On The Road

The whole point of my having a souvenir of a journey or a trip or a travel is to jog my memory. A souvenir acts as a touchstone, so that when I see it, or touch it, the memory of the day or moment when I got it comes flooding back. I write about souvenirs a lot on this site - well - I ask people to leave their comments about their souvenirs. I always find what other people bring back with them to be interesting and there is always a story entwined with the object. Most people don’t realize that though, until they are asked about it.

The other day I was at my storage unit - I’m cleaning it out and giving a lot of useless stuff away. Painters and artists in general are such packrats. Keep everything for the sake of making art out of it - someday. But I came across a box that had been carefully packed before being placed in storage. It contained a number of things - mostly things that I had received as gifts.

Within that big box was another smaller box marked Art Postcards From Travels. I slowly opened it up. Inside were all of my favorite souvenirs.

Most people visit museums because they think they are supposed to. How could someone go to Paris and not see the Impressionist works at the Musee d’Orsay? As an art student, and then now as an artist, I visit museums frequently not to tick the museum or the art work off of a to-do list, but to study. I’ve always gone to museums to see and explore the masterworks of artists, to study the layers of Van Gogh’s paintings, or to study the physical dynamics of Michelangelo’s sculpture. And then, after visiting the works of art, I would go to the museum store to purchase postcards of the work I had seen.

I randomly pull a few out of the stack.

Five Turners from the first time I went to the Tate Gallery in 1986.

The Veiled Lady by Raphael, from a trip to Florence that same year, is one of my favorite portraits in The Uffizi, not because of the face, but because of the painterly way the fabric of her dress was recorded. I went there on a hot September day, no waiting in line in those days.

Le Lit (The Bed) by Toulouse-Lautrec is one of my favorite paintings in the Musee d’Orsay along with Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Planers) by Gustave Caillebotte. Although I have to admit that finding an absolute favorite in the Musee d’Orsay is really difficult as my stack of postcards from that museum is really large. I found those on my trip to Paris in 2000.

There are even a few from the old Dali museum in Cleveland, many from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh where I went to art school, some from a trip I took to Washington DC in 1976, and not as many as I thought from Rome.

I flip through the cards and remember the days, the travels, the weather, the experience and even what I ate for lunch - which is kind of funny because I couldn’t tell you what I had for lunch yesterday!

One other random thing I found in the box marked Art Postcards From Travels was my first passport. The only mark in the book is a Radiant Baby drawn and signed by my art school buddy K. Haring. I remember the night I asked him to draw in it - he was kind of taken aback, he didn’t want to deface a government document! But I assured him the passport was set to expire soon so it would be ok. There are two dates on it because he transposed the numbers and then corrected himself.

Tell me about your favorite souvenir and the memory it brings back to you. Or go look in the various regions on the site, like the Yucatan, Paris, San Francisco, or Prague for a With Eyes Open Survey Question about souvenirs!