Celebrating a Lifetime of Making Art

Where do ideas come from?

I am mulling over that question which is taped to the cover of a sketchbook whose binding appears to be cut out from a car tire. The sketchbook is one of many that have been set out on tables in the Douglas-Whitley Gallery at the Dunedin Fine Art Center where Joan Duff Bohrer is having her first solo show — at age 92.

I have come to the DFAC to view Bohrer’s exhibit and to interview her. The gallery is packed. In addition to Bohrer’s show, called As I See It, there are four other summer exhibits opening at the arts center.

The show's curator, Marjorie Greene Graff, calls Bohrer "an artist's artist.

“Joan doesn’t make a painting, she interprets an experience,” says Graff. "She has an extensive cerebral view of the world around her, and her work is a recording of these vistas… Whether through drawing, making sketchbooks, modeling sculptures, or working with fiber art, her hand is recording her many ideas. In preparing for this show, I felt it important to display her use of a variety of medium.”

Bohrer does have an amazing range. Some of her paintings are representational — a lounging cat or sunbathers on a beach. In two paintings, the subject is a simple denim jacket (the first all white and the second bursting with color).

Two views of a denim jacket – one white, one multi-colored

Other canvases are mostly about color and form, with a hint of some form, usually from nature. The largest and most recent work (dated 2023) is a large triptych hung on the back wall, whose panels alternate between pinkish white, blue and green and a bright red. It is mysteriously entitled The Idea of Up.

On another wall, I read a statement by Bohrer, dated October 2011, entitled Why the PEONY? “Unintentionally,” Bohrer begins, addressing her penchant for painting flowers, especially peonies, “the Peony is often in my view when June arrives and says ‘Why not me?’ I say “why not?’”

Joan Duff Bohrer’s sketchbooks on display at the Dunedin Fine Art Center through August 18

But the sketchbooks are what captivate my attention, offering more glimpses into that random art-making process that drives Bohrer to paint peonies, a process that seems to be based on a simple notion – everything and anything can spark a piece of art. You just have to trust your eye.

Joan Duff Bohrer’s sketchbooks on display at the Dunedin Fine Arts Museum through August 18

The sketchbooks, available to sift through, are filled with pencil drawings, watercolor sketches, journaling entries, collages and sometimes even travel souvenirs (like the one labeled Sketchbook, Cuba, 2003), a diary of what has caught Bohrer’s eye over the years.

Joan Duff Bohrer’s sketchbook – Cuba, 2003

Joan Duff Bohrer’s sketchbook – Cuba, 2003

When I finally catch up with her, she is chatting in the main lobby with her eldest daughter, her son-in-law and devotees of her work. She carries a portable fold-up chair that she never uses. I know I should be asking her what it’s like to have her first solo show at age 92 — but I’m fixated on her sketchbooks. I blurt out my first question – “Where did you get the idea for the tire sketchbook?”

“Oh, that was just fun,” she tells me. Her niece Kathy brought her a tire and she thought, “Yeah, that goes together with ideas.  You travel around and get ideas.”

Joan Duff Bohrer’s tire sketchbook – Where do ideas come from

Joan Duff Bohrer’s tire sketchbook: Where do ideas come from

“Your sketchbooks are truly works of art,” I gush. “I made them all,” she says proudly, “sewed up the bindings myself.”

She credits the idea of exhibiting them to Graff. , who curated this unique solo show, culling pieces from across Bohrer’s lifetime of making art. When Graff, who taught collage at St. Pete College, asked Bohrer if she wanted to put the sketchbooks under glass, Bohrer quickly responded – “No. People need to touch them.”

“Will you be doing more sketchbooks?” I ask her. 

“I don’t think like that,” she says. “I’m not that kind of artist.”

Like all her pieces of art, the sketchbooks are something she does instinctually, she explains. She never says, “I’m going to do a sketchbook.” In fact, she has no method to her art madness. “I don’t like rules,” she tells me. Whatever catches her eye, whatever she finds herself looking at intently, that’s what prompts her to create. Once she found herself staring at her ceiling fan and got an inspiration for a painting.

