Aging with Grace

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life .

Oscar Wilde

If you think about it, we are the artists of our own lives and what we present is individual to only us. The portrait we paint of ourselves is a composite of every aspect of our lives. The clothes we wear, what we eat, who we chose as friends, our home, our beliefs, all combine to give others a view of who we are.

We decide what others see of us and as though it were a piece of art on a museum wall, they look and decide how they feel about what we present. A local art museum had an exhibit featuring 120 pieces of Monet’s work, covering most of his life. Starting with his earliest projects and continuing into his finally years, you could see the changes as his views and experiences were expressed in his paintings. We disclose to those around us, by our every choice, the person we have created.

In a perfect world, what we present to others would be a true picture of who we are. I don’t think it’s that easy. Instead of realism, we sometimes paint something more abstract and harder to discern.