An artist I know tells this true story: Soon after she married her third husband and they moved into their first house together, she claimed a spare room as her studio and made it clear to him where she stood. By this time in her life she was in her late-thirties and no longer the pretty young doormat she’d been in her previous marriages.

“This room,” she said to him, pointing to the spare room, “is for me and Art. Art is my first love. When I’m in there with Art and the door is closed, don’t disturb us, okay?”

That marriage, happily, lasted thirty years – until that husband died of Parkinson’s in his late-sixties – and in those decades her career as an artist flourished. Among the reasons for their marital success, I’m guessing, is that he respected and supported her love for – and need for – Art.

This story makes me think there are two kinds of people in this world – those who make art, and those who make it possible for artists to make art. Supporters, that is; those who appreciate, applaud, purchase, and display their art collections. And in this crazy, swirling world, where it’s hard to make rational sense of things and where artists dare to lead the way in expressing the inexpressible, we all need art more than ever, I feel.

As I’ve written before in my blogposts, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I’ve lived for close to seven years now, is something of an artists’ and art-lovers’ haven. Like Taos, New Mexico, where I called home for many years before emigrating to Mexico, art galleries abound here. Art of all kinds is everywhere.

Year-round this city is splashed with vivid color – pink and orange and red and blue and green-painted building exteriors dripping with flowering plants of every hue, all beneath a dazzling cobalt sky. It’s as if this San Miguel was made by artists for artists.

Often on my daily walks I’ll stroll through the vast Fabrica la Aurora art and design center just outside of el centro, and I’ll pretend the many gallery spaces are a huge museum’s rooms. One gallery in particular, Gallery Aller, draws me in each time because of their especially eclectic selection of paintings and sculptures handsomely displayed:

I cannot call myself an art patron. I don’t have the wherewithal to buy art nor the blank walls to call my own on which to hang it. Rather, I guess, I could more accurately call myself a watercolor-artist-wannabe, a perennial beginner. Every evening that I can I watch YouTube tutorials and try to follow the tutor. Incrementally, I’m learning by doing.

Why do I continue to stumble along like this, gripping my paint brushes like walking sticks? Because when I’m painting I think of nothing else; I’m utterly absorbed by it. Aches and pains don’t exist. Old insecurities and concerns about the future are lifted. For me, art is a balm. Art is not my first love, but “he” has become a warm and embracing lover.

If I were a rich girl – oh, and if I had the wall space — I know which piece of art I would buy. I’d race over to my artist friend Kathleen Cammarata’s studio here in SMA and purchase a large painting of hers that I’ve had my eye on for a long time, which depicts for me a golden, hopeful world beyond our imaginings:

Will such a world ever materialize? Not in my lifetime, for sure. But it’s the purpose of art, I think, to make us think, imagine, and dream of other/better things – whether we’re creating it or supporting its creation.