by Donato

Lucas van Uffel     detail    Anthony Van Dyke

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an
incredible institution.  One of my favorite pastimes is to head to
the Met on a Friday night when the Museum is open late and most tourists
are staggering home or off to dinner.  The galleries are quieter (they
are never empty!) and the mood is one of contemplation and introspection as a string quartet’s music resounds within the main lobby.  It is a wonderful place to suppress worldly worries for a few hours.

I wanted to take in the art at the Met in a different
way seeing this was likely well over my hundredth visit in the twenty plus years I have lived in New York.  I wanted to see the same art a bit differently, to come at it with a fresh perspective.  I decided to focus upon faces, to sample expressions and intrepretations from the thousands of humans
staring back out at us through the history of art and to see see how various cultures and artists engaged their muse to speak to the future through their act of artistic expression.

The broad range of creativity, design, craft, and expression I experienced was staggering.  So much greater than I thought I would see.  I was amazed how every one of the faces (and body parts) struck
me as profoundly beautiful and sublime.  It made me appreciate the
diversity we enjoy through artistic expression, and recall that there is no universal truth to beauty, it is all in the eye of the beholder.