Slow down. Look. See with your mind.

From "How to Read Pictures," the opening of Alice Elizabeth Chase's 1951 text Famous Paintings: An Introduction to Art for Young People:

Today we do things fast. We speed across the country in automobiles or airplanes. We flip over the pages of magazines with little more than a glance at each picture. But there are many things that still take time, like listening to music or looking at good pictures. Here in this book is a gallery of pictures to be looked at slowly. Some will appeal immediately to your eyes. If you want to see with your mind, too, look, then read, then look again. [Boldface added.] Some pictures you will like at once; their language is simple and easy to understand. Others you may begin to like until you have looked ten or twenty times; their language requires more study and thought. Some you may grow tired of. Others you may come to like more and more. Some you will feel like looking at when you are tired or discouraged, others when you are happy. But if you take the time to look and look you will find that a great work of art has many things to say to you and that you are learning to read the language of pictures.

Sing it, sister!

Heh, heh, heh.

Regular M-mv readers know how much I appreciate both the synchronicity and serendipity at work in my reading, thinking, and learning life. How's this for a neat bit of that ol' S&S magic?

On the way home from one of our most recent trips to Chicago, we stopped at American Science & Surplus, where I found a deck of Art Rummy cards featuring images from the National Gallery of Art -- for a $1.

Cool, I thought, and added them to our loot (which also included two Venus fly traps, a sun print kit, and two small figures of the Terra Cotta soldiers from Qin Shi Huang Di's tomb). As we toodled along the highway, I read the essay printed in agate type on the cover card, "Going to Museums." It described the "hunt-and-find" game, in which the members of a museum-going group identify one subject and then search for it throughout the art museum. "For example, who can find the most scenes that include horses or that show children at play?"

Fans of Chasing Vermeer (Blue Balliet) know that the innovative Ms. Hussey proposes just such a "hunt and find" game to her sixth-grade class when she suggests that they look for letters at the Art Institute.

"How about paintings? All you have to do is look." Ms. Hussey said she'd noticed that art often showed what was important to people in any given time. It revealed things. Besides, she'd said with a smile, she was tired of being in school all day. It was time for a field trip.

Everyone sat up.

Of course, I knew about Ms. Hussey because the Misses and I had just read Chasing Vermeer for the Summer 2009 incarnation of our "Girls Rule Book Club." We had also read a very simple biography of Vermeer from the juvenile non-fiction shelves, just to get some basic facts down, and in our wanderings had stumbled on a later edition of Famous Paintings: An Introduction to Art for Young People. After only one evening with the book, all of us agreed: We need to own this.

And now, as the excerpt with which I opened this entry suggests, we do.

I know. Cool, right?

Synchronicity. Serendipity.