BEYOND YOUR CANVAS

"Stop there!" (holding his hands as though to frame her face) "Did you know that you are a Leonardo, smiling at things beyond your canvas?"

Cecil to Lucy, Room with a View

I love the Mona Lisa. I also have always been fascinated by the American Indians, so my take on the Mona Lisa combines the two. I painted her just for myself! I love things that don't quite match up, don't belong together but are together nonetheless, or aren't quite what they first appear to be. Incongruity. Goats in trees, pancakes for supper, simultaneous rain and sunshine. I like for my first notion to be challenged; I like to be forced to take a second look. Two of my wonderful friends were too quiet to make much of an impression on me at when I first met them, but as I came to know them I came to know what treasures they truly are, and appreciate their company all the more ESPECIALLY because of our differences! I know for sure that in everyone we meet, there is more than meets the eye and you truly cannot "judge a book by its cover." I hate to be sized up on a few little assumptions; I am way too complex, idiosyncratic, and even self-contradicting! Who's not? :)

Not only are we limited by the"canvas" another person shows when we first meet them, we are limited by our own canvas as well - our perceptions and our own little world view! I sometimes have to remind myself that the way I see things is not necessarily the "right" way, just the way that makes the most sense to me. Being a good friend means jumping into the other person's canvas as best we can, if only so they have company there. Rarely does it work to try to bring someone else around to our way of thinking. And even so I'm smiling because all you've just read IS my way of thinking :) How does it look from your canvas?

Love, RED

"In order to express our sense of reality, we must use some kind of symbol: words or notes or shades of paint or television pictures or sculpted forms. None of these symbols or images can ever completely satisfy us because they can never be more than what they are ~ a fragment of a reflection of what we feel reality to be."

Fred Rogers, from The World According to Mister Rogers