Spin, 2013

“I just start with something. I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t know what the end result will be and I don’t expect to know. I’m inclined to let ripped pieces of paper tell me where to go. I really don’t like having to analyze my work. I’m not a very good person to interview. I’m very instinctive.

“I don’t like rules,” she repeats.

Climb, 2012

Her titles are keys into what her paintings are all about, but she herself doesn’t know what the title will be until the work is done. “My point of view is expressed when I finish a painting and give it a title,” she says. “There’s one in the show I call The Civilian. It’s political and I’m not saying any more.”

Joan Duff Bohrer poses in front of her 2016 painting she entitled The Civilian – “It’s political and that’s all I’m going to say.”

I remember being struck by that stark black and white canvas, so devoid of the color of most her work. When I return later to the gallery, I note that the work is dated 2016. I think I have a good idea of what the painting is about.

“Titles are important to me,” Bohrer says emphatically. “I’m a word person in that respect.”

Joan Duff Bohrer’s triptych inspired by her garden – The Idea of Up, 2003

What does the title of her triptych — The Idea of Up — mean? I ask. “I like looking at my garden,” she says. She sees her garden, “full of growing things,” through a big picture window in her house in Dunedin where she has set up her studio.

The more she looked at her garden, the more she wanted to capture the feeling it gave her. “I started drawing and got really into it,” she says. “I was curious. What was drawing my eye so much? Everyone would have their own answer to that question.”

She began with one painting. “It looked so great with lines and red color and I said, ‘I’m not going to change that.’ I just kept adding on (another panel). And when I finished I gave it that title.

“If it doesn’t mean anything to other people, it doesn’t matter.”

The Forbidden Fruit Series – The Ascent, Question, The Well, 2011

When I finally get around to asking if she has any reflections about art and aging, she tells me she really doesn’t think about it. “Now that I’m over 90, people are so impressed,” she laughs.

The fact that they mentioned “the 92,” as she puts it, in the publicity for her show bothers her a little. Does her age really matter? She is quick, however, to add that she’s grateful that “I don’t have pain right now. You get to this age and everyone you talk to has something.”

Joan Duff Bohrer’s sketchbooks on display at the Dunedin Fine Art Center through August 18

Bohrer got married right out of college and had three children, but she never stopped doing art.

“I’ve been doing art all my life,” she says. She sewed. She crocheted. She did needlework. And she painted. And when she wasn’t doing art, she was teaching it — including offering adult classes and workshops at DFAC.

At a recent author talk, Bohrer asked if there was anyone in the audience who had taken a class with her at DFAC. Several audience members’ hands shot up. One woman spoke up, thanking Bohrer for her stimulating class – “I’m still doing art and I’m 85.”

Was there any time in her life when Bohrer experienced an art block and didn’t do any art?

“No, except right now,” she tells me. “I haven’t been able to… play… since December.” In December her companion of the past 18 years, Stephen Schatz, a fellow artist, had a stroke. Now “it’s a whole new world.”

Schatz is recovering slowly. He attended Bohrer’s opening and author talk and he’s going to have his own solo show at DFAC on January 25, 2025. But he can no longer live on his own.

On the Beach, 1975

In the past few months, Bohrer has watched her “best friend” being helped by aides with the simplest of tasks, like bathing, and has wanted to capture those scenes on canvas. “He being so trusting and leaning on them… many with the wildest hair under the sun. And he all naked. And just meeting them.

“To me, there was something touching about that… and because it impressed me, I want to see what I can do with it. But it’s hard to know where to go with it. So I’ve set it aside for the moment.”

Joan Duff Bohrer at the opening of her first solo show at the Dunedin Fine Art Center

In a talk last fall on Bohrer’s drawings at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs, Graff confesses that she first fell in love with Bohrer’s work when she saw her journals at a show at St. Pete College-Clearwater several years ago.

“I had never seen anyone make a binding from a rubber tire,” she says. “This was again finding the use, the beauty in the every day. These journal pages could be — and they are — works finished unto themselves. But they also are impetus and ideas for the paintings.”

