An art-lover's pleasure

For me, art is sometimes just the joy of coming upon a dazzling, dizzying landscape painting ...

and moving closer... 

and closer...

until the two-dimensional landscape has turned into 3-dimensional, abstract brush-strokes of color. Then I back up again and watch the abstract strokes turn back into a landscape. 

I repeat this exercise multiple times, and each time am filled anew with wonder that a painting can have two such distinct identities: one as a vision of a San Francisco landscape, and another as colorful paint in abstract shapes on a canvas.  

The photos in this post are my photos of Wayne Thiebaud's San Francisco, West-Side Ridge, (undated, but around 1990), from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC