Each November I visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston located on a shady edge of the Fenway greenway. It never disappoints. Named for the woman who built it and filled it with treasures, she was born in 1840 to a good New York family.  Her position allowed her education, travel and a marriage not then available to most.   Some unlucky events in her young marriage to Jack Gardner plunged her into depression, her loving and wise husband devised a course of world travel to restore her “joie de vivre”.   The first stop was Paris in 1875 where she bought beautiful clothes and jewels. Frivolous perhaps but this first trip ignited her passion for beauty, her young agile mind was hungry and she devoured world culture.  Her subjects were architecture, engineering, painting, sculpture, music, tapestry and object d’art, her classroom: Spain, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, Athens, Munich, Vienna and Nuremberg and the list grew with time.   Together they started collecting with velocity and care.  You wouldn’t want to be up against “Mrs. Jack” bidding for a tiny Giotto or Mantagna.

A Young Lady of Fashion 1460's, attributed to Paollo Uccello, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

It is alleged that she wouldn’t back down once her vision was locked, and for art so precious, money was never the issue.  Her tenacity was as fine as the works she won.  The collection is no less thrilling today, imagine it was born from the will and eye of one woman, one lifetime.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, North Pacific Ocean Iwate 1986

How poignant to reflect on the sea as a calming influence in light of recent tragedies in the oceans, created by nature, and created by man.  Let's remember the wonders of the sea, and of all the ways that it nourishes us.

Sugimoto’s ongoing photographic series Seascapes, document the world's oceans in the artist’s unique way.   He uses very long exposures to capture and heighten the passage of time.  At first, each seascape seems to be a variation of the same body of water: clear day scapes with crisp horizons and others where sea and sky fog together.  It is only later that photo titles tell you that the oceans are oceans apart.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tasman Sea Ngarupupu 1990

Sugimoto’s extended-time working method depicts the way water really is and inadvertently, captures why I love pearls. They’re my Seascapes ― the unique expression of a particular body of water amplified by an artist’s eye. In a hurry, pearls look the same.  Slow down and they’re different in every way; different on every woman.