She spent 6 straight hours in there, alone. She brought her sketchbook and a digital camera and saw almost every work had ever wanted to witness up close and personally (well, besides all the classics in the Louvre). She saw pieces by Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, El Greco, Bernini, Cassat, Rodin, Corbet, Renoir, O'Keefe, Gauguin, Hopper, Vermeer, Hals, Warhol. The only one she really wanted to see but didn't get to was an anatomical sketch by Da Vinci; she asked a man at the information desk and he said it wasn't on display. At any rate, the experience was surreal; she had seen the images on posters, in text books, in art books, advertisements, postcards, and then right there in front of her face: the real deal. The true tones and textures of the paint, the dimples in the bronze, the swirls in the marble. It was hard to wrap her mind around the fact that the paint on the canvases she was viewing had been laid down by brushes held by the masters. The paintings are records of their movements; the tangible evidence of their visions, their minds, and their existence. The whole thing was very inspiring. She thought, “I want to draw and paint and write and hope that some part of any of it is good enough so that maybe hundreds of years after my body is gone, my mind will be here in the form of paint on canvas or ink on paper. Please God, let me do something that will touch people in some way. Touch any person in any way. Let me do that before I die.” Because that was success, in her opinion, and she wanted to be successful.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o></o>
