perhaps with different light impacting it, the color changes to a kind of soft yellow. Aside from the brilliance of the man who hung it in that way, this piece of art proves an adage that I have come to love. I heard it from Wayne Dyer but it could well have come from someone else (even the internet can’t decide).  “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”

“Change the way you look at things and

the things you look at change.”

Wayne Dyer

Perspective is an important component of the creative life. Whose story is it?  From where and when might they tell it? Questions asked so often in writing circles. We know that when a story is told by a different person, with a different perspective, the story changes. The details change, the voice switches, the moral shifts, the syntax transforms.

One weekend several years ago, I binged watched The Affair on Showtime. (Yes, I get inspiration from lots of sources!) It would have been a typical melodrama series with overwrought dialogue and scandalous plotlines but for one aspect: the continual change of perspective. The first 30 minutes of an episode is told by one character and the next, by another. The details would change or the conviction of a character’s certainty of a detail would be more emphatic. The second half was not just a repeat of the first but would pick up the story and move it along. But the fact that one character was convinced he’d worn his red polo shirt and the second character convinced he wore a green jacket underscores this idea that characters see, and remember, the same things differently.

Switching the perspective of a story by changing the point of view characters is enlightening as it is risky. I have done this in my novel by adding the perspective of the protagonist’s parents. They are morally compromised, stuck in their ways, and racists. These were not the kind of characters I wanted to spend much time exploring. But I’m glad I did spend some time with them as their perspective shed light on the main character in a way that I could not have achieved with just her single perspective.

Suddenly the hues of this character changed through a different perspective.