Joan Duff Bohrer’s tire sketchbook – Where do ideas come from

To prepare for that talk, Graff visited Bohrer at her Dunedin home. 

“When you walk into Joan’s house, you are in a painting. The whole house is her studio. The whole house is her art world," says Graff.  “There are big tables set up in the front room that she draws on and then as you go into the house a little more, there’s a huge glass window overlooking the garden that’s filled with exquisite plants and Stephen’s pottery. It’s a painting unto itself and I would assume a lot of inspiration. She is living the whole art experience.

“She the real deal."

 

joanduffbohrer.com

dfac.org

Joan Duff Bohrer’s tire sketchbook – Where do ideas come from 

Joan Duff Bohrer at her first solo show, “As I See It,” on view at the Dunedin Fine Art Center through August 18

NOTE: A version of this story was first posted at Art Coast Magazine on July 23, 2024.

THE PIN LADY: Jewelry That Tells a Life Story

Barbara Dunnavant hasn't written her memoirs yet, but you can "read" the story of her life in the delightful pins she wears.

"I always look forward to see what pin she has on next,” says Carolyn Nygren who often runs into Dunnavant in the common dining hall at Westminster Palms where they both are residents. “She always has a story to tell about it.” Of course, it helps that Barbara, who was born in Purdy, Virginia, knows how to spin a yarn in the fine tradition of Southern storytelling.

On a recent afternoon Barbara welcomed Carolyn and me into her Westminster apartment to check out her pin collection. Greeting us at the door wearing a large purple hat, she informed us that she wouldn’t be taking it off. “Trust me, you don’t want to see my head,” she says with a hearty laugh.

Barbara Dunnavant – aka The Pin Lady – in her home at Westminster Palms in St. Petersburg (that’s her on the motorcycle)

Dunnavant currently is being treated for cancer at Moffitt Cancer Institute. She was first diagnosed in 2020. But not even the Big C can suppress the exuberance of this woman whom I have come to think of as the Pin Lady. As Barbara ushers us in to her home, she hands us each a box of pastry from Nothing Bundt Cakes (a bakery on 4th Street in St. Petersburg).

The meet up with Barbara was Carolyn’s idea. She thought I might be able to use some of Barbara’s pin stories for a project called Bijoux Bios that I launched at The Studio@620 just before the pandemic hit with fellow writer Jaye Ann Terry.

Jaye and I have been gathering up interesting jewelry stories or “bijoux bios” for a book we are working on. Our tagline is “Every piece of jewelry has a story.”

Usually, the people we talk to have one piece of jewelry and one story to share with us. A diamond bought on an African safari. A ring from an uncle who was murdered. A necklace made from a magnifying glass. A Crucian hook bracelet from St. Croix.

Pins Barbara wears only on special occasions – a tiny red bow for Valentine’s Day, a bunny for Easter, a gigantic spider for Halloween and a pin with a slice of apple pie, the word Mom, a baseball and an American flag for the 4th of July.

Barbara has a whole table full of stories connected to the delightful pins that she has spread out on her kitchen table. All I have to do is point to one and out spill the most delightful tales.

Tales of a Southern upbringing (she was the fifth in a family of four girls and a boy whom she calls my Bubba), a loving marriage, a career as a nurse practioner in anesthesia at the Medical College of Virginia where she retired as the Chief Anesthetist, 14 years in the U.S. Navy Reserve which included active duty in 1990-91 at Camp LeJeune in support of Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Tales of Motherhood/Grandmotherhood, dear to her heart.

Oh, and the best story of all – a wild love affair with a man whom she met after her husband died who sparked in her a late-in-life enthusiasm for riding motorcycles.

Barbara credits her mother for her obsession with pins. “I don’t mean any haughtiness or anything, but in Virginia where we lived, my mother was blue blood,” she says. “Poor as a church mouse, but that didn’t matter, she had the right name.

“She also had a little touch of something I call bang. She didn’t have diamonds, but every day Mother wore pins.”

