Informant38

There was a traveling exhibition of paintings called "The Impressionists" that toured the US back in the 80's. One of those tasks of bringing-together that transcend the self-interest of collectors and institutions.
I went down to San Francisco with some good friends to see it, at the De Young Museum. Even with the constant noise and psychic congestion of hundreds of other people moving through the rooms it was a wonderful experience. I went off by myself at one point, trying to get personal with what I was seeing, trying to take in as much as I could.
There was a landscape by Camille Pissarro that stopped me completely, with awe and recognition. A view of fields from a hill, gentle outrolling grass falling away toward a valley, the sun somewhere behind, no houses in the foreground, nothing detailed but it was so exactly a reproduced moment - I was emotionally broken into, released, it was an undeniably familiar thing and so big. I cried, sort of, there were tears in my eyes, and I kept resurfacing to where I was physically, the museum, the crowd around me, my friends somewhere close by, but something about that was permanent and it brought together things I held from childhood, light and a presence in the world, more than benevolence but warm that way, a human thing but not separate, woven into the limitless.
You could do one of those progressive magnifications of say one of the spectacular Hubble images, where the glory of the stellar cloud expands and you step down toward each degree without a break, there's an inevitability, a fitting in, and you could take it down through the solar system to this world and if it was accurate in a poetic sense of accuracy it would reveal a landscape like that. It made me think of God as that word was first given to me, when my eyes were still fresh from seeing the world unfold. It was the connection as much as the harmony and balance of it, or the connection was the harmony and balance of it. Something seamless, but still that accuracy, Pissarro there working but completely out of the way of the light and the work as a man, a medium for it, a vehicle, all of it passing through his eyes and his mind to his hands and held there by the paint and canvas.

So that was an epiphany too, though I didn't think of it that way, at the time.