Sundays at the Art Museum

Back when I was about five my Dad started taking me and my brother to the Art museum every Sunday. The reason for this is we both refused to go to Sunday school at church, and the only other person who didn't go to church was my Dad meaning that we got dragged to the museum. At such a young age we had no interest in art so we just fooled around the whole time Dad looked at paintings. As I got older I started to take an interest in certain works of art, but never enough to tolerate a whole day of this. Soon me and my brother were old enough to look after ourselves and the visits for us came to a halt. Much later when I took my first art history class in community college did I realize that I really enjoyed looking at art, and now I had learned how to decipher a meaning from the work. My Dad at this point had still been visiting the museum every week, and so I decided to give it another shot. This time going to the St. Louis Art Museum was very different I now had a critical eye and my dad now would take me through every detail of a painting down to the last brush stroke. I never was very good at two dimensional art, but now I understand it much better due to my dad's knowledge of painting. I don't know if these experiences directly effect the kind of work I do, but has had an effect on the way I feel about art and partly why I decided to pursue a career in art.