My grandmother Sarah was an artist. She had a studio behind her modest house in Charlotte, North Carolina, a small wooden shed that she called the Poop Deck, where I could always find her molding clay into figures, welding abstract forms out of iron and steel, making plaster casts, or painting. I remember vividly the anticipation of that first whiff of oil paint and wet clay as I entered this creative zone animated with portrait busts and sculpted figures, art books, works by other artist friends, and choice specimens of nature, including a perfectly preserved robin’s eggshell and a genuine pygmy skeleton. We never discussed the genesis of this place, and I never wondered at the name she used for it until quite recently, when I learned that a poop deck is that area at the rear of a ship from which the helmsman both navigates and observes.

Though I didn’t inherit the gene for making art, I know the need to be connected with it. Just as in those early days in the Poop Deck, I have come to rely on that frisson of curiosity, that anticipation of being provoked, and, most importantly, that disruption of the obligatory, the rote, or routine that I experience each time I engage directly with works of art. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with routine—indeed, for me and for a large majority of my high-achieving Princeton contemporaries, routine has gone hand in hand with success. Knowing what to expect can be rather comforting, too. However, I’ve found that art— especially the kind that doesn’t give itself up too easily—allows me to step outside myself, to observe things in a new light, and to return to myself with an altered feeling or outlook. Whether through my own activities organizing exhibitions, developing art education programs, or advising on the creation of new private collections, it’s the transformative quality of art, the way it interrupts our habits of thinking that I particularly relish.

I remember the first time I truly recognized that a good painting has its own internal logic. Princeton’s Art 101 took me to stand in front of the Art Museum’s Tarascon Diligence by Van Gogh. I realized with excitement that the mismatched shadows, unnatural colors, distorted proportions, and reversed perspectives equated more with the way things feel than the way they look. I’ve witnessed similar reactions among people I’ve taken around galleries looking for art to buy or just to understand. Their faces transform: patient suspension of belief gives way to a flicker of a double take in their eyes, where I can literally see them making sense of this physical object and its meaning. I liked the expressions of delight dawning on visitors to the National Gallery in London as I explained why Sassetta, the fifteenthcentury Sienese painter, used blue for the elegant coat that Saint Francis discards in his vow of poverty. Precious lapis lazuli was ground up to make that exquisite royal blue—form and meaning could not be better linked.

It is art by living artists, though, that I find most engaging and transformative. I recently organized a small group show in London for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, composed of five women artists “to watch.” Our U.K. finalist was a seventy- seven-year-old artist whose raw, effusive style embraces all manner of subjects. Films by Quentin Tarantino, news stories about toxic paint used on toys, and cocktails drunk on a holiday in Tenerife jostle for equal attention. What would ordinarily irritate and discourage me—the cacophony of tweeted, texted, and televised voices, images, and messages—becomes in her work, if not exactly a cause for celebration, at least an acceptance of the way things are.

For his forty-fifth birthday, and over his objections, I commissioned a portrait of my husband, Louis. Three years later, it’s almost finished! The artist, now a good friend, is an incredible draftsman and filmmaker who explores the idea that a portrait is never adequate to the task of portraying an individual. This “portrait,” therefore, will consist of over four hundred small drawings of not only my husband but also all the major participants in his life, closely observed in daily, routine situations at home, at work, in meetings, at meals, even watching a movie. You might, like our daughter, think, “What an egomaniac!” but viewing one’s own routine and companions from an artist’s vantage point has surprised us. It has identified something very human and basic: how individuality is expressed and defined by one’s relationships with others.

Not everyone has a grandmother who can introduce them to the magic of art and creativity, but the fortunate students of Princeton have their own Art Museum. For those willing to engage, this is the place where students will find their curiosity piqued, their imaginations sharpened, and their habitual assumptions tweaked. The Art Museum can be the place where visitors arrive thinking one way and depart thinking a little differently. It can be that place where they, too, find themselves a vantage point from which to better observe and navigate the world around them.

Sarah Lee Elson, Class of 1984,
independent art adviser, London