December 7, 2009. 3:02pm.

Looking…

I have started sniffing around a bit more.

I took out a book on BRONZINO and paged through it. I learned that Bronzino’s “real name” is Agnolo Tori, same as my nickname, and then read that wasn’t true.

I discovered a portrait of a young girl

that I attempted in a pen and ink drawing was also by Bronzino,

I read he may or may not have been gay, and realized many of his sitters, men and women, were quite attractive. One of them wasn’t and is kind of scary-looking. Ugolino someone… like the word ‘ugly.’ I saw him amidst the countless reproductions of Bronzino’s artwork – harsh, grainy, neon, dark, and realized most people only experience this portrait in a way that is totally misrepresented.

A bastardization. Holding none of the softness and nuance of the original.

Utter silence.

It occurred to me that I spend a disproportionate amount of time looking at his face. Maybe this isn’t true; I have no way of measuring what I think has happened.

When I’m away I resent the darkness of this picture – so rigid, so stiff, so limited, but when I’m here it’s so rich, without words-rich, in a way that I myself can’t understand. I haven’t started the damn skirt, or my Research Methods final project. I know there are endless ways to relate to you and I keep choosing the same one – dead-on, in an empty gallery, 4-5 feet away, recording my senses and whatever comes to mind. How am I supposed to create a template for self-guided learning when I’m constantly in this missionary-position rut? I’m signed up for a class next semester called, “Spiritual Development Across the Life Span,” because, although I don’t know how to explain it, it strikes me as mandatory integral to whatever it is that I’m trying to do. There’s the looking, which is a spiritual exercise, and the subject, which sometimes is devoid of everything except his staggering ego, and I wonder how this is supposed to be a spiritual exercise.

There is a naïveté and aloofness, with which I identify. Knowing and not knowing. Strong, and diminished. There is a sustained beeping coming from another gallery, the kind I would have imagined occurring when my young man was having unwanted alterations made to his poor lazy eye.

It’s distracting me, so I’m going to leave.

3:21pm.