“Wild & Wacky Bridge Lady” pin, gifted to Barbara by friends who invited her to play bridge with them

Her mother, she insists, never wore the pins to impress. “She wore them purely for her pleasure,” she says. “And she never wore them on such a mundane place as a left shoulder. Not ever. She would wear this small hummingbird on her back, or on the nape of her neck or on the sleeve of her blouse or on the cuff of her pants or the rim of her top. So that’s how I kinda got into pins myself.”

Many of Barbara’s own pins were gifts. While at the medical college, three of her co-workers got together for her birthday and bought her a pin with four pearls in a row. “They said we were all peas in a pod.”

Later friends she played bridge with gave her a “Wild & Wacky Bridge Lady” pin. “I asked them why they were so nice to invite me to the country club for lunch/bridge,” says Barbara. They told her there were two reasons – “You are fun and you play so poorly, it keeps us winning.”

When her daughter was born in 1967, she was gifted two sets of Baby Beauty Pins, a common practice back then (they were traditionally used to fasten the back of a baby’s garment.) “I gave one pin to each Grandmother and I wore two on my blouse collar. I have them in the shadow box with my other ‘momentos,’”  says Barbara. “They are quite sweet. I never see anyone wearing them in this era.”

Another pin was a gift from that daughter who “bought” it when she was eight or nine. “My daughter and my husband and I went to Washington for the weekend. My husband was really into museums, so we went into the museum gift shop, and I said, ‘Oh, isn’t that a neat pin?’ And the lady said, ‘It’s a mother-daughter pin.’

And our little girl said, ‘Mom, I’ll get that for you with my money.’ With her money? Well, of course she didn’t have her money with her. It was at home. So I said, ‘That’d be wonderful.’ Well, of course, she never paid for it, but I was so ecstatic that she wanted to get it for me.”

“Peas in a Pod” pin, gifted to Barbara by three co-workers at medical college, and an oyster pin Barbara insisted be made with the pearl inside the oyster

Some of the pins Barbara wears only on special occasions – a tiny red bow pin for Valentine’s Day, a bunny pin for Easter, a gigantic spider pin for Halloween and a pin with a slice of apple pie, the word Mom, a baseball and an American flag for the 4th of July.

Many members of Barbara’s family played on the famed Virginia baseball team known as the Old Hickory Ball Club. “It was a local get together,” explains Barbara. “They did play in a league, but it wasn’t anything like, you know, MLB.” Barbara is now a diehard Rays fan.

The pin she wears most often has two gold bands encircling a diamond. “I rarely wear diamonds,” Barbara tells us, pointing to the diamond in the pin which she is wearing on her left shoulder. “This was my original engagement diamond — you need a magnifying glass to see it,” she laughs.

Barbara designed the pin herself – it was made by Johnston Jewelers in Seminole. “We had a difficult time because the jeweler could not seem to offset the diamond exactly the way he wanted it. And finally, one day it clicked.

One of the golden bands is square on the outside and round on the inside (her late husband’s band) – the other (her band) is a replica of a ring that belonged to her husband’s great grandmother from Cairo, Egypt. “I have the original but it was too small for my ‘fat finger,’” she laughs. “My mother had the replica made as my wedding band.”

Bought from a street vendor in New York by Barbara’s husband, this pin looks just like the car they first dated in

The pins with some of the best stories were gifts from her husband Jimmy who she met while dating his best friend. “He’s not really into you,” Jimmy told Barbara on a double date at the movies, “but I want to have a date with you.”

They ended up eloping a few months before she graduated from nursing school (back then you couldn’t be married in nursing school so they had to keep their marriage a secret). A year later, in 1966, Barbara’s mother threw the couple a proper Southern wedding reception which is when she got the wedding band.

Jimmy was from Richmond. “That’s why there are so many Richmond skyline pins,” says Barbara. “He bought one of them for me. For Christmas, I think. Then I told him, I need both gold and silver. So, he got me the other one.”

