A Special Art Exhibit

 On September 18, our daughter, Megan, had her first art exhibit. It was held at Bart’s, this rather funky bar that once a month features art by local artists, for an exhibit that runs for about three weeks.  We wrote about the opening night and her subsequent appearance on a local TV station here.

Her closing night is tonight, October 11, and we’re here for it. She’s holding a raffle and the winner will go home with the painting shown at the top of the post. The proceeds will go to dolphin research. She painted this dolphin for closing night and also used it as an illustration of her art for a talk she gave at a community college in West Palm Beach a couple of weeks back.

When I mentioned to Rob that I was writing this post, he said, Where’s the synchro? Well, there probably isn’t one. But it’s fascinating to me, as a parent, to trace the genesis of a creative passion.  I think Megan’s love affair with dolphins began with a swim when she was ten or eleven. The three of us drove down to Key Largo, to Dolphins Plus  to experience these mammals in their own environment.  

This facility is one of the best in terms of captive dolphins. It’s entirely outdoors, ocean water washes through the metal grate dividers between the facility and the Atlantic, sunlight pours over the facility, the dolphins breathe fresh air.  There is something indescribably magical about swimming alongside a dolphin in this kind of environment. You feel their sonar as it scans you. You feel their particular kind of joy, their delight in being alive.

This environment is radically different from Sea World, where everything in the indoor aquarium is carefully regulated – the amount of saline in the water, the temperature of the air, even the light. As Disney’s Epcot Center, the natural light is sparse and comes from a few skylights. When we visited that aquarium years after that first swim at Dolphins Plus, the place depressed me.

A few years after that initial swim at Dolphins Plus, we were traveling in Venezuela, on the island of Margarita, and Megan and I swam in a huge outdoor facility with several dolphins. Like Dolphins Plus, this facility had actual ocean water, sunlight, fresh air, and it was huge. Megan and I were the only people in the water with the dolphins. It was thrilling, invigorating, and indescribably spiritual. The only way I can describe the spiritual aspect of this experience is that a kind of telepathic bond developed between us and the dolphins who chose to swim with us.

During Megan’s second year of college, she applied for – and won – a month-long internship at Dolphins Plus that became her independent study project as an art major. It was as if that first swim had come full circle. During this internship, she met her friend Erin, who now lives in Orlando and has the same dolphin interests that Megan does.

In late November 2011, five months after Megan had graduated from college, she was living at home and heard that she’d been accepted into an internship at Disney’s Epcot Center, working with dolphins. In January 2012, she moved to Orlando for the internship.

Considering the revenue that Disney pulls in annually from Epcot, the pay was bad and the interns were basically the ones who cleaned up dolphin poop. But…and it’s a biggie…she was able to take more than 600 underwater photos of dolphins and these pictures have formed the foundation of her art.

Her theme, fragmented perspectives, is intended to prompt us to question our concepts about dolphins, about wildlife in captivity, about the way these mammal see us – and the erroneous ways we see them.

The week of her opening night, the three of us went to see Blackfish,  a documentary that will probably be nominated for an Oscar. It concerns Sea World’s captive whales.  It’s a heartbreaking documentary. And here’s where the synchro may come in.

Three or four days after we saw that documentary, in which Megan and I left the theater in tears, she had an interview at Sea World for working with dolphins, a job her friend Erin also has. How perfect would that be? She and Erin could be working together and could, perhaps, even live together at some point. Megan got there at 5 AM, passed the swim test, had her interview, knew she was clearly overqualified for the job. She had, in fact, been hired for this job months earlier, but was eliminated because the job entailed driving a electric cart and she had some speeding tickets on her record. So this was her second try.

She didn’t get the job. Yes, it was initially a blow. But in the grander scheme of things, maybe it’s that silver lining.  In the parts of our lives that we can’t see from our perspective in the physical, synchronicity suggests a plan, a design, a venue. Not long after the Sea World rejection she ran across an interesting spot on Craig’s list and applied as an instructor for Paint Nites. She teaches her first workshop on November 1o.

She would like to expand her palette to other mammals – dogs, cats, elephants, tigers… Uh, is this going to involve a photo safari in Africa? If so, can your parents tag along?!

Here’s her website.