At 11:30am I headed off to the Jepson Center a Telfair Museum. This was a nice change walk with a tempature of 56 degrees today. Once I got there the door was opened for me by a guy whos job is to open the door. How nice is that? I would have never expected that in a museum. I paid the $15 admission for an adult (it is only $5 if you are a student) and headed up the beautiful stairway.

When I reached the first level I turned right and ended up in an area of Dutch impression paintings that were done by what I am assuming to be students of Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). At first I did not realize this and was thinking to myself the paintings were okay but I expected more. The I realized they were by students. So I ran away from the new art and went in search of something old.

On the third floor I found an area for children much like the one on the second floor I had avoided (due to the school that was visiting with 50+ 7 year olds). But this time I wandered in because I figured someone with a kid just might be reading this. So into the sea of 7 year olds I dove! There were activities that got kids involved in art which such as a wall with common household objects that were all magnetized. The kids could move things to make faces, people, houses, the sky is the limit with this. This is a fun place to visit if little ones in the group when visiting Savannah.

After surviving the room of ankle bitters I made it in to the main exhibit “Dutch Utopia.” In here I found myself leaning towards the pictures to see the brush strokes of masterpieces that were a hundred years old. It is one thing to take a photograph but a whole different thing to paint something and make it recognizable let alone captivating. These painters had it down to perfection.

The brush strokes and paint colors mixed in the canvas created wonder and amazement to anyone in its presents. The sight bit of crackling oil on canvas and the crinkled edges of the aged paper with watercolor placed in ways that no kindergartner could ever do made me feel like I was looking through the eyes of someone who was telling the story of how life was once simple, hard yet appreciated, and mainly it left me in awe. One of these paintings was going to be to me how I felt, how it was for me to pick up and leave everything I knew back in my hometown of Hampshire, IL, but which one was it?

I walked through many times looking at every painting in awe but not feeling towards the painting how I felt about my journey to Savannah. Yet one painting by James Jebusa Shannon I could not get enough of. Every time I was within eyesight of it I had to stop and stare. There was something about it that was beautiful and drew me in. Finally I stood in front of it to see if I could figure out what it was drawing me in. I got really close so I could see the light reflecting off the brush stokes left on the canvas. The cheeks of the tow girls were perfectly colored and how he knew to put the dark paint on the same brush as the light I do not know. But I was left in amazement and I knew that this was the painting that meant the most to me here.

There is a mother reading to her daughter in this painting and the pairing of colors with the sky in the background and the dresses they are wearing left me wanting more. To the left of this painting was aonthor that also caught my eye. To no surprise they were by the same painter. But these two girls with a dog at their feet reading on the hillside reached out to me. They were looking at at a book reading the pages with words of an author that they had not known. Me moving to Savannah, I am living the stories that are written by author that do know. But unlike a book I cannot just turn the page as I please, I have to wait and see what is written for me.

To anyone reading this, James Jebusa Shannon is an amazing artist and if his paintings are in Savannah or Chicago or Paris I would travel to see them. They will not disappoint but yet leave you with a place in your gut that wants more to life then what is seen from the outside. They will leave you wanting to find who are really meant to become.