Early this morning before I went to hear a lecture on the history of the San Diego Museum of Art, I read a piece in this week’s The New Yorker about a controversy surrounding the proposed plan to develop a casino on the Long Island Shinnecock Indian Reservation out near the Hamptons. The piece by Ariel Levy caught my attention for a couple of reasons. One of them is that my Brother Jim lives out there; and a second reason is that Shinnecock blood has been mixed over a couple of centuries through intermarriage mostly with African Americans and it’s hard to tell them from any other ethnic group. My great-great grandmother on my Mother’s side was Cherokee, so I have just enough Native American blood in me to make me pay attention to anything written about what has happened to the descendants of indigenous North Americans.

I ramble... but what I started out to say was how sometimes something I hadn’t thought about for decades comes up twice in my wandering through a day. I read the Levy piece about the Shinnecock Indian Nation, and then I went to the museum where I made a special point of going to visit a William Merritt Chase painting which I especially like called An Afternoon Stroll which as it happens was painted at the Chase family summer home at Shinnecock. I've always liked this Impressionist painting probably because it's very "photographic"... the way some photographs are "painterly." When I look at the painting I think about how the scene would look through the viewfinder of my camera... about what I would have to do to get just right that row of trees and their shadows and the white dress turned away from the light.Where am I going with this ramble. I don’t really know, but I like the coincidence of my having read about the Shinnecock Indian Nation an hour before I learned that William Merritt Chase lived at Shinnecock. He had absolutely nothing to do with the Shinnecock tribe, and as far as I know none of his paintings have Native American themes. In the same room with An Afternoon Stroll is another Chase painting done also at Shinnecock. I like coincidences especially when they turn out to be harmless. I also don’t know what Georgia O’Keefe’s having taken painting lessons from William Merritt Chase has anything to do with anything... certainly can’t be called a coincidence... but when I see their paintings in the same rooms of a museum in San Diego, I think it’s a little like walking down a street in a town and knowing that two people I like very much live on that same street. Another painting that I like very much is hanging in the same room with the Chase paintings. It’s by Eastman Johnson and is called A Woman Reading. As far as I know, Eastman Johnson didn’t have anything to do with Georgian O’Keefe or William Merritt Chase.And then I went upstairs to take a look at Giorgione’s Portrait of a Man where I was reminded by a docent that this painting is comparable in importance in the art world to the Mona Lisa. It is one of the most important Renaissance portraits in the United States. Giorgione was painting in Venice about the time Columbus was discovering America, so I definitely can’t make a connection between his Portrait of a Man and Shinnecock. So sometimes there doesn’t have to be any connection between things to give them meaning... even on a day that begins with a very nice coincidence. It’s just that I know I like the way Chase and O’Keefe and Johnson and Giorgione saw the world, and I want to know how and why it is that they felt it was important to leave something from their experience of living on this earth that would make a person like me glad to be alive on it as well. Giorgione’s man, somber and intense, glancing out at me from the Fifteenth Century, informs me about the importance of seeing the world. It makes me wish I could get all the politicians in the world, a few at a time, to take a stroll with me through a couple of galleries at the San Diego Museum of Art...