This painting is called Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte. It is by the French painter Georges Seurat. There are many reasons why this painting has always been a particular favorite of mine, and one that inspires me. I love impressionism, and this painting is a great example of it. Impressionism is basically a whole bunch of teeny tiny dots and splashes of painting that someone come together to make an image. It reminds me a line from the movie Clueless, where the character Cher describes impressionism as looking really good from far away but up close it is just a big old mess. That label fits life so perfectly---especially when we are comparing our own lives to someone else's. Everything looks great from a distance, but when you get right up close and personal, you can start to see the flaws, the cracks, the things that make something imperfect.
Another reason I love this painting is that it is a centerpiece of a great scene in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, one of my favorite non-serious movies. The whole art institute scene in the movie particularly inspires me, from the Seurat painting, to the accompanying music by Dream Academy, to the fact that the mood of the scene transports me instantly to that time period in my life and I re-live it all. When I was in Chicago recently I was able to see this painting up close and personal and I took a whole slew of every increasingly close-ups of the painting, mimic-ing the scene John Hughes did in the film. Art brought to life.