During junior year, many Hopkins students know someone returning from abroad, or are, in fact, coming back to the States themselves. Ask any one of these weary travelers, and they'll tell you of the adjustment involved when sinking back into the routine of classes, homework and the MSE library. These 21st-century Gullivers will talk of language adjustments, of shifting in work and leisure time and of completely different food. I too am one of those returning to Hopkins after time abroad, but rather than coming from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, or Australia, I came back from the land of Work.
And what type of world it is. I found myself navigating the waters of what some imagine as a post-grad event after, quite frankly, burning out on Hopkins' academia (sympathy pats all around). By sheer luck, I landed an internship in the Conservation Department at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa. I speak of fortune for several reasons: 1. It saved me from sloth and selling stoves (a completely different story), 2. Wonderful people work in the Conservation Department, and 3. Art. The wonderful, glorious art.
I'll go ahead and make another admission before I begin my Barnes' primer. Not only was I burned out, I was wayward. I knew I had a deep passion and appreciation of art, but I had no clue about how I wanted to direct said passion. Now I've had my epiphany. It's conservation. Not saving trees and manatees, although that would be fun, but saving artwork.
Here's the perfect excuse to learn as much as one possibly can and then apply it in a systematic fashion. For every conservationist has, in their hands and brains, a wealth of information on art history, fine art and chemistry. Yes, chemistry.
It approaches art in a fairly unorthodox way: the physical elements of art. Historians think of art in a temporal context, viewers think of it in a visceral or aesthetic context, philosophers in a soul-tweaking context and artists in a manipulative context.
Of all these groups that engage themselves with art, the conservationist is the only one who has to absorb a little bit of each viewpoint and then add their own context of atoms, chemicals and physics. In this way, art truly becomes its own organism, one that not only affects and communicates, but also one that breathes, changes and retains a physical dynamism through the ages.
So, to veer from the prosthyletizing, I'll relate why my semester off was akin to traveling abroad. Let's assume that people who go abroad have experiences that are completely unfathomable to them here. They see great sites, engage with people very different from them, and hopefully mature and come out a more educated, erudite soul.
By no stretch of the imagination, I can include myself in such a group. The people I worked with were very different from what I was used to, and from them I learned more than I ever have in 14-plus years of schooling. Perhaps most importantly, I saw some of the wonders of the art world --- Matisses, Van Goghs, Renoirs. To see Matisse's Joy of Life only a few inches from my face and unframed was perhaps the closest possible thing to a spiritual experience without seeing the face of God.
The land of Work is a strange one, a communal of my Oz and Kansas.The black-and-white of home was transformed into a Technicolor dream among so many French masterworks. Do I believe that my life after graduation will be so blessed? Certainly not, but at least I can hope for splashes of Dorothy's life.