There is also a car pin that her husband bought for $6 or $7 from a street vendor during a weekend excursion in New York City. “This is the exact car that we dated in,” says Barbara in amazement. And there is the silver flower pin which he bought to commemorate their visit to Georgia O’Keeffe’s house in New Mexico.

“My husband’s favorite artist was Georgia O’Keeffe. He loved her flower paintings,” she says. “We were the last group of tourists that they allowed into Georgia O’Keeffe’s home. You can go there and do the grounds, but you can’t go into the home.” The pin came from Schwarzschild Jewelers, an old Richmond establishment that has been in the same family for five generations.

“When my husband was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 53, we, of course, were devastated,” says Barbara. “Jimmy lived five and a half years more.” During that time, they took a last cruise to Europe on the QE2 (and returned on the Concorde).

In London, they splurged and stayed at the Ritz. “Because my husband was very ill, we could only do one thing a day,” remembers Barbara. “One day I got short with someone and felt bad about it. Before we left the hotel, I told Jimmy that I had offended someone and it was still eating at me. Leaving the Ritz, he said, ‘You know, we’re not going to ruin this trip by you worrying over something you’ve said or done.’ So he walked into a jewelry store and bought me a little Speak-No-Evil Monkey pin.”

Three left from the 25 pins Barbara bought for 50 cents each at a farmer’s market to give away to her new Chesapeake Bay Area neighbors – proceeds went to the Haven, a women’s shelter

Her last gift from Jimmy was a crab pin. “He died on November the 19th at 20 minutes to midnight in 1998 at the age of 59,” she says quietly. “My birthday is the 12th of March. That year he had a goldsmith in Ashland, Virginia make this pin for me with a teeny tiny diamond and little pearls. On the back, he had engraved, ‘We had it all.’”

After her husband died, Barbara moved to the Chesapeake Bay Area. She went to a farmer’s market there and bought 25 pins — at 50 cents a piece — from a lady who was selling them for charity. “I thought it would be a nice way to introduce myself to the community, because the money was going to the Haven, a woman’s shelter. I ended up keeping about six of them.”

She also bought herself an oyster pin with a pearl in honor of the area’s most famous product. “The interesting thing about this pin is I had a ‘fight’ about it with the jeweler. Because when I asked him to make this for me and that I wanted the pearl to be on the inside of the oyster, he said, ‘Well, we’ve never done that. We always do it on the outside.’

“I said, ‘Well, I’ve never seen a pearl growing on the outside of an oyster.’ So finally he did it, you know, I’m sure, just to shut me up.”

This crab is the last pin Barbara’s husband had made for her before he died – it’s enscribed, “We had it all.”

Then in 2001 while working at an ophthalmologist’s office, administering anesthesia to cataract patients, she met Doug Carter, the motorcycle man, who had come in for cataract surgery. “Oh, gosh, he was so handsome,” she says.

She left, however, immediately after that first encounter on a two-week vacation with her husband’s family to the Grand Canyon. When she came back, her fellow nurses told her to go out into the lobby. “There was Doug with a bouquet of Madam Alexander roses asking me if I wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle.”

Barbara was 58, Doug was 64. She was hooked — on Doug and on motorcycling. Much of their early time together was spent “living in sin” in Florida at Doug’s Madeira Beach second home. “The home was wonderful — Florida lizards not so much,” she chuckles.

When she returned to Virginia, she stopped at the gift shop of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and found “Matilda, a very befitting pin of a lizard with a fancy hat and jewels.

Barbara had become a motorcycle mama, but she still was a proper Southern lady. She didn’t sit around drinking tea and eating crumpets though. At age 67, Barbara got her own motorcycle license and started to ride solo.

“My first bike was only 250 ccs, which is quite small, and I did the Skyway Bridge on that motorcycle at 60 miles an hour,” she says. “On the big slow incline, I said out loud (of course, no one could hear me), I said, God, it’s either concrete or water. If you give me a choice, I’ll take the water.”

