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I've just about finished unpacking from two fabulous art-filled weeks away with my sweetheart, but my mind is still packed with memories!
The trip began with a five-day watercolour painting workshop in central New York State, with Brazilian artist Fabio Cembranelli, and continued with a week of museum-hopping in Boston.
The entire art-adventure was a celebration of our 30th wedding anniversary, with the workshop as his gift to me and the Boston stay as my gift to him.
Neither of us had ever visited Boston, about a six-hour drive from our home, so it was lovely to explore the area together.
We each enjoy art and art history, historic buildings, museums, and music, so we'd planned our stay around those basic themes.
For the visual arts and art history, we visited the museum-like Boston Public Library, Harvard Art Museums, Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFAB).

With a day-trip to Salem, we added a touch of more gruesome history with the Salem Witch Museum and the Witch Dungeon Museum.
Salem is also home to a large number of historic buildings, in particular within its Historic Derby Street Neighborhood, where we were pleasantly surprised to see many houses and other buildings dating from the 1600s and 1700s.
This close to Halloween, the decorations in Salem were superb, and we adored the very artistic 'haunted garden' style in the front and side yards of numerous historic homes.
Boston is also filled with fabulous historic buildings, so we did several self-guided walking tours; most notably the Freedom Trail and Historic Harvard.
The musical portion of our trip involved live music at America's oldest tavern, traditional Irish music at another historic pub, and an indie music concert at the TD Garden. We managed to find resale tickets to a sold-out show; Maggie Rogers' "Don't Forget Me Tour". Although not originally from Boston, she treated this venue as her 'home town' show because she's currently a Fellow at Harvard University. After completing a Master's (degree) in Religion and Public Life (MRPL) there, focused on "the spirituality of public gatherings and the ethics of power in pop culture", she joined Harvard's Divinity School as a Religion and Public Life Fellow. "She will spend this time expanding the writing and research of her MRPL degree, which explored the relationships of religion, spirituality, and pop culture from her vantage point as a performing artist."
In her own words: "I thought a lot about the ways in which we connect to each other through pop culture, how art can be an agent for peace, and what responsibility comes with holding that kind of power."
--- https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/people/maggie-rogers ---
The word "peace" has two distinct meanings - an absence of war, or a state of tranquility and freedom from disturbance - so a portion of that last line resonated with me: "how art can be an agent for peace".
It struck me that this applies to My Art Despite Pain initiative, using art as a therapeutic tool for chronic pain management... peace from pain, if you will.

I'll write more next week about some of my favourite paintings and other artworks in Boston, but in the meantime I have to tell you that I could have spent hours looking back and forth between two specific pairs of paintings at the MFAB.
These were Claude Monet's 1891 "Grainstack (Sunset)" and "Grainstack (Snow Effect)", along with his1894 "Rouen Cathedral, Façade" and "Rouen Cathedral Façade and Tour d'Albane (Morning Effect)".
It was absolutely incredible to see each pair side-by-side, to be able to look at one then the other; my sweetheart told me later that it looked as though I was watching a tennis match.
My snapshots can't do these artworks justice, but I hope you'll get a sense of what I mean.