My favorite artist is John Singer Sargent, and I think that, ultimately, Impressionism is my favorite movement. The classical, non-portrait art galleries in Washington, D.C. have plenty of Impressionist pieces, but it’s the National Gallery West Wing that has the most massive collection.

I hadn’t been there since the pandemic, when I went to see my favorite painting. (Nonchaloir (Repose), by Sargent.) I think it’s with this painting that the impression Impressionism has left on me is apparent. It’s a picture of a woman with a floofy dress relaxing on a couch, and it looks like it was thrown together in twenty minutes. But that’s not true at all. If you look at her hands, you can see sharp detail and precision that only looks sloppy. It’s an amazing piece of art.

And on that day, four years ago, the entire that whole section of the museum was closed off. No Sargent. No Whistler. No Monet. No girl in yellow reading a book. And I hadn’t been back since.

Because I’ve hit a steady routine of drawing in cafes on Saturdays and/or Sundays, and because you can’t spell routine without rut, I gave the museum another shot. And it hit the target. I got to see my favorites, I got to see new, exciting pieces, and I got to see the same people over again.

This is normal. Depending on which entrance they use, the gallery herds you through the maze of rooms, and certain pieces demand a certain amount of attention from different people, which averages out, and boom, there they are.

Usually, I’d only see them in a couple of rooms, especially when I would sit down and draw a painting that grabbed my attention. I divided my attention between the canvas and the eyes surreptitiously peeking over my shoulder to watch what I was doing. My rough sketches, as you can see, put the rough in rough. There’s a reason I color and ink these pieces as fast as I can.

Normally, most the fun of coming to a museum is people-watching, but I didn’t do that this time because I was so focused on capturing the figures in my style, and quickly. Also, the crowd was really dull. Hair was dark brown, black, and white. Parkas were black or navy blue. There weren’t patrons there I’d describe as bright or notable.

Then there was the woman who interrupted my work by being really striking. Her hair was a very red shade of auburn, and her sweater was white with blue stripes. She was petite and middle-aged, and I watched her do a bored circuit of the room and leave. When she wasn’t distracting me anymore, I finished my drawing.

Later, I was looking for another painting to sketch out, and there she was again, sprawled out on a bench, playing with her phone like a teenager. I just kept seeing her. It took fifteen-to-twenty minutes to finish a sketch, and I did five of them, so she was going through these rooms incredibly slowly. And she wasn’t looking at the art.

Between the first and second time I saw the striking woman, I zeroed in on a great painting of a clown at exactly the same time as an old woman. She was bell-shaped, with a shawl draped over her round, hunched shoulders. She wore a fishing hat and glasses that are so thick, if you rub them you can see the future.

She started talking to me, and I responded, and she gasped and staggered back in shock, as if I’d forgotten to tuck after using a urinal. (I hadn’t forgotten.) What followed was incoherent jabbering, until she said slowly and deliberately, “I thought you were my husband. But you look nothing like him.”

We chatted about the painting for a minute, and she laughed at her antics and left the room. A few minutes later, I too exited the room, and there she was, pointing at me gleefully and whispering to a man who did not look a thing like me, in the slightest. Our clothes were completely different. We were different heights. I had a beard. I was wearing an orange beanie, and he was not.

The man chuckled. “You must be my doppelganger.”

“I’m the World’s Worst Doppelganger,” I said and got the hell out of there, where I ran into a guard.

“Excuse me, sir,” he asked, “is that a sketchbook?”

The guard is an artist, but he’s hit a low point with his art. He’s second-guessing himself, his output has been low and crappy. I’ve been there. I stopped drawing for five years because of it. He wondered if I had any advice about getting back on the horse.

I couldn’t give any advice because I don’t know what I’m doing, but I told him what broke my empty streak: go back to basics. Get rid of everything and start with a pencil and an eraser. Use a sketchpad you don’t care about and go and make mistakes. Draw often. And remember, your art is better than you think it is.

Wisdom. I got it.

That was my outing. People being weird, and some beautiful art. And some sketches. I hope you had a good weekend.