Barbara stopped riding motorcycles in 2015, the year her 31-year-old great-niece was killed while riding on a motorcycle with a “man of questionable inebriation.” After getting the 3 a.m. phone call about her niece’s death, Barbara never rode her bike again. “I was devastated,” she says.

But she never gave up on Doug. They stayed together nearly two decades, despite Barbara’s cancer, despite Doug’s own illness, even overlapping at Westminster Palms for a time. He died at age 85.

Barbara Dunnavant shows off her favorite pin, a metal pinpoint with the slogan Nat Den Krebs — which means Catch the Cancer in German— given to her by her 11-year-old granddaughter

As I look over Barbara’s pins, from the giant spider to one from which hung a delicate Fabergé egg, it occurs to me that two subjects were glaringly absent from her pin collection. There were no motorcycle pins and not one in the shape of a cat. I had seen a cat dart across the room earlier. Surely a Pin Lady who had a cat would have one or two cat pins?

“For Christmas one year my Doug gave me a David Yurman bracelet with a gold motorcycle with wheels that turn – hanging, you know, like a charm bracelet,” Barbara says, explaining the absence of motorcycle pins. Clearly no pin could top that.

As for the cat, Barbara laughs. “I just got that cat yesterday afternoon.” She took it in as a favor for a friend whose other cats were mistreating it. “I’ve never had a cat in my life. My friend delivered it to me yesterday. His name is Butterscotch. He’s 13. This morning, I ran around calling him Buttercup. Now he’s so mad, he won’t pay any attention to me.”

Does Barbara have a favorite pin? “Oh, yes, that would be this one,” she says, picking up a metal pinpoint pin with the slogan Nat Den Krebs. “My daughter works for Boston Scientific which covers hospitals all over Europe. At one of the hospitals there was a health fair and my granddaughter, who is 11, sent me this last Saturday in a care package.

“Nat Dean Krebs in German means Catch the Cancer. I just thought that was super sweet.”

 

In Search of Jewelry Stories

As founders of the Bijoux Bios project, fellow writer Jaye Ann Terry and I are compiling a book of the most touching, humorous and bizarre jewelry stories that we can find. If your ring, bracelet, brooch, earrings, necklace, pendant, choker, tiara or watch -- or maybe even your whole jewelry box -- have interesting tales to tell, please let us know at bijouxbios@gmail.com.

NOTE: A version of this story was originally posted at Arts Coast Magazine, the online journal of Creative Pinellas, on May 22, 2024.

Tea, Dalí & Me: A Birthday Celebration

By Margo Hammond

I went to a Victorian tea party at the Dalí earlier this month with my friend Anthea Penrose. Born just a month apart on two different continents (Anthea is from England), we were celebrating our upcoming birthdays in May and June.

We sat at a small table in the Raymond James Room where we could see the museum’s new Dalí Alive 360° dome through triangular glass windows.

A woman in a floral hooped skirt and a black bolero jacket offered us a choice of teas from a tray – Earl Grey Lavender, Florida Orange Blossom and Carrot Cake. I chose Orange Blossom and plopped the oversized tea bag into a porcelain cup.

A man in a top hat and suspenders poured steaming water into my cup and then returned continuously to top it off as I ate from a three-tiered serving stand set in the middle of the table. The top tier was filled with petits-fours, the middle, with flaky triangle pastries, the lower with classic English tea sandwiches – egg salad and, of course, cucumber sandwiches with smoked salmon.

In addition to the tea and edibles, the museum’s Zodiac Membership Committee, the all-volunteer group that organized the members-only event, set up a display of Victorian objects (a Victorian mesh bag reminded me of one my mother collected) and a corsage-making booth.

We also were treated to a talk by Curator of Education Peter Tush on the museum’s current special exhibit Dali & the Impressionists and were invited to view that exhibit after hours.

At first a Victorian tea party and an exhibit on Impressionism seemed like an odd pairing. The Impressionist painters, after all, had famously rebelled against the stuffy world of tea and crumpets in the 19th century, rejecting the rigid rules of the Academy that great art was filled with stylized religious or mythological figures.

