“I’ve never been here before,” I tell Alice as we walk down Wilshire. It is a Friday afternoon, and my day off. That crazy charged pre-storm weather is still going on, in advent of a storm that never comes, ruffling our hair and skirts.

“Here here or here the museum?”

“Here the museum. I’ve been on Wilshire before.” I joke.

“Right.”

We arrive at the LACMA, and Alice flashes her press pass. I pay the fee to get in and we wander upstairs to where the Bonnard exhibit is. She is working, scowling at her notepad and scrawling things, crossing them out, scrawling again.

A riot of pastel color catches my eye and I find myself drawn to a painting of a naked woman bathing. The light is extraordinarily real, and I can nearly smell the scent of water on her skin. Like all good impressionism it looks incredibly realistic from far away, but up close it’s just spots of color, every color there is, hovering in hollows and shadows.

I stand there enjoying the sensation of the color bouncing off my mind, and smile. Then I walk to the next one.

I agreed to come more out of a desire to build on my friendship with Alice than to see painting after painting of the same woman bathing, but the work moves me. I walk through the sun-drenched white rooms, taking in one tableau after another, and not all of them are bath scenes. To my surprise, however, these are the ones I like best.

I move from canvas to canvas, seeing the textured palette of naked, domestic, uneroticized, yet still somehow erotic flesh. It has a cumulative effect that is inexplicably moving. How amazing to paint the same woman again and again, and with each one to create a new riotous microcosm of color, a universe that blooms in the shadows in the hollow of a shoulder blade, or the curve of waist or hip. I imagine being seen that way by a lover, and it feels hot and sweet, not staid and boring.

I’m not sure how long it has been. I’ve lost track of Alice and I’m just looking at all the different colors on the body of a bathing nude. There seem to be a million colors, and a million brushstrokes. The man loved his work, I think, not just the product but the process, the labor of it, the shuttle-like motion between palette and canvas and back. I wonder what his wife was like.