Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Art

Art

I love great art. I define it as something that gives me “The Warm and Fuzzies,” or its corollary, “The Cold Chills.” I think these are opposite ends of the “Art Appreciation Gene.“

I like the fine arts, music, literature….virtually anything in which that thread of creative energy has been captured and resonates. At the present time we are on a vacation and my wife and I like to stop at Antique Shops. We have been doing this for years and they are great places to prowl around in search of an object that has the creative resonance.

There must be many out there like myself because as the years pass the tingle is getting harder and harder to find. What I see more and more is old stuff that was low quality to begin with and hasn’t improved with time just because the paint wore off. When I was stationed in Europe it was everywhere. In those days it wasn’t finding it, it was affording it. In an European Antique Shop there are many more tingles than you will ever find in a shop here in the United States. Still you can find it. The trick is to keep your mind open and instead of finding it, let it find you.

This is another example of a gem laying out there in a sea of stones. If you are looking for a diamond you probably won’t see an emerald. For example several years ago I saw a collection of Hummel’s (Porcelain German Figurines). My mother had been an avid collector and I knew something about them and began looking. A woman had passed away and her collection had found its way into the shop. The dealer had them priced about right and Hummel’s had never been a collectible that really rang my chimes. However, on the edge of the collection, collecting dust, with a crack running down her arm was a cherubic angel. It was a piece of Meissen, no doubt the showcase of her collection, that had somehow gotten overlooked.

In Germany an Antique Dealer has taken me under his wing and taken and interest in me. He was EX Military and had a passion for his wartime service and antiques. He had a collection of Meissen and showed me how to spot it. “You can’t afford this Percy, but you need to know what the good stuff looks like.“ It has been heavily counterfeited over the years but if you look closely in the details and the glaze you can see the difference between a real example and a knock off or forgery.

Anyway, there with the Hummel’s was an honest to goodness Meissen Figurine, a beautiful example and my heart started racing. I asked to see it and knew without turning it over and checking for the distinctive crossed swords trade mark, what it was. Since it was damaged and since the dealer didn’t know what it was I got it at an affordable price and it remains the greatest discovery I have ever found…

Now what does this have to do with writing you ask…. Yeah, it’s a great human interest story but Writing.Com is about writing. Good writing, great examples of the craft are scattered about everywhere. We have favorite authors and we tend to start there but everything our favorite authors produce is not guaranteed to give the tingle. Sometimes it comes from the most unexpected places, some ordinary person caught the muse on a good day and hit the lotto, but there was no pay off. Maybe it got picked up and published in Readers Digest or some other source where it flashed in the pan a few thousand times and was then forgotten. Sometimes it’s written by someone who writes from an orientation you don’t share… Like a gay or Lesbian writer and you feel turned off and once you sense that orientation you quite reading. But great literature can come from anywhere and you have to be ready for it to find you.

Sure when I go to an Antique shop I’m looking for another example like my cherub, but lightening doesn’t strike twice in the same spot and you don’t have to be much of a patron to know what crossed sabers looks like. However yesterday, I found another gorgeous piece…no it wasn’t Meissen but it resonated, it was beautifully sculpted, cast , painted and the patina was glorious. The artist who did it definitively had a good day back around the turn of the century.

You never know where it’s going to pop up so keep an open mind. Sometimes it pops up in the middle of a written work…you’ll be reading along in a catatonic stupor about to fall asleep and a writer will suddenly hit a vein of pure inspiration…We all have our filters in place…there is to much information out there for it to ever be otherwise but try and give them a little tilt, maybe the slightest crack, so when your muse says, “Dummy! Take a look at this,” you aren’t too preoccupied.