Whichever way you slice it

Though I am pretty much inept in the kitchen, my significant other keeps insisting that I adopt his passion for concocting amazing cuisine. This past weekend I suggested we try making Mango Chicken, my favorite dish at any Indian restaurant. We made something tasty, although it wasn't remotely Indian. Not surprisingly, we had to cut up some mangoes for the recipe. Mangoes are a tricky fruit to cut and so I went online and found step-by-step instructions.

http://homecooking.about.com/od/howtocookbasics/ss/cutmango.htm

The process is actually pretty amazing. You cut off two big sections of mango and create a checkerboard of incisions in the fruit, but not the skin. Afterwards, you turn the skin inside out and the fruit pops out, like scenes from a pop-up book, ready for extraction. It was so satisfying!

I kept thinking about the process for the rest of the weekend and it occurred to me that it was sort of similar to looking at art (particularly when there's a skilled facilitator). When you first see a work in front of you it may seem strange and impenetrable. When you start carefully looking, breaking things down into smaller, more manageable pieces and then the entire work begins to reveal itself and the viewer can access it at a new level. Hopefully the result is something more authentic than the Mango Chicken I made this weekend.

The poetry of pictures

A couple years ago my friend and I spent a hilarious afternoon on the third floor of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, where they were displaying pictures and poems by elementary school students. The children had studiously copied famous works of art and wrote short interpretive stanzas relating to their pictures. Some were poignant and thoughtful. Most of them seemed comical because the children focused on aspects of the paintings that were unimportant to the typical art historian but were fascinating to their young eyes. They became fixated on things like pearl earrings or walking sticks laid carelessly behind a portrait subject and in their reinterpretation of the work, the earrings or the walking stick took center stage. It was an absolute pleasure to see the works through the children's eyes.

At work, I recently asked a nine year old boy to write a response to a work in the museum's collection. He liked a picture of the Grand Canyon and he chose to write a poem. Here's my favorite part:

Formed over millions of years by wind, rain, ice and by the Colorado River.

A spectacular view captured on canvas to excite and inspire us,

Makes me want to go there and hang glide off the edge,

And go soaring through the canyon with the birds.

There's the funny and there's the poignant. And then sometimes, some one can capture the essence of a scene and what they have said or written becomes even better than the work itself.