They opted instead for the great outdoors where they painted “en plein air.” They wanted to lose themselves, as Dalí put it “in the mystery of light, color and life.”

But as Tush’s talk demonstrated, the exhibit — and our afternoon at the Dalí — was all about surprising pairings.

Take our table companions, for example. They were a couple whom neither of us had ever met. He was a professor of journalism at USFSP. She was a psychotherapist. But as we chatted over tea snacks, I realized that I had not only read the professor’s book on scrub jays, I  had written about his book twice for this magazine (see Reading My Age: 73 Books in 2022 and Writing About Things With Feathers).

It was a pair-up that would have delighted the Surrealists’ love of chance encounters.

The exhibit Dali & the Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Degas & More (which is on view until April 28) itself is a study in juxtaposition, placing the early work of Dalí next to the works of his older mentors. It celebrates Dalí’s initial love affair with the Impressionists, who inspired him to become a painter – but it also tells the story of his eventual rebellion against those early influencers.

The show reminds us that every generation first tries to imitate their predecessors but inevitably rejects them to forge their own style. Or as Picasso was said to advise, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

To illustrate this point, Peter Tush first showed us slides of paintings by an impossibly young Dalí side by side with the likes of Renior and Alfred Sisley. Port Alguer from Riba d’en Pitxot (1918), painted by Dalí when he was 14 — 14 years old! — is juxtaposed with Renior’s Rocky Crags at L’Estaque (1882).

The Lane to Port Lligat with View of Cap Creus (1922), painted by an 18-year-old Dalí is set alongside Sisley’s The Loing at Saint-Mammès (1882). Amazingly, both Dalí paintings hold their own. You would never guess they were painted by a teenager.

Then Tush clicked on a slide of Dalí’s 1923 painting, Cadaques, paired with a quintessentially Impressionist view of another port city by Claude Monet – Antibes: Afternoon Effect (1888). In Dalí’s painting, blocky shapes and geometric forms invade the landscape. At 19, embracing Cubism, Dalí is already moving away from his early Impressionist mentors.

The final pairings Tush’ showed us are two works from 1924 – Dalí’s Bouquet (L’lmportant c‘est la rose) and Henri Matisse’s Vase of Flowers. Here Dalí is no longer competing with the Impressionists of the 19th century. He’s being compared to a contemporary. Matisse was in his mid-50s in 1924. Dalí was only 20, one year away from his first solo show in Paris.

As I toured the exhibit to see the actual paintings Peter Tush had showed us in his PowerPoint presentation, age (and my upcoming 75th birthday) was on my mind.

I stopped a while before a pair of self-portraits and took a long, hard look – one by a brash, emerging artist (Dalí’s Self-Portrait, Figueres) and another by a well-established, celebrated master (Paul Cézanne’s Self-Portrait with a Beret).

Peter had pointed out that both are wearing hats, but Dali’s is clearly an affectation (as is the pipe he sports, which he never lit). Dalí is 17, with his whole career ahead of him. He is inventing himself.

Cézanne is 61 and the weariness of his long life marks his face. He has only six more years to live, but he doesn’t know that. So he continues to do what he does best – he paints.

It occurred to me that this pairing of self-portraits is an inspiration to both the young and the old artist. The young can see their future. The old, their past. They are tributes to the beginnings and ends of creative lives, each with its own drawbacks and joys, each with its own powers.

At the end of the Impressionist show, there was a chance to create our own self-portraits. You sat in front of a machine to have your photo taken and then, by the wizardry of AI, your image was transformed into a “one-of-a-kind Impressionist work of art.”

The museum had offered something similar in 2022 during the Picasso and the Allure of the South exhibit. My self-portrait back then — a Cubist version of myself — gave me a surprising glimpse into the future. . . I looked like my mother.

This time the opposite occurred. Although I would hardly call the Impressionist self-portrait I created via AI a “work of art,” this time I found myself peering into the past. The AI machine had time traveled, offering up a younger version of myself.

Note: A version of this article was originally posted on April 5 in Arts Coast Magazine, the online publication of Creative Pinellas.