What the Old Masters Whispered to Me at the Blanton Museum of Art
- Linda Chido
- Jan 7
- 6 min read
A day with the kids, the Baroque, and the relief of imperfection
Today the kids and I went to the Blanton Museum of Art to see Spirit & Splendor: El Greco, Velázquez, and the Hispanic Baroque. It’s one of those exhibitions that quietly rearranges you. Not because it overwhelms, but because it asks you to slow down. To look again. And then to look closer.
Two things stuck out in our visit:
The first was a small but meaningful moment of recognition. One of my kids stopped in front of a portrait and said casually, “I remember him.” It was King Charles II (1679-1680), painted by Juan Carreño de Miranda. They remembered the king not from a textbook, but from a painting I used years ago during our history lessons.
That is one of those quiet confirmations you do not get often as a parent or educator. Paintings lodge themselves in memory in a way dates and writing rarely do. It reaffirmed my belief that art is not decoration in education. It is a mnemonic device, a doorway, a way history becomes human—and a reminder of just how essential art is to learning.
The second realization was a little shocking and quite liberating.
Standing inches away from works by Diego Velázquez and El Greco, I could see everything. Not just the mastery, but the flaws. I’m one of those people who bobs and weaves in front of a painting—stepping back, leaning in, getting as close as I dare before a guard becomes alert.
With my nose inches away from these brilliant works, I was a bit taken aback with what I was noticing. Underpaintings left unresolved. Perspective that wandered or collapsed entirely. Edges that dissolved rather than snapped cleanly into place. Brushstrokes so loose they bordered on abstraction. Bodies with proportions that could be classified as Mannerism, but were undeniably distorted, off. I found myself thinking: if this painting were submitted to a realism competition today, it would likely be rejected.
Some canvases also showed visible cracking, not unusual for paintings of this age, but a quiet record that the fat-over-lean principle of oil painting had not been perfectly obeyed. And yet—here they were, hanging in a museum in all of their glory.
What does that say about us, standing here now, in the contemporary art world?
I don’t have a neat answer. This isn’t an argument against rigor. Painting should be rigorous. Representational painting demands it. But what I felt in that gallery was the weight of an contemporary expectation that sometimes slips into something else—not excellence but control. An unspoken assumption that everything must be resolved. That every brushstroke must withstand unlimited scrutiny. That balance and harmony must be achieved not just convincingly, but flawlessly.
What I’m circling here isn’t perfection as aspiration but the illusion of total control. Painting as a practice has never truly supported that fantasy. Oil paint is a time-based medium: it continues to cure, contract, and respond to gravity long after the painting leaves the studio. It ages. Linseed oil yellows. Painted surfaces crack. They get bumped and dinged as they move through the world. A painting records not only the artist’s hand but the life it has lived beyond the studio walls. And yet, the way contemporary paintings are now often evaluated—frequently first encountered as high-resolution digital files, zoomed into at extreme scale—quietly reinforces an expectation that no trace of uncertainty remain.
Standing in the museum, in front of the greats, the cracks told the truth. These painters were well aware of the rules of oil painting. They were not ignorant of fat over lean. They were also working at the tail end of the Renaissance, not far removed from some of the greatest painting ever made. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael were not distant myths to these Baroque artists. And I can’t even imagine painting royal portraits—images meant to stand in for power itself. The pressure must have been enormous.
The works I was staring at are part of the canon. These are the greats. And still, they weren’t perfect.
Somewhere along the way, perfection seems to have crept in as an expectation. I’m not even sure when or why. But it’s there. And maybe it doesn’t need to be.
Standing there, surrounded by paintings that are both rigorous and imperfect, something happened that’s hard to name. Something loosened. And something ached. I don’t fully understand that feeling, but I recognize it. It’s the sensation that comes when art speaks.
Not in words. Not in lessons. But in presence.
Contemporary artists study the masters because they have something to say to us. Across centuries, across belief systems, across materials and techniques that have barely changed, something is still being communicated. Standing among saints, kings, knights, and visions of the divine, I felt that familiar whisper. I don’t always know what the message is. I can’t always translate it. But I always feel it—deeply.
Sometimes it’s sublime. Like a baby Jesus painted with such tenderness it brings you to tears. And sometimes it’s wonderfully, absurdly human. One painting, clearly inspired by the Last Supper, made me laugh out loud. Every figure around the table was facing the viewer except one. That one man, in the foreground, was turned away, his back to the viewer. What the artist offered to us of this man was his gleaming bald spot. My daughter and I burst out laughing, imagining some long-ago grievance immortalized forever in paint.
That tension—the sacred and the flawed, the reverent and the ridiculous—doesn’t weaken the work. It gives it breath. And it makes me love it even more.
As we were leaving the museum, a simple thought popped into my head: follow the love.
I love art. I love looking at it, making it, studying it, and teaching it. What I don’t love is the grind, the hustle, the pressure, and the attitudes embedded in parts of the art world that quietly undermine the very people it depends on. Not everywhere. Not everyone. But frequently enough to notice.
Artists are expected to make their best work while shouldering enormous risk. We’re asked to function as makers, entrepreneurs, marketers, shippers, administrators, and brand managers—often without meaningful resources, financial stability, or institutional support. Most formal art education offers little to no training in business practices, yet artists are judged harshly for struggling within systems they were never taught to navigate. It’s a bit like throwing someone into deep water and critiquing their form while they’re trying not to drown.
At the same time, artists are told to grind, to hustle, to feed algorithms, to accept rejection as routine, and to give up significant portions of their income—often fifty percent or more—to institutions that rely entirely on their labor to exist. And then, when the strain shows, when processes falter, when something goes awry, the response is too often to label the artist as “unprofessional.”
That word lands hard for me. Not because professionalism doesn’t matter, but because the conditions required to sustain it are so unevenly distributed. And yes—it’s insulting. It reveals a contradiction at the heart of the system: one that depends on artists’ labor while refusing to reckon with the realities under which that labor is produced.
What’s unsettling is how old this pattern is. I’ve been reading The Artist’s Reality by Mark Rothko, and in his research he points to writings by Michelangelo that articulate nearly the same tensions. Centuries apart, the complaint is familiar. The imbalance persists. The system tends to benefit from itself and it has always been uneasy with artists who see too clearly.
This isn’t a rejection of rigor or professionalism. It’s a refusal to confuse exploitation with standards.
Days like today remind me that art itself operates by a different logic than the industry built around it. Art unfolds slowly. It tolerates uncertainty. It carries contradiction, humor, devotion, failure, revision. It survives not because it was optimized, managed, or perfectly executed, but because it IS human.
Standing in front of paintings that have cracked, shifted, traveled, endured handling, devotion, neglect, even laughter, I was reminded how generous art is, and that both art and artists are beautifully flawed.
And maybe that’s enough to carry with me back into the studio, still listening to the echo of the Old Masters' whispering in my ear.
LINDA CHIDO ART
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